Tools for the Self Directed Life

Developing Mental Toughness. 

Under my other voices heading I present to you an article,  brought to my attention by one of my clients on obtaining objectives and success through consistency. 

The article or blog was called "The Science of Developing Mental Toughness in Your Health, Work, and Life."  by blogger James Clear. whos work and be read on JamesClear.com
 

Have you ever wondered what makes someone a good athlete? Or a good leader? Or a good parent? Why do some people accomplish their goals while others fail?

What makes the difference?

Usually we answer these questions by talking about the talent of top performers. He must be the smartest scientist in the lab. She’s faster than everyone else on the team. He is a brilliant business strategist.

But I think we all know there is more to the story than that.

In fact, when you start looking into it, your talent and your intelligence don’t play nearly as big of a role as you might think. The research studies that I have found say that intelligence only accounts for 30% of your achievement — and that’s at the extreme upper end.

What makes a bigger impact than talent or intelligence? Mental toughness.

Research is starting to reveal that your mental toughness — or “grit” as they call it — plays a more important role than anything else for achieving your goals in health, business, and life. That’s good news because you can’t do much about the genes you were born with, but you can do a lot to develop mental toughness.

Why is mental toughness so important? And how can you develop more of it?

Let’s talk about that now.

Mental Toughness and The United States Military

Sun Run  Fort Bragg, N.C., Army photo by Sgt. Gin-Sophie De Bellotte

Each year, approximately 1,300 cadets join the entering class at the United States Military Academy, West Point. During their first summer on campus, cadets are required to complete a series of brutal tests. This summer initiation program is known internally as “Beast Barracks.”

In the words of researchers who have studied West Point cadets, “Beast Barracks is deliberately engineered to test the very limits of cadets’ physical, emotional, and mental capacities.”

You might imagine that the cadets who successfully complete Beast Barracks are bigger, stronger, or more intelligent than their peers. But Angela Duckworth, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, found something different when she began tracking the cadets.

Duckworth studies achievement, and more specifically, how your mental toughness, perseverance, and passion impact your ability to achieve goals. At West Point, she tracked a total of 2,441 cadets spread across two entering classes. She recorded their high school rank, SAT scores, Leadership Potential Score (which reflects participation in extracurricular activities), Physical Aptitude Exam (a standardized physical exercise evaluation), and Grit Scale (which measures perseverance and passion for long–term goals).

Here’s what she found out…

It wasn’t strength or smarts or leadership potential that accurately predicted whether or not a cadet would finish Beast Barracks. Instead, it was grit — the perseverance and passion to achieve long–term goals — that made the difference.

In fact, cadets who were one standard deviation higher on the Grit Scale were 60% more likely to finish Beast Barracks than their peers. It was mental toughness that predicted whether or not a cadet would be successful, not their talent, intelligence, or genetics.

When Is Mental Toughness Useful?

National Spelling Bee

Duckworth’s research has revealed the importance of mental toughness in a variety of fields.

In addition to the West Point study, she discovered that…

• Ivy League undergraduate students who had more grit also had higher GPAs than their peers — even though they had lower SAT scores and weren’t as “smart.”
• When comparing two people who are the same age but have different levels of education, grit (and not intelligence) more accurately predicts which one will be better educated.
• Competitors in the National Spelling Bee outperform their peers not because of IQ, but because of their grit and commitment to more consistent practice.

And it’s not just education where mental toughness and grit are useful. Duckworth and her colleagues heard similar stories when they started interviewing top performers in all fields…

Our hypothesis that grit is essential to high achievement evolved during interviews with professionals in investment banking, painting, journalism, academia, medicine, and law. Asked what quality distinguishes star performers in their respective fields, these individuals cited grit or a close synonym as often as talent. In fact, many were awed by the achievements of peers who did not at first seem as gifted as others but whose sustained commitment to their ambitions was exceptional. Likewise, many noted with surprise that prodigiously gifted peers did not end up in the upper echelons of their field.

—Angela Duckworth

You have probably seen evidence of this in your own experiences. Remember your friend who squandered their talent? How about that person on your team who squeezed the most out of their potential? Have you known someone who was set on accomplishing a goal, no matter how long it took?

You can read the whole research study here, but this is the bottom line:

In every area of life — from your education to your work to your health — it is your amount of grit, mental toughness, and perseverance that predicts your level of success more than any other factor we can find.

In other words, talent is overrated.

What Makes Someone Mentally Tough?

1936 Olympic workout of Jesse Owens and Frank Wykoff

It’s great to talk about mental toughness, grit, and perseverance … but what do those things actually look like in the real world?

