Emotional Leadership for Men: The Skill That Changes Everything

[Music] Today we're talking about emotional mastery. Most men were never really taught how to navigate their inner world. We've grown up in a culture that taught us how to think, how to fix, how to do, but not necessarily how to feel, how to regulate or how to empathize. We've all learned how to push, how to stay very busy, how to repress, how to numb, how to override, and that strategy that works for a while, until the backlog of emotional content that you accrue throughout your life starts to catch up with you. And then you start to get sick, you start to get chronic illness, you start to hit burnout, or you start to lose the respect of the woman or the partner that you're with. She stops wanting to have sex with you, stops being attracted to you, potentially your relationship starts to collapse. Maybe your kids don't trust you or don't look up to you. And eventually this backlog will start to cause major problems in your life one way or another. There's only so much avoiding and numbing and collapsing that you can do. Maybe that energy, the energy and motion, the emotion starts to catch up with you and it starts to leak out in dysfunctional or even toxic ways. And so here's what a lot of men, I think struggle to recognize and understand, which is that emotional mastery isn't about becoming soft. It's about becoming solid. It's about becoming grounded and stable. Stoic is a part of that, but it's also more than that. It's not just about becoming less of a man. There's a lot of connotations with emotionality being a feminine thing. And so a lot of men are quite anything emotional with becoming less masculine or more feminine somehow. But actually this is an important facet of becoming the kind of man who can lead. First of all, before we can lead anybody else, we need to learn how to lead ourselves. And we don't do that by repressing what we feel. We don't do that by avoiding or numbing. We actually do that by turning towards. Because you can't lead a relationship or a family or a mission if you can't lead yourself first. And if you can't turn towards what you feel and embrace and understand and integrate and metabolize the content, your emotional content, your inner experience, you'll just react, you'll retreat, you'll get defensive, you'll project and you'll forever be immature emotionally. And that's not leadership. That's actually boy psychology and not man psychology or masculine or mature psychology. So that's what we're going to be discussing today. If you're new here, welcome to a waiting evolution. My name is Jasper Brown. And I want to be giving you guys a very practical episode around emotional leadership today. I'm going to give you systems. I'm going to give real world examples so you can actually understand the difference between immature or boy psychology and grounded mature masculine leadership in the emotional realm. And it's taken me over 30 years and a trail of broken relationships in my wake for me to arrive at this understanding and to put these pieces of the puzzle together. So I'm going to be transmitting that today. And as I look back into my history, I can actually see that it took the woman that I loved dumping me, breaking up with me and walking away from my relationship for me to finally get the message so that I started looking in the mirror and seeing what I was missing here. And my cultural conditioning and my family upbringing had failed to equip me with the necessary skills to actually be successful in relationships. And since then, I've really leveled up my game. I managed to get my woman back by demonstrating a very fierce, persistent commitment to emotional development and relational skill building such to the point that she felt safe to start the relationship again. And it's worked. We have an amazing relationship these days. And in that process, I understood some pretty important lessons, some very powerful skills. I've managed to acquire and I've coached hundreds of other men to do the same. And throughout the years of coaching that I've done with men one on one and also in my men's groups, I have seen the same pattern of emotional underdevelopment in pretty much every man who steps through the door or who reaches out for support. Men are ill-equipped and emotionally underdeveloped. So I want to start this by really understanding why that is. That's the context here. Why is it that men struggle with emotional development? What are the blockages here? So first of all, we have our cultural programming. We've been, a lot of us have been told that emotions are a feminine thing and that being feminine equals being weak. That's kind of that cultural milieu or this idea is really emerging from a point in history where we have seen a massive shift in the paradigm of masculine and feminine dynamics. So any issue that we look at, we need to examine that through a cultural lens across time to understand where it's situated in any historical context. So for most of human history, men went out hunting, women stayed at home looking after the children. And so within that we can see a very specific delineation of gender roles and tasks. The men had to switch off empathy and go and kill shit. Women had to stay in empathise and nurture. So it makes sense that women tend to be more emotionally tuned or attuned and more relationally aware or intelligent. Whereas men we tend to prioritise things like spatial reasoning, strategic thinking, systems. And most men find themselves at a deficit in terms of emotional and relational intelligence compared to women. That's just how we arrive in life. And so there is a developmental gap that gets exposed. A lot of men mist or never received the emotional maturation phase that's necessary. We grew up without having real role models of mature emotional leadership. I know I certainly didn't have a father or a father figure or a leadership figure in my life who taught me how to navigate relationships, for example. This was missing. So it makes sense that I never really got the skills. I never really understood what was required from me in order to have successful relationships. And so it took failing and stepping on the rake and hitting myself in the face in relationships in order for me to wake up to the fact that this was missing and these were necessary skills. And that I was finding myself at a deficit compared to women who were more emotionally and relationally evolved. Generally, of course, there are exceptions. Women are certainly not perfect and can be very mature as well in relationships, but we're talking generalizations at this stage and we're talking at the broader cultural. landscape. And so what we've seen more recently in very recent history is feminism, which leveled the