Six years ago, I realized that my experience of being a man needed an upgrade.
I wasn’t ashamed of being a man. I didn’t hate men. And I definitely wasn’t walking around wishing I had been born differently.
It was more subtle than that.
I had simply lost touch with what felt good, beautiful, enlivening, and honorable about being a man.
This was during peak Covid years. And my then fiancée and I were living in a major city that was extra Covid-y.
My weekly men’s group had moved online. Male friendship and community became harder to come by. And culturally, conversations about men seemed increasingly focused on everything that was supposedly wrong with us.
Some of those conversations were necessary. Some were ridiculous.
But regardless, I started feeling an itch to go deeper into my own relationship with being a man.
Ultimately, I wanted to become a man I deeply respected, and genuinely loved being.
Looking back over the last six years, these are the seven things that had the biggest impact on becoming a man that I more deeply respect.
7 Things That Helped Me Become A Man I Respect
1. Carried a knife 24/7
I’m fully aware that I’m starting the list with a weird one for some people, but this was essential for me.
Living in a clean, modern, major metropolitan city, I felt like a eunuch. I felt the pristine, immaculate IKEA-fication of everything. I felt the disconnect from nature. I felt the disconnect from my body, from danger, from adventure.
One of the first things I intuitively felt drawn to was carrying a pocket knife. Every day. No matter what.
And not just a little two-inch Swiss army knife type thing. But a foldable, good sized (4.5 inch when folded, 9 inches when expanded) knife.
With each use a part of my soul healed.
Now, granted, while still living in the city most of what I used it for was opening Amazon packages that arrived at our door.
But every now and then a situation would arise that I would be prepared for because I had my knife on me. It opened my world in small ways that allowed my feelings of preparedness and effectiveness to slowly grow. It helped me feel that much closer to the physical world.
I had also done some fairly extensive street fighting/weapons training back in the day, so a knife didn’t feel like a scary thing to have on me. But making the decision to purchase it and carry it with me as a default was still healing.
2. Started pushing myself in the gym more
Historically, if there’s one pillar of my life I have been prone to dropping, it’s my physical fitness. Why? Mainly because it’s always been fairly easy for me to maintain a lower body weight for my frame, and my body doesn’t really give me issues.
But 3-4 years ago I packed on some weight, and didn’t like it. So 2.5 years ago, I hired a consistent trainer for the first time in many years.
We worked out together every week, year round, and the weight fell off and my strength improved dramatically.
It was also a male trainer, which was essential for my process. I wanted my time in the gym to just be locked in on one kind of energy and having a female trainer would detract from that.
When my wife and I moved countries (with a baby on the way), this was one of the first things I did for myself. I found a (male) trainer in a gym with a culture I liked and pre-paid for a long period of time from the start.
With this new trainer, I’ve stepped up my intensity even further and I’ve been setting lifetime personal records a few times per month on different lifts.
What this has all done for me is significant and far-reaching.
I feel more connected to my body day to day. I feel stronger. I feel more capable and prepared as a father/husband/protector. And I feel more resilient to the inevitable stressors of everyday life.
It also feels like the habit has enough years of momentum under it that I really can’t imagine ever dropping it again. I’m enjoying it too much. I genuinely find the process and the progress to be immense fun.
Ultimately, it just feels correct to be a man with visible muscle.
When I was a man with minimal strength, it didn’t feel correct. Sure, I could just go through life leaning on my intellect and emotional intelligence, but it would feel like a copout.
A man should be strong. My son will know weightlifting earlier than I did, and I look forward to the day when we can go to the gym together.
3. Built a man-cave
Both where my wife and I lived in our super-rural 100+ year old home and where we live now, I leaned into decorating my office like I wanted to.
Now, to anyone with design sensibilities, decorated is a generous term… because I like a very minimalistic aesthetic. But I made it my own. And that made all the difference.
Little to no art… incredibly functional… 100 or so books and written resources that I keep coming back to. And then not much else.
In essence, I gave myself physical territory that didn’t need to accommodate anyone else’s preferences.
The me of a decade ago would look at my office today and think, “Oh I should probably put more random stuff on the walls. There shouldn’t be so much unused space.” But I don’t want to, so I don’t.
The space is mine and mine alone. It does what I need it to do and not what others need it to do. And I love it.
4. Started mentoring more young men
Something funny tends to happen in my business, and it’s been this way since day one.
Regardless of whether I’m writing/speaking/creating more content for men or women (and there have definitely been extended seasons of each), my coaching roster tends to skew a bit more towards women. As in, the natural default is that I’ll have somewhere between 60-80% of my 1-on-1 clients be women… unless I do one thing. And that one thing is specifically call out to men and tell them I’m looking for more male clients. Whenever I do that, I get a wave of them. But when I don’t do it for a number of years, my gender mix tends to slide back to mainly women. Maybe because hiring someone for relationship work has lower stigma for women than men, and so men need the explicit invitation more than women do.
This year, I put a call out to men, and specifically younger men. I said that I wanted more young male clients (to me, younger is under 40) and they came out in droves.
Who knows why this is the season where I wanted to mentor more young men. Perhaps because I knew I had a son on the way/am now a father to an infant son. Maybe because I had felt enough earned/accumulated wisdom from these multi-year experiences in my relationship to being a man.