In a word, toughness and grit equal consistency.

Mentally tough athletes are more consistent than others. They don’t miss workouts. They don’t miss assignments. They always have their teammates back.

Mentally tough leaders are more consistent than their peers. They have a clear goal that they work towards each day. They don’t let short–term profits, negative feedback, or hectic schedules prevent them from continuing the march towards their vision. They make a habit of building up the people around them — not just once, but over and over and over again.

Mentally tough artists, writers, and employees deliver on a more consistent basis than most. They work on a schedule, not just when they feel motivated. They approach their work like a pro, not an amateur. They do the most important thing first and don’t shirk responsibilities.

The good news is that grit and perseverance can become your defining traits, regardless of the talent you were born with. You can become more consistent. You can develop superhuman levels of mental toughness.

How?

In my experience, these 3 strategies work well in the real world…

1. Define what mental toughness means for you.

For the West Point army cadets being mentally tough meant finishing an entire summer of Beast Barracks.

For you, it might be…

• going one month without missing a workout
• going one week without eating processed or packaged food
• delivering your work ahead of schedule for two days in a row
• meditating every morning this week
• grinding out one extra rep on each set at the gym today
• calling one friend to catch up every Saturday this month
• spending one hour doing something creative every evening this week

Whatever it is, be clear about what you’re going after. Mental toughness is an abstract quality, but in the real world it’s tied to concrete actions. You can’t magically think your way to becoming mentally tough, you prove it to yourself by doing something in real life.

Which brings me to my second point…

2. Mental toughness is built through small physical wins.

You can’t become committed or consistent with a weak mind. How many workouts have you missed because your mind, not your body, told you you were tired? How many reps have you missed out on because your mind said, “Nine reps is enough. Don’t worry about the tenth.” Probably thousands for most people, including myself. And 99% are due to weakness of the mind, not the body.

—Drew Shamrock

So often we think that mental toughness is about how we respond to extreme situations. How did you perform in the championship game? Can you keep your life together while grieving the death of a family member? Did you bounce back after your business went bankrupt?

There’s no doubt that extreme situations test our courage, perseverance, and mental toughness … but what about everyday circumstances?

Mental toughness is like a muscle. It needs to be worked to grow and develop. If you haven’t pushed yourself in thousands of small ways, of course you’ll wilt when things get really difficult.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Choose to do the tenth rep when it would be easier to just do nine. Choose to create when it would be easier to consume. Choose to ask the extra question when it would be easier to accept. Prove to yourself — in a thousand tiny ways — that you have enough guts to get in the ring and do battle with life.

Mental toughness is built through small wins. It’s the individual choices that we make on a daily basis that build our “mental toughness muscle.” We all want mental strength, but you can’t think your way to it. It’s your physical actions that prove your mental fortitude.

3. Mental toughness is about your habits, not your motivation.

Photo Artist Jason Beamguard during  his Book Challenge 2018

Motivation is fickle. Willpower comes and goes.

Mental toughness isn’t about getting an incredible dose of inspiration or courage. It’s about building the daily habits that allow you to stick to a schedule and overcome challenges and distractions over and over and over again.

Mentally tough people don’t have to be more courageous, more talented, or more intelligent — just more consistent. Mentally tough people develop systems that help them focus on the important stuff regardless of how many obstacles life puts in front of them. It’s their habits that form the foundation of their mental beliefs and ultimately set them apart.

I’ve written about this many times before. Here are the basic steps for building a new habit and links to further information on doing each step.

1. Start by building your identity.
2. Focus on small behaviors, not life–changing transformations.
3. Develop a routine that gets you going regardless of how motivated you feel.
4. Stick to the schedule and forget about the results.
5. When you slip up, get back on track as quickly as possible.

Mental toughness comes down to your habits. It’s about doing the things you know you’re supposed to do on a more consistent basis. It’s about your dedication to daily practice and your ability to stick to a schedule.

How Have You Developed Mental Toughness?

Artist Juan Coronado photo of Actor/Model Jimmy Flint-Smith

Our mission as a community is clear: we are looking to live healthy lives and make a difference in the world.

To that end, I see it as my responsibility to equip you with the best information, ideas, and strategies for living healthier, becoming happier, and making a bigger impact with your life and work.

But no matter what strategies we discuss, no matter what goals we set our sights on, no matter what vision we have for ourselves and the people around us … none of it can become a reality without mental toughness, perseverance, and grit.

When things get tough for most people, they find something easier to work on. When things get difficult for mentally tough people, they find a way to stay on schedule.

There will always be extreme moments that require incredible bouts of courage, resiliency, and grit … but for 95% of the circumstances in life, toughness simply comes down to being more consistent than most people. 
 