hierarchy, it flattened the power relationship between men and women, and women have come up into parity with men. And from a position of equality in relationships, men find themselves without the backing of any kind of patriarchal power structure. So that makes leadership difficult because we don't have those kind of power structures or power over as a structure to rely on in terms of generating leadership in relationships. And we find ourselves trying to establish leadership in relationships from a place of equality. Or we could say that relationships are becoming co-led in many ways. But leadership is an important thing for men. It's part of our sense of self-worth, it's part of our sense of identity. It's how we create confidence and meaning in our role in life. And it's also one of the ingredients of polarity. It's what creates an arc of attraction between two people, or the masculine and the feminine, let's say. So if we find ourselves floundering or struggling with leadership, that's going to lead to the depolarisation of relationships. And I see this all the time in coaching men who come to me and say, my woman doesn't feel attracted to me anymore, she doesn't want to make love to me anymore. And often my questions are around, where are you struggling to lead? Are you leading at all? Maybe she's, and this is very common, she's wearing the pants in the relationship. The woman is leading, she's earning more money, she's more emotionally skillful or bigger somehow. And so men end up collapsing into shame, they collapse from a lack of capacity, they collapse because they can't create emotional connection. And this leads to being in a very disempowered state for men. We actually hold a lot of shame and a lot of insecurity. And so being confronted with this reality of failing in your relationship, your woman not wanting to make love with you, struggling to be respected by your kids or by your partner. This leads to shame. And shame is one of the most difficult emotions to actually hold and to metabolise and integrate. And if you can't metabolise, sit with or integrate shame, you're, you're going to struggle to actually change your behaviour. Because shame, the role of shame is to help you realise where you're going wrong and what needs to change. And so a lot of men get stuck. They cannot feel their shame nor can they actually change. And so they stay in a toxic shame loop. Because they can't feel it, they don't actually get the behavioural correction, because they don't get the behavioural correction, they get even more criticism, judgment, blame and accusations from their partner. And they fall even lower. And so it becomes a downward spiral. And that's just an example of one of the emotions and the problems that arise if we can't feel just that. Men also kind of get hit with the message of false strength. Around emotions, this is where the kind of stoic lens comes in. We kind of get this message that not feeling things or not being affected by things or not caring is a certain form of strength. But reality is that it's kind of a pseudo strength. It's actually a bit of a lie. Real strength is not your ability to numb, disconnect, deflect, defend or avoid the truth of your emotional experience. Real strength in my opinion is your ability to actually stay present and understand what your emotions are communicating, what those emotions are needing, being able to hold discomfort and hold tension in your nervous system, to be able to stay in the midst of an emotional crisis in your relationship or hold space for your woman when she's collapsed, when she's raging, when she's upset, when she's afraid. And we don't do that by not feeling. We actually do that by feeling very deeply and handling the feelings that we have with a lot of skill. So I think it's important to get this really clear to understand this context. Most men were trained to repress, distract or override their emotional experience and they were not taught how to lead with their emotional experience. And this is a major problem because women or the feminine, the modern feminine, has evolved a lot. Feminism in powered women, it emancipated women, it brought women up to equal parity in terms of power dynamics and relational dynamics. And the modern feminine doesn't want 1950s masculine behaviour. The modern feminine generally is looking for a more evolved form of masculine as a gender role. And with that comes a new level of skill, a new level of development. And in many cases men are lagging behind. The feminine is calling out and saying, we want emotionally mature men. We want men who have the capacity to understand what they're feeling, to communicate what they need, to resolve conflict, to understand their psychology and their trauma because that's what creates safety for the feminine. To be with mature masculine qualities or men that embody those, let's say. Children as well require a high degree of emotional achievement if you want to raise them well. And the perfect example of this is look at yourself because most of us didn't grow up with high degree of emotional achievement. I know I certainly didn't. And that caused me a lot of pain. That's caused me a lot of heartache. That's caused me developmental arrest, missing pieces in my growth as a being. And if you want apparent children well, you need to be aware of their emotional needs. You need to be able to communicate with them in a way that actually leaves them feeling seen and heard and understood and cared about. You need to be able to create secure attachment for them. Otherwise they're going to get an anxious or an avoided attachment style. And if that's new to you or you want to go deeper into that, I've done a whole series of podcast episodes on attachment science and the different attachment styles. And that's highly recommended to familiarize yourself with those concepts and understand your own patterns so that you can see them playing out in your relationship or with your kids, for example. So as a general principle, emotional or leadership in general depends on emotional clarity. If you're not clear and you don't understand your emotional experience, you're missing something vital. And with that, you're just pretending you're posturing, you're performing masculinity or you're performing a specific role, but you're not fully embodying that role. It's based on a false front somehow or it's based on partial integration. And so of course the results of anything partial are going to be equally partial. If you want to be successful in relationships, if you want to be successful in business, if you want to be a successful parent, all of this requires emotional development because anything relational, anything that is based on connection between you and someone else is going to be completely