All my clients that I’ve worked with till now have been women. The sample is very small but just one guy ever contacted me expressing interest in what I do. In many groups and seminars on my personal growth journey, I was the only guy.
From my experiences, the self-development world is female in a ratio of at least 70:30. Why is that? I believe we guys are super proud of our logical and reasonable right brain and just leave the emotional growing up, which is the major part of self-development space, to the female gender. We don’t need anything, we are fine.
I was the same. And damn proud of my way of being. Numbers, analysis, logic. That’s all that matters no?
Unfortunately for all of us guys out there, it’s not.
Do you know why? Because emotions are the only human way of being connected with the world.
Emotions are immediate responses to the present environment (Hendel, 2018).
And there is a huge difference between acting emotionally and being in touch with our emotions. A problem can occur when emotions spill into us acting emotionally without any processing. Just taking the emotion as an excuse and acting out what we feel completely unfiltered and uncensored in this world.
And this goes for both sexes. A woman just shouting hysterically or a man pounding on the car steering wheel when somebody doesn’t drive exactly as he wants them to.
But this is not what I want to discuss in this post.
Think about it. Why do emotions exist?
Fear tells us we are in a situation in which our life could be in danger.
Anger helps us protect ourselves.
Guilt wants to keep us connected with society, it keeps us from doing socially unacceptable acts so we don’t feel guilty.
When I first started understanding why emotions develop from an evolutionary standpoint and allowed myself to be in touch with what I was feeling, my life changed. I became a more balanced person, more grounded and able to connect with people around me much more.
I still remember the first time I became aware of my emotions.
I felt jealous when I saw a leaflet offering a personal growth workshop.
At that moment my mind started protecting my well-being by firing throughs. They were saying “This girl has no idea what she is talking about, why is she better than me for hosting a workshop. Who does she think she is!”
And I didn’t even know the person. I didn’t know her experiences, her credentials, who she is and what she can share with others. But she was hosting a workshop and I didn’t. And my mind quickly went on the offence to protect me. To keep me from feeling worse, smaller, and feeling bad about myself.
This is what we do. Instead of feeling our feelings and becoming inquisitive about what is going on inside of us, we get consumed by an endless stream of thoughts that keep us stuck.
But If I asked myself what is this feeling telling me I could discover that It was finding excuses for me to not put myself out there, to stay safe in hiding myself. To not share what I know like the girl on the pamphlet. I wouldn’t want to be judged like I judged her.
The words I was saying to myself were: “This girl has no idea what she is talking about, why is she better than me, who does she think she is!”
I wanted to create workshops. This is why I reacted so strongly. If it didn’t mean anything to me, I wouldn’t even see the pamphlet.
Things that trigger us are telling us something. That is where we have an opportunity for growth. In situations that produce a response in us. And it’s always connected with an emotion. It can be jealousy like I felt it, it could be anger or sadness or any other emotion. Depends on what we imagine the event means for us.
But all these events can be our teachers.
So when I am talking about being in touch with our emotions, this is what I mean. Feeling what is going on for us at the moment. Are we excited, sad, angry, fearful, or anything else?
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And because women are more in touch with their emotions, there is more of them in the self-development space trying to improve their experiences and their lives. And why it is hard for them to form long-lasting and meaningful relationships with men who are not able to express what is going on for them.
Maybe women in general lack more of the male-predominant “logic and reason” but we all need access to both emotions and reason in our lives to live a rewarding and balanced life.
Of course, I am overgeneralizing to an extent but I think we can all notice the differences in the way of experiencing and reacting to situations between sexes.
One of my missions is to try to impact logical men, that self-development, working on yourself is a fascinating journey worthy of time and attention. I don’t think there is anything more fulfilling than getting to know ourselves except for helping others.
So I want to impact and empower men who feel at this point that something is not the way they want it to be. Something they are feeling is telling them that they are not happy, that it’s not it, that life could be more, that work could be more, that relationships could feel better, that getting up in the more could be more exciting.
One thing we will be working on is being aware of what is going on in your world.
This is a must, a prerequisite to improving the experience of our lives across the board.
So to all men out there: don’t be afraid to feel, to be emotional. Emotions are just guiding you to a better life. Listen to them, process and only then react.
It is much better and healthier to allow ourselves to feel what needs to be felt. Mental and even physical symptoms can arise as a result of suppressed emotions.
“Blocked emotions lead to depression, anxiety, and a wide variety of other psychological symptoms caused by chronic stress. Additionally, chronic emotional stress causes changes to our physical health by increasing the amount of stress hormones, called corticosteroids, coursing through our body. Emotional stress has been linked to heart disease, stomach pain, headaches, insomnia, autoimmune disorders, and more”. (Jacobs Hendel, 2018).
I experienced this first-hand with digestion issues, headaches and insomnia for 10 years of my life.
And this doesn’t mean we will just act emotionally. We always have an option to choose how we will respond. In the words of Viktor Frankl, a famous psychiatrist and holocaust survivor:
“Between the stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our responses. In our response lies our growth and our freedom” ( Frankl, 1946)
I would love to hear your thoughts and opinion on the matter.
All the best!
Lan
References:
Frankl, Viktor, (1962). Man’s search for meaning: an introduction to logotherapy. Boston: Beacon Press
Jacobs Hendel, Hilary (2018) It’s Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self, Great Britain: Penguin Random House.
Image by Senjin Pojskić from https://pixabay.com