Tools for the Self Directed Life

Activating Your Mission, Meaning, and Mastery

by Calvin Harris H.W., M

I suspect the College education model as practiced today, as the best means to secure wealth and fame, is fading as a goal for many young people. Even the famed ‘SAT’, or other IQ Tests used as barometers of intellectual superior advantage and the indicator that one is on the fast track of wealth and success, may not be holding up factually as better living.

A Wall Street Journal correspondent and author of the bestselling book “When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.”- Dan H. Pink has been quoted when asked of what portion of our career success does IQ account for? His answer: “between 4 and 10 percent.” Which has been backed up by Researcher Daniel Goleman and the Hay Group.

The first step in gaining the tools for a self directed life is then to begin activating your mission, and getting clarity on some of the contradictory data that we have. Data that acts as models or guides to what you believe to be better living or success and how to get it.

IQ testing for some when going through school became a worry and an impediment to setting a life course decision and a delay in trying to craft their innate mission. A struggle waged over would they be good enough to achieve the outcomes in life they set out to do? A struggle waged in the mind.

I feel we all live in our heads so much of the time that when we are faced with the circumstance that forces us to acknowledge that we also operate in a three-dimensional world and navigate through it by our somatic body, a body many times driven by unconscious decisions, this can be a shock to us.

We look to models as the guidepost along our journey in life to help point our way through. One guidepost often forgotten, but that has the propensity for success, is how we spend our time. If we would observe, we would find we spend most of our days in random thought and to a lesser degree imagining outcomes to situations that may or may not take place. In fact this process is the mechanism for life long learning. This process of our consciousness, is an alchemy of emotions, rational mind and our analytical capacities that act both as our allies and as obstacles. In our endeavors to live successfully, they can greatly move us forward in life, if focused with clear accurate data, barring that, then an acute observation and courageous adaptability must be developed. These qualities move us forward without trying to second guess ourselves or worse diverting ourselves away from our mission-meaning in life.

A second model or concept that needs reviewing is the idea of Education and the potential of learning. We are life long learners. Education is not a series of memorized pieces of data that we recite back for a short time and then forget. Nor is it the striving for the goal of coming up with a high test score from an intelligence test.  Education is learning and engaging with information useful to our life, that when implemented, moves our life course forward. So many think of their education as acquiring a piece of paper that says ‘Degree’ on it, thinking this is the magic key to immediate success and fortune. So many, because of buying into just getting that paper, that degree, and perhaps not comprehending all of its variables, are left with a Degree, debt, and having feelings of disappointment and /or betrayal.  

I am reminded of Chad Grills, the writer of the book “College or Not” when he was purported as saying “It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if we don’t have a high IQ, brand name college degrees, or a high GPA, we don’t have a propensity for meaning. Or, we worry that because we don’t have a sufficient degree of these (old) measures of intelligence, our ability for growth and service will decrease (an impediment to meaning). The reality is, science and research increasingly show that these old credentials and measures of intelligence don’t matter that much.”

To gain meaning in your life today, one must overcome outworn definitions and measurements of yourself.  Your task is to see yourself in a whole new way, creating a new narrative beginning with the idea of you as a Conscious Observer, you want to observe those concepts that seem to control, drive, and sometimes divert your life. It’s not necessary that you completely discard information found within concepts, but it is important that you examine the messages you accept from the information, especially those with a negative bent, thereby lessening negative effects to your talents and your overall success or mission. ⁠

Researcher Daniel Goleman and the Hay Group have shown that IQ placement accounts for a baseline of intelligence, therefore for a person to have mastery in life, would be more a matter of that person working with that baseline to create a mindset, and exercise  the ability to do critical examination and the agility for correction on faulty conclusions. Allowing them to hone and strengthen their natural abilities and talents to consciously move in the direction of their innate and chosen path in a way that leads to the intersection of where preparation, talent, and opportunity meet.

So, if the old Learning-to-Success model components are changing, what does one use as guidepost or indicators of attributes and skills needed in the new model for success? What traits, abilities, and skills can you emulate that can activate your quest toward meaning, success, and mastery now?

I suggest the concepts of Grit + Imagination + Skills as basic components of the new model. We are at a time in history were some of the world’s most innovative companies are looking for people driven by the new model to drive their missions and success. Why not use them to drive your own mission and success?  What do these new skills or traits look like?