governed and dictated and manipulated by your emotional experience. So that's a bit of context. Now for me, the question becomes how can we start to actually develop these skills and fill in these gaps in our development? This is where I got to. I recognized, You once I. ruined a number of relationships and found myself ill-equipped to navigate the complexity of those relationships. And I started to fail. I was hit in the face with the truth like, "I can't do this. I'm not doing this well. I am struggling here. I don't have what is required for me in order to make these situations and relationships work well." And so I recognized that I had a lack of skill. And this took a lot. You know, this took a lot of repetition of fucking things up and hitting myself in the face and hard looks in the mirror. But eventually I got the message and I said, "Okay, I'm missing stuff here. This is important. I want good relationships because I want to have a balanced and integrated harmonious life. That's important to me. And if my relationships are a mess, then all of my energy is getting sucked into conflicts. Instead of being poured into my passions and my purpose or my spiritual development." So I recognized that relationships was crucial as a problem to solve. Like, let's dedicate, however long it takes in my life, to solve relationships. And a crucial component of that was the relationship with myself. That's where it all begins. Because your dysfunction in relationships with other people is just a mirror for the dysfunction that you have inside of yourself. And if you're recognizing that you're struggling to create intimacy, trust, communication, conflict resolution, outside of you, with other people, then the answers for that lie within. And this is the education that I never received as a child, as a young man growing up in school. Nobody taught me how to navigate my own internal landscape. And so that's where leadership begins. Leadership begins with understanding and becoming transparent. And seeing your patterns and understanding what the process is in order to evolve beyond those patterns. So now I want to walk you through a five-step process that is going to help you turn the emotional chaos or the emotional unconsciousness inside of you into clarity. And I really started to relate to this as part of my hero's journey. This is part of me. The warriors process of self mastery. One has to master oneself. An emotion, it's just happening all the time, right? From what you think, to what you spend your money on, to how you spend your time, to who you're chasing to have sex with. This is dictated by your emotions and your emotional needs. They're going to be literally running the show for your entire life and dictating all of your behavior. So for me, locking that down and developing a very deep conscious relationship with my inner experience, my emotional experience was just, it became very clear and very obvious. So I started to treat this as a part of mastery. And as we talked about last week on the podcast, I talked about intelligence. And we're just tuning into a specific line of development, one of the many different forms of intelligence. And we're learning how to understand and create a system around that intelligence. So emotion, emotionality and the emotional needs that we have is just one of the bands or lines of development or emotional or lines of intelligence that the body has. And so we're tuning into that where deconstructing it. So this is a five step process to help you deconstruct and understand and integrate your emotional line of development or emotional intelligence as it's known. So step number one is to feel finally enough. We need to reclaim or develop our capacity to actually tune into and recognize or become conscious of what you're feeling in the first place. And if you've been spending most of your life numb or checked out or disconnected from this, this is this can be a difficult step to actually start turning towards instead of instead of turning away from your emotions. So the way, yeah, I mean the way I think of it is that you first you have to you have to learn how to turn into and tune into the nervous system essentially. And this is going to suck in the beginning if you haven't done a lot of this because you're numb. So you're not going to feel anything. You're just going to have to sit with the numbness. And underneath the numbness is a lot of something. Or maybe you feel overwhelmed. And so you have a lot of anxiety. You have a lot of stress. Your nervous system is buzzing and you will really struggle to cope with that feeling of stress anxiety and overwhelm. And the tendency there is to just reach for our coping mechanisms to reach for porn to reach for video games to reach for social media or drugs and alcohol and to shut it down. Because it's uncomfortable. We don't want to feel that stuff. But we have to feel that stuff. We have to stop running from what we feel and start turning towards what we feel so we can actually reclaim the connection to our body. And then we have to start with the first vital step which is actually just to get present. Present enough to feel what's happening. And we can do that by developing some sort of daily practice. Things like meditation, yoga, breath, work, anything that's forcing you to slow down. And then we can approach a more conscious because the faster you go, the faster you're sort of like this is why things like social media and games and alcohol and drugs is all like consuming. We need to stop the consumption. And actually be with what's happening inside. And then we can do something like anything that's forcing you to slow down like yoga or breath work or meditation or just slow, slow, anything slow is going to help you to train somatic awareness. It's going to help you to notice. It's going to help you to create a bit of space for. And even if in the beginning you can only do this for a few minutes, it's still positive. Until you can't turn towards it, how can you lead because you don't know what it is that you're experiencing. So the first stage is turning towards and feeling whatever the fuck is happening inside of you. And getting better and better and better at doing that. It's actually a superpower. Once you unlock this, it becomes extremely powerful. Because that becomes the content that you're able to share with other people that creates intimacy, it builds trust, it creates sexual tension. There's a lot there. Step number two is to name. Naming your emotions. That's the first step to owning it or the second step to owning it. And that's not weakness. It's actually precision. It's actually like having like a fine edge on your knife. You don't want to blunt dull knife. The chops are gleevedgable or different sizes. We want a very