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Deconstructing the traditional concept of being a man. Building Emotional Intelligence. The importance of working on our mindset.
Today’s guest Jay Williams is a life coach and founder of NLP, Life and business coaching, an organization that helps Entrepreneurs & Business Owners to go from feeling stuck to becoming Mentally and Emotionally Unstoppable in life & business. In today’s episode he talks about the benefits of handling our emotions in a healthy manner, how we can grow our emotional intelligence and build a solid mindset.
CHAPTERS:
00:02:20 CHAPTER I – Redefining Men
00:02:22 Main Differences Between Men and Women
- Men usually have a “hunter” way of dealing with situations, in which they first identify a problem and then come up with a suitable solution. On the other hand, women tend to have more of a “gatherer” approach, pondering several potential solutions, but more often than not having a hard time putting one of them into practice.
- For most men is hard to talk about what’s real. Even though it seems to be getting better concerning younger generations, men still struggle to open their hearts, be vulnerable and acknowledge they’re in need of emotional support.
00:07:01 Old-Fashioned Men
- The main reason why most men have a hard time sharing their feelings lays on an archaic concept of how should be a man, according to which it’s not right to let out a certain type of emotions that could be read as a sign of weakness.
00:16:02 Mastery
- Being masterful over something is to be truly dedicated and committed to learning a specific skill or craft, to the point in which it becomes a habit and can then be done naturally and effortlessly. It may not possible to fully master something so that there’s nothing else to learn about it; however, devoting yourself to master a particular field can be a great challenge to take on, especially when it’s related to self-improvement and self-development.
00:20:15 CHAPTER II – Building Emotional Intelligence
00:20:15 Expressing Vs. Suppressing Emotions
- For a lot of men, is just easier to put things down and suppress their feelings, especially those uncomfortable ones such as shame, fear, guilt or anxiety. In order to avoid coping with such uneasy emotions, men will turn to anything that can provide some kind of numbness and distraction from reality, such as work, social media, booze, drugs, porn or food, just to name a few. However, you it’s not possible to let go of that what we’re not willing to feel, meaning that if we have a tendency to run away from unpleasant feelings, we won’t be able to eventually overcome them.
- Emotions actually work as a GPS. They are a guide that provide very useful information about ourselves and how we stand concerning a specific situation. Instead of suppressing emotions, we should aim to express them – it’s a fact that getting things out of our chest and effectively putting our any feelings into words will definitely make us feel way lighter from an emotional point of view.
00:31:34 How Past Events Can Influence Our Present Life
- How we understand reality and feel about our current life has actually very little to do with what’s objectively going on in front of us. In fact, it has much more to do with things that happened in the past. Even what appear to be small details can have a major impact in ourselves.
- When we’re having unpleasant feelings about a specific situation, it’s always healthy to try to find out if those resemble any particular experience of our past. Usually, present issues will resonate with things that may have happened way back in our life, especially when we manifest a disproportionate large reaction to what seems to be the cause of our unease.
00:39:58 Nice Guy Syndrome
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- More often than not, we’ll try to compensate for past experiences that have made us feel left aside or even abandoned by becoming a “nice guy”, to avoid revisiting that emotional situation. Some usual symptoms of this widely-spread syndrome are approval seeking, fear of conflict, and getting involved in destructive relationships, among others.
- The very first step to overcome this syndrome is awareness. It’s key to find out the root cause of those symptoms, so that we can better understand ourselves and how we’ve built our usual coping mechanisms. By acknowledging the whole context, we can begin to release some of the negative charge that usually translates into feelings of shame, guilt or fear.
00:46:43 CHAPTER III – Mindset
00:47:15 Cause or Effect Mentality
- When it comes to choosing how we stand up to life, we can either be on the cause side or the effect side of things. On the latter, we’ll find ourselves blaming others for our sorrows, whether it’s our partner, our parents, our boss, or even the whole society. By standing on the effect side of things we become victims, feeling completely helpless and disempowered towards life.
- On the other hand, we can choose to stand on the cause side of things – By asking ourselves “How am I responsible for this”, we can begin to take action from a place of intention, acknowledging our power to change any given context, despite external hurdles.
00:52:33 Being “in the Mind”:
- When we are “on our mind”, we operate in a place of generalities, making vague, ambiguous statements that doesn’t serve us and make us feel overwhelmed. This being on our mind is closely related to standing on the effect side of our emotions, where we lack self-control and feel completely disempowered. The best way to get out of that state is by getting specific. This can be achieved simply by asking better questions. This implies acknowledging our feelings, but then asking ourselves what actions could we take about them. When we get specific, we get more clarity on a certain situation and potential ways of dealing with it.
00:55:48 Results as a Mindset GPS:
- Checking whether we’re getting the results that we want in the different areas of our life is a great way to know if we need to work on our mindset. There are two basic reasons why problems persist in time. The first one is simply lacking the basic knowledge and skills to actually solve that problem. The second one is letting emotions affect our thinking. When we make decisions from a place of fear, guilt, anger, shame or resentment, we might not make the best decisions at all. If you find yourself struggling with specific problem you believe you have the relevant knowledge and skills needed to solve, it may be time for you to take a close look at your mindset – there might be some work to be done there.
00:59:42 Coaching:
- Unlike most traditional therapies, coaching is future-focused rather than problem-focused. We all have “blind spots” – things that we should deal with that are just out of our awareness. A coach will point those out, sort of like holding a mirror towards ourselves, with the aim of bringing objectivity and a new perspective to the table. As Les Brown put it: “You can’t see the whole picture if you’re in the frame”.