Grit

Wikipedia defines grit as:

“A positive, non-cognitive trait based on an individual’s passion for a particular long-term goal or end state, coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective. This perseverance of effort promotes the overcoming of obstacles or challenges that lie within a gritty individual’s path to accomplishment and serves as a driving force in achievement realization. Commonly associated concepts within the field of psychology include ‘perseverance,’ ‘hardiness,’ ‘resilience,’ ‘ambition,’ ‘need for achievement’ and ‘conscientiousness.’⁠”

We talked earlier about 'courageous adaptability.' Call it a short hand to describe  Grit.

Grit has in its makeup, conscious regulators,  such as patience and a unique attitude perspective in any given situation. Victor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, founder of logo-therapy, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, flushes out for us a key perspective on 'attitude,' with his words: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

If we can become conscious of our 'spaces between', our ‘timing’, and patience, as we endure what life throws at us, we’re well on our way to building grit, and from those experiences to make us stronger and also more compassionate of others.

Imagination

Imagination is that alchemy between our emotions, rational mind, and our analytical capacities, aka Creativity: once harnessed it is unmatched as a talent. Creativity harnessed is one of the most sought-after commodities in the world today. It has become a innovative and integral component of the new technologies that is needed to evolve, and propagate the many new products and services on the horizon. The alchemy of creativity becomes the futures great bastion of human expertise to perfect and master.

Building creativity skill can start as simply as by writing down ideas every day. Harnessing it can take longer. Needed then is the conscious awareness, the perception, and emotional balance brought into action during development, and implementation, of new ideas and products. Creativity coming forth as ideas are worked from good to desirable, to beneficial, and on to lucrative. Strategic thinking becomes then part of the blend in the creativity equation to produce better solutions and resources to problematic situations.

Skills

The one skill that will be prized above others will be the mastering of our emotions. Emotional mastery can be tricky for it is the practice of observing our thoughts and feelings as they arise and determining from what sources they spring. Choosing the ones that serve us and dismissing the ones that cause pain or frustration.

This is necessary in setting a life course and move us to our innate mission. Along the way, we find we produce marketable skills and our creativity builds value, in some cases where none previously seemed to exist. These marketable skills of the future may fall into one of the categories for: Art, Business, Engineering, Design, and Science. 

The beauty of these new skill sets is that they’re all self-reinforcing. That means that if you’re willing to build grit by operating in uncertainty, you naturally start to develop ideas to solve your challenges. This leads to a boost in imagination. As our imagination increases, we’ll have to find an outlet. Searching for an outlet to channel our energies will lead us towards wanting to build our skills. These three areas begin to strengthen each other, and the process of increasing this new type of intelligence becomes seamless. Once we are self-taught in one skill or field of study, we can repeat the process again and again. When we’re growing and improving, it becomes easier for meaning to manifest in our lives.

So in conclusion, I want to give you some insights from one of the ‘New’ industry leader’s thinking on the ideas of the new models of  Learning-to–Business success by Lazlo Bock.

Laszlo Bock is currently the CEO and Co-Founder of the Company named Humu, in Mountain View, California. He is the author of "WORK RULES! Insights from Inside Google to Transform How You Live and Lead", (which has been named one of the top 15 business books of 2015). He has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and on the PBS Newshour 

Bock's marketing slogan for Humu is: “Making work better for everyone, everywhere, through science, machine learning, and a little bit of love.”

Bock's previous job was as the man in charge of hiring at Google, and this is what he had to say about the skills he looked for when they wanted to hire under his watch:⁠

“For every job, though, the #1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information.”

Laszlo went on to say “the second most important thing they’re looking for: …is leadership — in particular emergent leadership as opposed to traditional leadership. Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? We don’t care. What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you’re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what’s critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power.”

We’ll uncover more about these attributes and traits in-depth in future articles. In the meantime think on these words

I've learned that making a "living" is not the same thing as making a "life". - Maya Angelou

So if you need to get a handle on this or in moving forward drop me a note. We can go over or discover activities, habits, and techniques, without harassment or harsh judgment that is advantageous to a solid re-invention of a successful you. 

A Conversation On Masculinity, Society, and Change Neither is Static

THE KEYS TO WORRY-FREE CHANGING NOTION OF GENDER, MASCULINITY, & SOCIETY -  THE EDGE COMES FROM KNOWING 'What’s Behind the Curtin'. By Calvin Harris H.W., M.

The Life and Age of Man: The Stages of Man's Life from Cradle to ...
FAMSF Explore the Art - Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

This post is written to give a ‘Breathing space’ or a broader view to men when issues come up in the matter of Gender identification, the notions of your sexuality vs gender or in the matter of having to defend or change in a time of Societal change. I will start with the comment that if changes are demanded of you and you did not instigate the change, then make note someone else has an agenda or profit to be gained by it.  