sharp knife so we can be precise with the way that we cut. And it's the same with the emotions. We don't want to be very general or very vague. We want to be precise. So I know from my own experience when people would ask what are you feeling. I would say I'm fine. I'm good. Sometimes I'm bad. Pretty rarely. I'm bad. I don't feel good. So I had a very limited vocabulary. I had a very limited map. And what we want to do is we want to expand the complexity of the map. And a tool that I really like is the emotional wheel. You can google emotional wheel. And you'll see the full spectrum of emotional experiences, which gives us much more finesse, much more refined, much more refined spectrum or array of emotional words. We can use to label and communicate what we're experiencing on the inside. And the emotional wheel starts with very general or very primary emotions, like sad, angry, happy, disgust, you know, these kind of things. And then it fragments into much more specific nuances of those emotions. And so this becomes really, really useful in identifying the precise thing that you're feeling. It's like the same, the same we have with language when you're studying English. It's like having great, most men are stuck in grade two emotional literacy or grade five. You know, they have a few things to point to but not much. As you get much better at language, you start to be able to communicate in many different ways with, you know, highly specific words, the point two different forms of meaning. And that makes you a much better communicator. Same thing with emotions. We've got to be able to name and understand the map if we're going to be able to communicate. Because if you can only say three words or you only have a small handful of things to point to inside of you, that makes for in precise leadership. Because you're blind. You're literally blind to yourself. When we develop precision in being able to name things, that creates precision in the action that we take. So we need to expand our vocabulary. Step number three is to own your emotions. You've got to drop the blame. We've got to stop projecting. If you can't own your emotions and you can't take responsibility for the impact that your emotional experiences or the way that you relate to your emotions has on your relationships or other people, you're not going to get anywhere. A woman will never feel safe with you if you blame her for what you feel. A woman is not going to trust you if you can't take responsibility for the impact that your anger or your repressed, or your repressed anger or your explosiveness or your defensiveness has on her. You cannot continue to keep saying that you made me angry. You deserved it because of this. You started it. You actually need to take responsibility. You need to own your triggers because the things that trigger you are your triggers. You need to own your patterns, your childhood wounding, your psychology, your attachment style. You need to own your responses to other people, even if other people are provoking you or poking you. You need to own your responses because you're responsible for what comes out of your mouth and how you behave. You need to own the impact of your emotions and your behaviors on everyone around you. That is what it means to take radical responsibility. radical responsibility is the foundations of masculine power or just power in general. The more you can take responsibility for things, the more you can control. The less of a victim you are, the less receptive, the less passive, the less weak you become because you are owning it. You're making it yours. You're taking responsibility for it and you're reclaiming the power to affect change. That's how that works. Step number four is to express. So a man who is able to express himself and who speaks his truth with clarity and not chaos is powerful. Right? If you can communicate what you feel, what you need, what you want or what you can sense or what you can perceive in others, that creates clarity. Just like the language that we use, that's why we need precise wording because we need to be at a point with precision. That creates clarity instead of chaos. We need to learn how to express ourselves without collapsing and this is where things get difficult because if you've spent your entire life fleeing from emotional or avoiding emotional content or turning away from or getting defensive and denying your emotional experience, you need to own it, you need to hold it, you need to label it and you need to express it and that can be quite confronting in the beginning. I feel disappointed. I feel jealous. I feel ashamed of the way that I've been treating you. I feel disgusted in how I've behaved and where our relationship has got to. I care about you so deeply. I don't want to lose you. I'm terrified of losing you. This is emotional vulnerability. In the beginning, those things are hard to say without collapsing because the weight, the emotional experience, carries and that's why we need to get so good at it. That's why we need to become masterful. We can express the truth without being destroyed by it without having to hide from it. We can face the truth directly and we can express the truth with clarity cleanly without guilt or without blame or if we feel those things, we're able to name it, we're able to hold it, we're able to actually make space for it. You can be ashamed of something and shame is very heavy. It makes you want to collapse. But if you're strong enough, you can hold yourself in shame and still speak the truth of it. And for me, that's a fucking man right there. That's strength. That's something I respect. Is when a man can own a vulnerable truth about himself and he has the strength to hold himself in it. And if he's really strong, he's going to have capacity to hold his partner or his kids or a brother who is in conflict with and he can hold it all. That's what creates respect. That's what creates trust. That's what creates polarity. That's what makes a woman attracted. She's like that is a man right there and I am deeply attracted to that capacity because it shows real strength. So we need to become the kind of man that can do that. And we can't do that by avoiding and running away from what we feel. We can only develop that capacity by turning towards and alkalizing and integrating the depth of what we feel and becoming masterful at it, becoming a fucking samurai of our own emotional experience. And step number five is to transmute. So we're having the emotional experience where we're feeling it, we're naming it, we're communicating it. And then we need to alchemize it because every emotion is a message. It's a message that your body and the incredible intelligence that's imbued within your biological system. Your emotions are a message that