Either way, it has been a balm to my soul to be able to work with more men. Especially young men who remind me of a younger version of myself. Driven, big-hearted, wanting to have a positive impact in the world, married/marriage-oriented.
When I get to help a 27-year-old man avoid a mistake that cost me 5-10 years to learn, and I see them get it in an instant, it feels like collapsing time. And it feels deeply meaningful.
I’m currently in the process of ideating/outlining my next program for men, and the fact that I get to pull inspiration from the real lives and struggles of these amazing young men is such a blessing.
5. Owned my ambition again
In the early years of running my business, I worked like a man possessed.
Now, I was single at the time and had fewer responsibilities, so that was a factor.
But over time, I slowed down. In certain years, I slowed down quite a bit.
Then, over this last year (after moving countries and becoming a dad) my pace has picked up significantly.
I had a number of people tell me that once I was a dad, I’d barely have any time left to work. It’d all be diapers and patchy sleep and just trying to survive. But that hasn’t been the case at all.
I’ve found a passion for my work like I haven’t felt in quite some time. And this is all while being very involved in raising my son (have you heard all the new data saying that Millenial men are spending 2-4x more time with their kids than previous generations – I believe it).
The effect of all of this has been life-giving. Even and especially on days when I’ve had a terrible streak of sleeps.
I love being in push-mode again. I love going for it. I love putting out 2-4x more work than I have been in years in a season where I ‘should’ have reduced work capacity.
I think that everyone but especially men need a big challenge to contend with in their lives. Something to chew on. Something to battle against.
Part of a man withers when nothing in his life requires his full strength.
Being more fully of service after a number of more dormant years has been the best. And I’m excited to continue the trend over the coming years.
6. Taking responsibility for people besides myself
One of the main differences between a boy and a man is that a boy consumes more than he produces and a man produces more than he consumes. And a man becomes even more of a man when he produces not just for himself, but for others.
Over the last few years, my wife stopped working, and then we had our son. Being the sole provider for our family has been so nourishing for me.
In my 20’s, I was like a gardener growing things and snacking on them while tending the garden. The garden was just for me.
But now, I get to garden with a greater sense of meaning and purpose because my daily efforts feed others.
My hope is that we will have more children over the coming years, and I will get to provide for them as well. And in so doing, will only continue to grow further.
7. Developing a relationship with God
I’ll say right off the bat that the version of me that existed 10 years ago would have cringed reading this one on the list.
But nothing has brought me more peace than cultivating a relationship with God and having a home-church that my wife and I attend on a weekly basis.
Just like I used to think that it would be hard for a man to consider himself a man while having a boss (aka not being self-employed), I also thought that it would be hard for a man to consider himself a man if he worshipped a force greater than him.
Ultimately, this was all just a form of arrogance. The notion that we should be the most powerful and capable person in our entire world is a delusional one. We don’t control everything, nor should we pretend to.
Sure, it is our responsibility to control the controllable, and to always do our best. But to think that we need to be the strongest person in our lives (and our kids lives, our wife’s life, etc.) is misguided.
When I relinquished the idea that I had to force everything into existence and hold the whole world together (for myself, my family), a huge weight was lifted off of my shoulders.
In my 20’s, I subconsciously used to believe that masculinity = maximum autonomy. But now, it feels like masculinity = willingly carrying enormous responsibility while simultaneously acknowledging that I am not the God in my own life. Like, yes, I am responsible for my effort, my integrity, my family, my daily choices. I am not responsible for controlling all of reality.
Does this mean that I never stress? Never worry? No. I’m still very much a human and am still prone to slipping and backsliding like everyone else.
But it feels like there’s an extra layer of safety net underneath my whole life, and for that, I am grateful.
The Integration Never Ends
I didn’t become a man I more deeply respect by convincing myself that men were superior, by consuming angry Red Pill/MGTOW/manosphere content about women, or endlessly analyzing what society thinks about masculinity.
I became it by living more deeply as a man.
By becoming stronger, more capable, more responsible. More useful to those around me, more connected to other men, more ambitious in service of something meaningful. More willing to carry weight for the people I love.
And more willing to admit that I cannot carry everything on my own.
So, maybe you’re reading this knowing that nothing is catastrophically wrong with your life… but something in you feels underused.
You’ve become complacent or comfortable when you know you’re capable of being strong. Disconnected when you know you’re capable of brotherhood. Aimless when you know you need a mission. Or successful on paper while privately knowing that you’re living at 60% of your capacity.
This is some of my favorite work to do with men.
My private work isn’t about imposing the above seven things on other men (these aren’t seven prerequisite commandments for masculinity… they’re seven things that worked for me). It’s about figuring out where your particular life has gone flat and what your next edge actually is.
If I can support you in any way in your journey, I’d love to work with you.
Dedicated to your success,
Jordan
Ps. If you enjoyed this article, you’ll also love checking out:
– How To Heal Your Father Wound
– 5 Ways To Help Reduce The Male Suicide Rate
– Supercharge Your Sex Life (video course for men on how to feel more comfortable, confident, and connected in the bedroom)