The impetus for writing this post began with a call. I got this phone call about an article that was to appear in the March 1st or 2nd, 2018, edition of TheNation.Com, in its SOCIETY Blog Column. A post titled: "Do We Need to Redefine Masculinity—or Get Rid of It?", written by one Collier Meyerson, a Knobler Fellow at the Nation Institute, where she focuses on reporting about race and politics, as well as an investigative fellow at Reveal. Even before the articles came out a call came to me to be on the lookout for it and a request for my reaction to the article. Since its release, I have had a barrage of calls with hot opinions about it, more than any article (to date) generated from any posts that I had written myself. (Well, it is my own fault for encouraging you all to read more, and then to dig deep for understanding.)

I feel, to meet a storm successfully you will need an edge, that is, a preparation and / or history of the behaviors of the storms and how they behaved in the past: that is where the edge to success is found. So for all of you who are ready to Take Action one way or another, let me play devil's advocate here and let’s start with the meaningful action of an investigation. This investigation may seem a bit around the bend but hold fast, for the future is at stake.

Be pre-warned this article, may have intellectual and emotional undercurrents for some; those of you that take the time to digest and discern what is being offered will find it well worth the read. I welcome your comments and for those of you having regular scheduled session with me, I welcome your phone calls regarding personal issues brought up by this post.  

Also, contain at the end of this article is a link to Ms. Meyerson's article for your perusal and consideration.

I am a believer in having a shameless array of ‘Conscious’ emotions, considered in this conversation when the goal is to lead to a compassionate solution. Yes, even the emotion Anger, if that anger is self-possessed within an idea. The goal then, as Thanissara Mary Weinberg expresses it, is to have - “Anger . . . traditionally thought of to be close to wisdom. [To be used], When not projected outward onto others or inward toward the self, it gives us the necessary energy and clarity to understand what needs to be done.”
Now, I, in fact, was happy to see an article on masculinity in a publication like ‘The Nation,’ in light of my post last year in SOC on 30, June 2017, titled “A Man Is Expected - New Pathways of Being.” Yet, I was surprised by the title implications to Redefine Masculinity or get rid of it. Let’s face it, there are not too many women nor men that really want to get rid of Masculinity. So let us knock off the nonsense of getting rid of it and try to reason to the core of the matter.

It's clear when you look out into society that masculinity is a tough subject to approach for many people, regardless of gender, but it seems it is popping up in one form or another and therefore it wants to be addressed.

 I'm afraid beliefs about male and female, that is humans and their rights are being turned upside down and that some of the discussions of the new masculinity reflect more theory first than any real consideration of human progress or history on the subject. I don't think it's the wisest move to redefine what it means to be anything beyond Conscious Beings right now. Radicals could easily turn beliefs about humans and unalienable rights they possess upside down especially in a climate demanding change. 

It may surprise some to know in a very short number of years it will be a moot point.  The rage and outcry in the courts, will be about abuse in the use of Robots and Inanimate Objects and there again the consideration for redefinition.  This time for Robots being Sentient Beings, that means beings with consciousness, or in some contexts life itself. Sentient beings for the longest time where considered primary a state belonging only to Humans.  To be Sentient you needed to possess five aggregates: matter, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. As technology and science progressed as rapidly as it has identification of sentient beings have been extended to animals and plant life and will in time move to our machines. At some point, regulated behavior in the use or misuse of Robots and inanimate objects as Sex objects will prevail. 

What it means to be a man or a woman can be reduced to just saying  ‘Human.’ We have the capacity to think, feel, perceive or experience subjectively and with empathy.  When we go beyond that, then we start to get into trouble when like the Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to separate, distinguish as it were the ability to think from the ability to feel and maybe where we start some of the modern divisions of men and women. Humans are carbon-based communal societal creatures that have empathy and justice called Love within their somatic DNA and within their shared blood, they as for now, come with a knowledge of an expiration date.

Photo by Jason Beamguard

 The Blade Runner movies and the book that they were adapted from,  “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by writer Philip K. Dick, first published in 1968, explored issues of “what does it mean to be human.” The fallacy the book tried to point to was the belief that Androids, unlike humans, are said to possess no sense of empathy or compassion in the future, and the question did humans still contain humanity. I would start the conversation here because for some folks The concept of masculinity mis-seen is the belief that masculinity in the male gender has no empathy or compassion. And thus masculinity in the male gender is a mechanical apparatus that can be turned on or off at will. Rather than it being an evolutionary engineered process once geared to the benefit of family,  community or humanity and has historically been manipulated but yet is always evolving.