that body is communicating to in. It's giving you vital feedback. And so we need to learn how to read the signal of that feedback and not become completely consumed or reactive to that feedback. So your emotions are energy and information. The energy itself wants to move, it wants to express. And the information encoded within that energy reveals a certain need. And that gives us a direction when we can tune into that need and understand what that emotion is communicating to us. It helps us to understand what we need to do about it. And that's a key insight right there. If you can understand that your emotions are connected to your needs and that every emotion has a need behind it, then this is super empowering. Because we learn to actually have the emotional experience and that actually informs our behavior. It helps us to choose what the right thing to do is in that moment when we can understand what that specific emotion is telling us. So we need to ask ourselves when we are feeling something when something is arising inside of us and we're having an experience, we can ask us off the question, what is this feeling asking for? What need is it actually pointing towards? And when I understood this, when I made this connection in my mind, it was like a light bulb moment and I was like, holy shit, why did no one teach me that in primary school? That would have been useful. If I'd known that for the last, you know, 25, 30 years of my life. And so I'm going to walk you through a couple of the, yeah, so the primary emotions, and I'm going to point towards the needs that they have just so you can make this distinction in your mind and get this, get this insight and encode this in your brain for the rest of your life. So anger, the need behind anger is boundaries. Anger is an alert emotion. It's like the, the, it's a response to threat. We feel threatened and we become angry. Therefore, that is letting us know that boundaries have been triggered or violated. There's a need for some sort of action in response to that. If we feel threatened, we need to take some action, we either need to run away, or we need to put a line in the sand, or we need to maybe respond to that threat with some form of aggression. To prevent ourselves from getting attacked, for example, or to hold a line where we feel disrespected by someone that we're close to. And so anger communicates something really important that we have a boundary violation. And that can be something coming in, it can also be something coming out of you. And so when anger arises, the need behind that is to get curious about what's the boundary that's been crossed here. Is it my personal safety? Am I feeling disrespected? Is my agency or my sovereignty being threatened by someone in some way? What is that? Let me get curious about that. So that's anger and the need behind anger. Sadness. Sadness is an emotion that is connected to connection. Often it's about connection. We feel sad when we have lost connection. We feel sad when somebody has passed away. So there's a need for processing. There's a need for grief. There's a need to let go of a certain attachment to something that we've had. Or there's a need for a form of acknowledgement of a relationship and how important that was to us. Sadness needs to be felt. It needs to be integrated. That's a way one of the ways that our body processes emotional content. We get sad when we lose something or when we fail at something or when something doesn't go the way that we wanted it to. And so the need behind that is a form of acknowledgement and to feel that sadness. Fear, the need behind fear is safety, support, certainty. So when you feel afraid of something that's an indication you don't feel safe obviously. You have a need for feeling safe again. You need to feel more supported. You would love to feel more supported. You want to have more certainty, more structure, more stability, things that you can depend on so that you can feel safe again. So if I feel fear, I know that I need to change something. Something needs to be adjusted. Something needs to be augmented in my reality so that I can be back into safety again. What is that thing? What do I need? Maybe I need space from someone that's making me feel threatened. Maybe I need reassurance in my relationship because my woman has one foot out the door and she's talking about leaving. Maybe I need to know that my kids love me. The next emotion is shame. We've talked a bit about shame already. So the need behind shame is acceptance. It's integrity. It's belonging. If you feel ashamed, you want to feel that you are accepted in spite of the thing that you did wrong. Maybe you feel ashamed because you've behaved in a way that was out of integrity. Maybe you lied, you cheated, you stole something. And that has led you to being in fear of being ostracized by people that you love or by your community. You don't want to feel judged. You don't want to feel wrong. You want to feel connected. You want to belong. You want to be accepted. And you want to be integrity in integrity with your values. So shame is pointing us towards those needs. Joy, the need of joy is celebration. It's authenticity. It's the being, the spectrum of who you can be. It's feeling free. The need to feel free. The need to be fully present and alive. And I think we all need that. And sometimes joy or the need behind joy isn't fully recognized until we feel it. You know, you suddenly have a really hearty laugh and you're in good company. And suddenly you laugh like you haven't laughed in years and you didn't realize how much you needed that. You needed to let your hair down. You needed to celebrate. You needed to feel like you can just be yourself without pressure. And the last one, the last emotional talk about here is frustration. Frustration. What's the need behind frustration? What is frustration communicating to us if you're frustrated? When do you get frustrated? When something that you want isn't working? So there's a need for progress. There's a need for efficiency. I know I feel frustrated when I'm trying to understand something and I don't get it. It's like, "Ah, why don't I, you know?" And this was the feeling of trying to make a relationship work and failing at that. I was making a lot of effort to fix my relationship and it wasn't working. There was no progress. It wasn't efficient. It was dragging my energy down. It was wasting time. So frustration communicates the need for progress, efficiency and understanding. So those are some examples of the needs and the needs that underpin the feelings that we have. Now, I'm going to give you, I want to walk through three real life examples of emotional leadership in action. And we're going to look at the boy's psychology or the immature reaction to these