Man as Machine

There is a book mention in Ms. Meyerson blog by Gail Bederman: her seminal book is on the issue, "Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917." Author Gail Bederman writes: “I don’t see manhood as either an intrinsic essence or a collection of traits, attributes, or sex roles. Manhood—or ‘masculinity,’ as it is commonly termed today—is a continual, dynamic process.” The first thing we need to do, according to Bederman, is stop arguing that masculinity has traits that are inherent. “Gender,” she writes, “is dynamic and always changing.”

Book Cover of Gail Bederman  Book

Between 1820 and 1860, according to Bederman, more and more white men were beginning to identify as middle class: entrepreneurs, professionals, and managers. And with that distinction, there came about a new and important gender identification for men, one that centered around civility. As opposed to brutishness or violent tendencies, manliness during this period was focused on a civilized character, holding off on marriage to accrue wealth. And then a man should focus on providing a good life for his wife, his children, or his employees.

Between 1879 and 1910, the number of middle-class men who were self-employed dropped, from 67 percent to 37 percent, prompting another a shift. “Middle-class Victorian men were obsessed with manhood at the turn of the century,” writes Bederman. They became “obsessed” with cowboy novels, and hunting and fishing. At the same time new epithets, like “sissy,” “pussy-foot,” “cold feet” and “stuffed shirt, ” emerged, indicating “behavior which had once appeared self-possessed and manly but now seemed over-civilized and effeminate,” writes Bederman. Around 1890, a noun defined as “the essence of manhood” took hold for the first time—now, manhood was called “masculinity.”

The idea, Bederman says, was that being “manly” had a “moral dimension,” and was defined by a dictionary at the time as “possessing the proper characteristic of a man; independent in spirit or bearing; strong, brave, large-minded, etc.” But then, when the economy tanked between 1879 to 1896, and with it the whole middle-class white-male “civilized” identity, the concept of “manliness” shifted again. After that, Bederman says, when men wished to invoke a male power they used “masculine” and “masculinity” to describe it. “The adjective ‘masculine’ was used to refer to any characteristics, good or bad, that all men had,” she wrote. The element of morality had been left behind.

The shift in white middle-class American male identification at the turn of the 19th century was also a way to justify white supremacy. “Linking whiteness to male power,” Bederman wrote, “was nothing new.… during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, American citizenship rights had been construed as ‘manhood’ rights which inhered to white males, only…Negro males, whether free or slave, were forbidden to exercise ‘manhood’ rights—forbidden to vote, hold electoral office, serve on juries, or join the military. The conclusion was implicit but widely understood: Negro males, unlike white males, were less than men.” But once “masculinity” came around at the end of the 19th century, and black men were fighting for “manhood rights,” a new idea had emerged. White middle-class men were starting to see themselves as maintaining a universal male quality: savagery. But the way they separated themselves from their black counterparts, was to articulate that they had evolved more. Bederman uses the example of National Geographic, which was first published in 1889 and gained popularity “by breathlessly depicting the heroic adventures of ‘civilized’ white male explorers among ‘primitive tribes in darkest Africa.” Similarly, she writes, “Anglo-Saxonist imperialists insisted that civilized white men had a racial genius for self-government which necessitated the conquest of more ‘primitive’ darker races.”

America’s new definition of masculinity was cemented during the 20th century. Though black men gained the right to vote, under Jim Crow laws, which last well into the mid-20th century, they continued to be subjugated by white men, who restrained black men’s economic possibilities and frequently portrayed them as uncontrollable rapists. From early westerns to the action films we watch today, white cis men overwhelmingly were cast as leads in the mass entertainment our culture consumes; guns became a rite and plaything of young white men in our country. And masculinity became a made-up excuse to dominate.

In his essay, Michael Ian Black. an American comedian, actor, writer, writes: “I believe in boys. I believe in my son. Sometimes, though, I see him, 16 years old, swallowing his frustration, burying his worry, stomping up the stairs without telling us what’s wrong, and I want to show him what it looks like to be vulnerable and open, but I can’t. Because I was a boy once, too.”

Black can’t show his son what vulnerability looks like not because he is biologically incapable of doing so. The block is one formed by habit, culture, and American history predicated on white male domination—which produced a masculinity predicated on white male domination. Who says we have to hold onto that? It is only with the understanding that gender identification is moveable, malleable, and worth undoing that we can begin to make the boys all right.

A change of Role

Tim Marshal & Son

Modifications to masculinity should be a personal and individual choice, to be made by the male or female in their own exploration of their life. Based on their journey to discover their innate self and to get their answer to the great question Who Am I. No one should decide but that individual themselves. They will need of course historic and scientific facts, to be able to look behind the curtain, as well as support both for their spirit and their bodies by their communities. To find that innate self and then to offer their unique contribution to family, community, society and the world.  

This would mean no more expectations of a  cookie cutter assembly line version of masculinity, or of what it should look like or do. No more of a one version fits all.  More of a self-made version of what I call male on man(kind). In my work, I look for the essence in each person I interact with, people to engage their individual merit, on a person by person basis. I have found it seems to work better than applying labels - at least for me.

Freedom to be You

See the Nation article by Collier Meyerson

A hiki i kekahi manawa  =   Until next time
 

The Odd Way We Define Success

By Calvin Harris, H.W., M.

Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, and Gary Merrill in All About Eve (1950)

How often do we hear about successful people, then imagine we fall short by comparison?

In my coaching practice, when Clients ask me how they can become successful? I reach for one of several canned questions to create a dialogue to an answer:

• Short and sweet: “Do you work for yourself?”
• Ambitious: “If you did not have worries about obligations or money what would you do?”
• Mysterious: “Is there a difference in focus in a man of success. Compared to becoming a person of value?” 
• Awkward: "Your focus is it chasing the money or chasing the passion?"

If I’m lucky, the conversation moves the other person to return to their inner dialogue of themselves, to uncover more of the root cause for the question, and to help them frame an answer to their vague subjective question or at least see the underpinning or gauge to their unsatisfied state of being.

Tesla car

I half joking say to them, Oh I can understand your feeling, because on the one hand, I am a successful entrepreneurial mentor, life coach, writer, and more. But on the other hand, I’m none of them, if I used your gauge, because based on your gauge, then shouldn’t a writer have a large following of loyal fans? Shouldn’t a life coach have only high paying clients? Isn’t an entrepreneur supposed to make deals while whipping along in his Tesla through the fashionable sections of SoCal’s Coast Highway?

That’s success, right? And if not, why do you seem to think it is?

Here’s the thing. I’ve noticed that everyone I read, listen to, or follow on social media is unusually accomplished, if only in hype. This is bound to happen. The most prolific people, even if not talented, will get the most attention.

I mean, they’re the best at getting promotion. It’s no surprise they have a large following.

But what then happens to most of us? We hear about these promoted “successful” people, then imagine we fall short by comparison. I call this the Comparing Mind.

How do you respond to others' lives? Have you felt compelled to look over your shoulder and compare yourself to family members, best buds, classmates, neighbors, or someone you've read about, and believe that you have to equal whatever they did in their lives?

The first thing to understand is to know that to some degree the Comparing Mind switches on in all of us. Like it or not, our comparison software will always be running in the background. Now to mediate the absurdity of the Comparing Mind, we want to be mindful and with a lightness of humor, that our lives require a rigorous discernment of which voices to listen to: those coming from our own depths of purpose, or those which are received from the promotional blast of the world around us.

I recall a conversation that took place during a business meeting, that you might find interesting, it was said: In the business world, this phenomenon, of the Comparing Mind doesn’t care about the size of a raise. It only cares if it’s bigger than their co-worker’s raise. For instance, when a CEO’s pay was made public in 1992, it triggered the Comparing Mind in thousands of executives across America. “Wait, she’s making what??” As a result, CEO pay spiraled upwards like a whirlybird.

The takeaway is that the Comparing Mind thinks in terms of relative or equivalent achievement, not in significant or absolute achievement. In other words, if we are not conscious of the other person, we don’t even make the comparison.

Model Jimmy Flint-Smith Photo by Juan Coronado

The point is when confronted with Comparing Mind, it is helpful to put things in perspective. The Comparing Mind is blind. It’s blind to the fact that “successful people” are just people. Beneath all their outward success, they’re as flawed as the rest of us.

Tim Ferriss, for example, author of the “4-hour Workweek”: in 2016 his The Tim Ferriss Show was considered the #1 business podcast on all of iTunes and was ranked #1 out of 300,000+ podcasts, so when you talk about social media success, his name is one that would come to mind.  

Interestingly enough, Tim Ferriss, is purported to have written a revealing blog a few years ago. In the article, Ferriss purportedly wrote that he often struggles to get out of bed in the morning and that he was seeing a therapist. Therefore successful superstar or not, we don’t always have it easy. None of us have it easy all the time.

But, one thing we can do to keep down the stress, is to become conscious of when the Comparing Mind is in action and to develop a sense of examined mindfulness about it.

And when you catch the Comparing Mind doing its thing, remember to flip your focus, stop and check, is your attention on the relative or the significant efforts to your achievement success? It doesn’t matter what other people are doing. It does matter what you are doing, and how you feel about doing it.