problems and then contrast that with a much more mature leadership in these situations. So example number one is that your partner triggers you and she says, "You're not showing up for me." Ouch. So the reactive boy, he would feel his, I mean, in general anyone might feel their body tightening the chest, closing off a bit of shame, flooding the system. And the boy takes that on as, you know, I'm failing again. Here we go again. Maybe anger starts to arise. He gets defensive. He feels the need to run or to fight when he hears those words. He feels blamed. Maybe he snaps something like, "I do everything for you. How could you say that? Can't you see all of these things that I'm doing?" So he gets defensive. Maybe he shuts down and collapses. Emotional leadership in that situation looks like this. He hears those words. "You're not showing up for me." An emotional mature person or man will take a breath first and foremost. So he will give himself a moment to metabolize the impact of her words. That hurts. So he's going to ground himself and he's going to say something like that hit. That hit me hard. He might name what he's experiencing. So I feel I feel my nervous system contracting. I feel tense and I feel blamed. So he's gonna explain What how that landed for him. I feel a bit blamed. I feel a bit unappreciated Give me a moment. He's gonna ask for what he needs. So he's gonna own it and ask for what he needs. Give me a moment. I want to stay present with you And then he might say what I'm needing babe is just a bit of acknowledgement for all of the things that I do do for us and I Want to hear where I'm missing it for you. I really want to understand why you feel that way That's leadership. That's bringing a authentic and trust worthy response to a partner who expresses her upset not a reactive childish defensive reaction Can you see the difference there can you feel the difference there? Imagine being on the receiving end of that That's what relational mastery starts to look like so example number two is that the woman she's in an emotional storm She's crying She says you don't get it. I feel alone The reactive boy inside of us would feel overwhelmed by that he would go into panic mode. What do I do? Fight flight freeze his he shuts down or he tries to fix it immediately What more do you want for me? Why don't you try? I don't know what you need you know is is Disregulated So he gets overwhelmed very easily by her emotional expression because he doesn't have a lot of space inside of him for his emotional expression And so chaos leads to chaos Her storm creates a storm inside of him Emotional leadership on the other hand Looks more like this or sounds more like this if you're listening to this one starts with grounding I would try to stay present in my body I see that she's upset. I see that she is having a very strong emotional experience I try to stay present in my body I soften my eyes and I make sure that I adopt a gentle tone I don't meet heightened emotionality with heightened emotionality. I don't start yelling at her or screaming you know or like trying to Change what she's experiencing I stay grounded soft and steady and I say something like I'm here for you babe I can see that you're really upset and I can feel your pain And I'm literally trying to wrap around her energetically I'm trying to bring my regulated nervous system into contact with hers If she's open to receive touch I'll place a hand on her leg I would look into her eyes and I would say I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere I see that you're really upset And maybe you could add something if you want you can ask her or whoever it is Would you like to be held can I hold you or do you need to be heard Tell me more tell me everything And if you can hold that frame if you can hold that center She will gradually soften the emotion will pass through her she will start to feel Soothed by you and so that will create more connection And the polarity will be returned or restored Because that's where polarity often gets ruined that's where trust often gets broken She has a chaotic emotional experience that she can't contain It it erupts out into the world And if you as the man Become completely destabilized if you run away or you fight her You are confirming her fear that you are not safe Instead you want to be able to stay grounded and present And also bring some sort of direction to the interaction So I see that you're really upset. I'm here for you. I'm not going anywhere Would you like me to hold you? Tell me more about that You're bringing leadership you're creating a direction you're you're moving the situation Towards a specific outcome which is regulation safety connection And maybe on the other side of that intimacy If she feels like she can really surrender into your presence So those are two masculine and feminine examples the last example that I'll give is You and a friend So a brother of yours a good friend of yours is a bit out of line He's projecting He's very reactive his emotionally chaotic Perhaps he's refusing to see The impact of his behavior And maybe you've tried to bring it to him before and he's just very defensive his very reactive And that's problem it's creating chaos Emotional chaos unowned So the reactive boy might rise to the challenge he might get hot Become judgmental Starts to blame him starts to fight fire with fire Says you're a mess you need to you need to pull you get your shit together man Maybe he just maybe you just ghosts Ah, this is too hard and I can't be deal but I can't be bothered with this shit He's just he's just toxic Maybe you confront him to try to dominate him You need to pull your head in dude otherwise You know This that and the other So the reactive boy meets that emotional chaos or a brother that's out of line with fire meets fire Emotional leadership on the other hand Grounded Non-reactive Stays connected to the truth of the moment and says something like brother Something something's off here. I really care about you But I can see that you're not okay and I want to reflect something that I'm noticing to you right here You don't have to agree with it, but I need to express this I want to mirror something And in that expression once he's once you've spoken your piece you stay steady You're offering truth from from a from a place of care And concern and empathy not from ego And you're inviting this man forward you're inviting him up You're not demonizing him blaming judging You're actually seeing a part of his psychology or a part of his shadow that he might be unaware of And like a good friend You're inviting him into deeper relationship with himself and therefore As an extension of that deeper relationship with you And you're giving him a chance to make that transition in his