Men's Beards - A Choice or a Fashion Statement

You know how sometimes things seem to have a kind of synchronicity in how they play out. They then take on a life of their own, like this article for instance. I got up one morning, got coffee and turn on the computer.  I found myself on Facebook, watching a lumberjack of a man, with a long unkempt beard wearing only long John pant bottoms. He is outside in the freezing snow, moving around in this crazy funny dance screeching like a banshee. underneath the post was this comment “Who's that woman with a beard?”

I then turned to my E-mail post for the day, I found a comment from my web-e-zine reader asking me why I had that coffee mug up to my mouth (in the February web site picture.) Followed then by the comment “You look like you’re hiding.” I was taken aback by this because my perception of the picture was that I was giving a salute or toast to getting up getting moving with that morning cup of java.

Later that morning I was seated at a small bistro table, in earshot of a table of women who after ordering their lunch, had their conversation turn quickly to men: Talking about guys who wear beards, agreeing on the statement “you can’t trust the unkempt bearded guy. They are usually trying to put off doing something or they are hiding something.” Of course, these ladies could have been easily dismissed as Pogonophobia (those with the fear of beards) and that would have been the end of it.

Getting back to work, that afternoon at my computer, I find additional E-mail post. These e-mail post, in essence, are asking why I had that coffee mug up to my mouth, followed by, in essence, comments to the effect of: “You don’t look open and welcoming,” “You Look as if you’re trying to hide.”

Which then gave me pause, grist to my mill so to speak in thinking about the connection between having something in front of, or on the face that causes a reaction, that may be perceived, not as the perception you had intended it to be. My thoughts went back to those comments from the ladies at lunch and the conversation on men’s beards.

Which is how this article came into being. Thus, this issue is about the perception of image and how that might play out. More importantly, it is about making your choices, in a way that reflects your innate being. Your uniqueness rather than a one of the herd consciousness. This can be one of those moments for you to be clear and honest (to nobody but yourself), on why you came to your choice to have or have not facial hair. We know that some of the drivers for this decision have to do with wanting to be trendy, hip, cool, popular, sexy, and finally into those deeper issues of successful, relevant and or happy.

Trends and fads within the last four decades, we have seen Male hair grooming go from (on the top of his head) short to long to bald. Hair is like the only beauty regiment some men will allow themselves and with it disappearing off the top of the head, I am not surprised that it had moved to the face.

Within the last ten years’ Facial hair has become the trending part of the new Gen-XY male sexual persona, with various schools of thought advocating on how much or little to trim of facial hair. The Downside to this is, I have found that these same men, who will not shave beards have no problem shaving armpits and pubic hair evidenced at public showers such as alethic club, circling around the shower drains.

Why even Duluth Trading Company has a great Advert out – Tame Your Pelt Sasquatch – ‘Simply Great Beard Oil’- the difference between the beards of Greek Gods and Hobos.  It seems these oils have names such as Datenite (classy and bold), Dirt (earthy and fresh), Leather (smell of leather), and Lumberjack (fresh split pine and cedar). the oil, come highly recommended as reported by user Sal of Nashville, I paraphrase his comments - “softens the straw hedge, prevents skin irritation and what I really got a kick out of “the scent barges into the room and bellow man coming through!"

In the mid to late 1900’s….say up until 2006, before the Beards fashion trend really took off, critics had hinted at a psychological connection between a man and his beard, as hiding his true nature under the guise of cover to bolster those with less aggressive trendies, those who were shy, self-conscious, or in need of a little self-confidence.  It is a fact, that for many men a beard can make you look Older and More Aggressive.  The rub comes when the reason for the beard, it cannot predict your standing in the group, or with either the love of the ladies or feeling successful in business or life.

Move this fashion trend forward to 2016, were beards have propagated like rabbits, brings the new dilemma for the beard owners, how to stand out with confidence from the crowd in going forward, or in bringing about the success that should be yours in your life.  It may mean going back to basics, looking at your strengths and weakness in your job or personal life- trim out the useless, massaging the skills that could take you forward, considering your range of options for change, now these options might require some genuine courage and determination on your part, but well worth it in the dividends. Think about it, the True trendsetters are off starting something new, hell that could be you.

In the end, it should not matter what your message is, as long as you and your persona are in line with each other, saying the same thing and you are happy with it. Like anything else in Life, it is about the enjoyment of expressing your creativity and character. Even if someone else mistakes your manliness for a screaming naked woman in the snow. Enjoy the irony, breathe and laugh. Enjoy your life. Take a tip from Maya Angelou - “My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”