own time You're not expecting him to fix everything straight away or to be different than he is But you are requiring a certain degree of self-reflection and ownership And that's a healthy standard to hold for your friendships So how did those land for you? How did that sound where how would you respond in those situations and did the way that I suggested to respond from a mature position? Did that sound different? Did it sound alien or foreign? These are just a few examples of what emotional mastery looks like an emotional leadership sounds like It's not controlling, it's not collapsing, it's not performing It's learning how to translate the energy of emotions into clarity, into power and into truth And until you can learn how to do that You are somewhat at the mercy of your inner world You're being had by it somehow It's happening all the time. And so if you can't lead, if you can't become conscious of and lead yourself in your inner world, you're going to be led by it in the outer world. And obviously, the people in your life can feel that. The people in your life, either consciously or unconsciously will feel the depth of the relationship that you have with yourself and therefore the depth of relationship you have with them. They will feel your emotional capacity. And as an example of this, I have the kind of feedback that I get in relationships has changed enormously over the years because I started to be much more emotionally regulated. I started to be much more articulate and precise in the way that I choose to communicate. People started to reflect and give me feedback. Ah, Jase, you feel really grounded. Jase, you're feeling a lot more mature. Jase, you feel that was really skillful the way that you expressed that thing. And so, you know, the way I think of it is relationships are mirrors that reflect stuff about us all the time. And so, what you hear from other people and what you see around you in your relationships is a reflection of the relationship you have with yourself. That's also a key insight. So, this is one of the core kind of initiations that I'm offering here with Awakened Evolution and this podcast and the work that I do, the men's groups, the coaching because this development, this skill development and personal capacity that I've developed through focusing on this stuff completely changed my life, completely transformed my relationship from toxic to vibrant and very healthy and very sexually charged. Because I understood that if I couldn't lead myself emotionally, I couldn't lead anything. So, this isn't just a nice to have skill. It's not just a optional thing. It's actually a right of passage. It's a foundational developmental line that we need to focus on and for most men on the planet, it's low-hanging fruit. This is a hugely high leverage point that we can focus on and access and sharpen and it doesn't take that much. If you can really double down on this because most men are less relationally developed than women, if you can leverage that and you can just put a few skill points in this direction and just bring that level of emotional development up, bump it up a bit. The impact on your relationships and the quality of your life is profound because emotionality and emotional intelligence is the foundation of relational safety, sexual polarity and trust in relationships, trust with people in general. So it's huge. So you can ask yourself, where are you still reacting emotionally instead of leading? Where are your emotions running the show? Where are you unconscious? Highly recommend getting the emotional will. This is something that I teach inside the conscious masculine, my men's community. I have a bunch of modules and content and video guided processes around emotional development and emotional intelligence and how that leverages into relational skills, like conflict resolution, for example. And that's just super crucial. And I just really, I stand behind this idea that by stepping into emotional mastery, everything changes because your life is dictated by emotions. So if that resonates and you feel cold to join my men's group and come along and step into the space with us, we do practices and processes and support each other to develop these skills as a as a brotherhood, which is really powerful to do. And if you're in crisis and you want high-level coaching, advanced systems and accountability for advancing your personal development, you might like to apply for one-on-one coaching with me. You'll find the link to book call and have a resonance call with me below this episode. And lastly, I'll leave you guys as I always do with a final meta perspective on emotional development. So what we're really looking for here to develop is emotional maturity, to develop a conscious and deeply integrative relationship with our emotional system. Why? Because your entire life is dominated and will be dominated by meeting your emotional needs. This is what drives your entire survival. This is what the ego is fixated upon. The whole role of the ego is to survive. You are a separate self. Whatever your name is, whoever you think you are, that self needs to survive from birth until death. And it's going to do everything in its power to survive. So your emotional needs are a core intricate part of that survival agenda. And meeting those needs is going to happen one way or another. And the default way that humans or animals meet their needs is in a relatively immature and unconscious way. And therefore, we get completely ruled and our whole life gets completely dominated by simply satisfying our base emotional needs for food, sex, money, status, and this sort of stuff. And if we do that in an unconscious way, this is going to lead to a very superficial and basically animalistic experience of life. Most people behave just like animals, which are basically survival zombies, just on an autopilot going through life, satisfying their basic needs. They eat, they fuck, they shit, they eat, they fuck, they shit until they die. And that's what happens if we do it very unconsciously. Life will just keep reproducing and life will do its thing. And you can participate in that. Or I should say and and or we can aim for something higher. But in order to reach something higher, we actually need to develop some form of mastery. We need to develop a deeply conscious relationship with our survival mechanisms, with our needs, with our emotions, with our mind and psychology and understand how this impacts our choices. In order that we can actually progress beyond being a slave to our biology, we actually want to advance and maximize our potential. And if you don't become emotionally conscious, it's like having a computer with some sort of power hungry app running in the background. Or a bunch of a whole range of apps that are running in the background, which are basically taking up the RAM, they're influencing the performance of the machine in a very profound way. They came with the machine, they were already installed. And that was part of the design. But if you can't find those apps, you don't know what those apps are doing, you don't understand their function. They're basically dictating the performance of your machine and you are just a biological machine. And it's doing that in a way that you don't understand. So you don't understand what those programs are doing, why they're there or how to reprogram them or actually integrate those programs into the functioning of your machine. Because you're a literate, you're fundamentally illiterate, computer illiterate. So emotional maturity is really about building awareness and developing capacity. The more aware you are, the more everything makes sense. And obviously the more things make sense, the more you understand, And the more you understand the more capacity you will build. Capacity is really important because we need to develop the ability to stay regulated. We need to be able to manage our energy, to manage our attention and to make good choices. The more aware you become, the more capacity you build, the more complexity you're able to hold. And that's going to drastically expand the range of your choices in life. It's going to improve the quality of your relationships. It's going to refine and elevate your desires. So you don't just chase after cheap dopamine and just satisfy your base needs. You're actually going to live for something more, more elevated, more refined, more complex, more nuanced. And that's going to improve the quality of your whole existence because you have actually control of your base desires and your impulses. And this is how this is a crucial ingredient of self mastery, mastery over the self, over yourself. And by doing that, we start to actually move towards the full potential of your vehicle in life. You came into life with this vehicle and by understanding its mechanisms, by understanding and knowing its limits. And by finding ways to fully understand and perhaps even transcend the basic coding that it came with, you can actually rewire the system beyond just basic survival, unconscious survival. It evolved beyond that if you choose and that will have a huge impact on your life. So if we're going to boil it all down, we're looking for a very high degree of emotional integration because that is the process of self actualization. We're coming all that you can be. We're putting skill points in all of the most important forms of intelligence and maxing those out as much as possible because we want to level up our character as much as possible. Just like in any video game you want to get to max level. Why? Because that's the best level to be, right? It's the most powerful character that you can have in the game, which is obviously what we want. And when you have a very strong character, when you've maxed out your character, that sets you up to play the highest version of the game. That sets you up for seeking truth. And if we're seeking truth, the necessity of that is to be able to transcend the self, the finite egoic self. We need to expand that and eventually transcend that. And truth seeking and an ego expansion is an emotionally challenging process because essentially you have to face your ultimate fears. The ultimate fear of the ego is to die. And so we need to face our fear of death, which is emotionally difficult. But on the other side of the fear of death is the absolute truth, is ultimate understanding. And that's something that you can become directly conscious of if you choose to go there. That's what this whole channel is about. That's what I'm advocating for. That's what I'm transmitting. That's what I have discovered for myself. And therefore that is what I teach. That's the greatest joy, the greatest epiphany, the greatest understanding is to have those states of enlightenment and to then live with that context, to live life beyond just basic survival and with the ultimate truth at our disposal or accessible to us. Because then we have the biggest picture understanding boiled down into the micro actions that we take on a daily basis. And that gives us the best way to make choices in life. Therefore we have the best life. So we need advanced emotional development and emotional maturity to be able to integrate these kind of experiences. And these kind of things, your worldview will be challenged and deconstructed. When you have an ego death, it's a very intense experience. And then you return back to your normal life and what you thought your normal life was and your relationships and where you're at in your life. And a lot of that stuff needs to be reorganized. And so we need flexibility, we need capacity, we need the ability to navigate that emotional impact. And your relationships, your sense making, your career, your life purpose, all of this gets reorganized. Once we understand the ultimate perspective or we start to experience the ultimate perspective. So we need a very high degree of capacity and awareness. And as a result of that by focusing on this and developing mastery in this direction, we actually unlock the possibility for this very profound expansion of what life is, which leads to a very high degree of fulfillment. And that level of fulfillment only comes from starting to figure out what all of this is, what all of this means, who you actually are. And these are some of your highest emotional needs. You might not even know that these exist yet. But at the highest level, you can experience the full spectrum of emotions, the highest degrees of joy and ecstasy and rapture. The greatest possible emotional experiences. And yeah, I have a lot more to say about that in the future when I do dedicated episodes on reaching those states and integrating them. And I'll share everything with you guys. So stay tuned. And lastly, just remember at the highest level, you are the full spectrum. You are the entire spectrum, every possible emotion, every thought, every sensory perception, every state of consciousness, every single thing that you can experience. That's what oneness means. That's what non-duality means. That's what infinity means. Essentially, you're all of it. And so what we're doing here is gradually expanding the ego, expanding your sense of self to actually embrace and encompass the entirety of what you are. It's just that you've forgotten that or you never, you're disconnected from it. You're in the illusion and we're trying to break out of the illusion. And by doing that, we're actually developing the greatest possible experience of life. By becoming one with life. One with reality. By becoming one with the absolute.