April 30, 2026 • 52 mins
You want to have the answers. You want to be solid. You want to be the one people can rely on. But here’s the question most men don’t ask themselves: What is it costing you to always be right?
In this solo episode, Kier unpacks the hidden price of certainty and why the need to always have the answer can quietly damage your relationships, your growth, and your self-awareness. Using a real conversation with his wife about money, he walks through how quickly defensiveness can take over when your identity feels challenged and how that moment right there is where most men lose the opportunity to grow.
Kier breaks down why curiosity feels so uncomfortable, especially for Black men who were raised to equate confidence with safety and uncertainty with risk. From being taught to “look strong” as boys to navigating spaces where being wrong can feel dangerous, this episode gets to the root of why so many men struggle to ask questions instead of proving points.
Because the truth is when you always need to be right, people stop being real with you. Conversations turn into debates. Intimacy fades. And over time, people don’t get closer… they just get quieter.
This episode challenges you to rethink what strength actually looks like. Not as having all the answers but as being willing to sit in discomfort long enough to understand something new.
In this episode:
- Why defensiveness shuts down connection faster than you think
- How the need to be right can cost you intimacy, trust, and respect
- The link between masculinity, control, and fear of uncertainty
- Why criticism often holds the key to your blind spots (Johari Window)
- How curiosity can shift your relationships, leadership, and self-awareness
- The difference between proving a point and actually growing
Key Quote: “Certainty is armor. Curiosity requires you to take it off.”
If you’ve ever felt the urge to defend yourself before you fully understand what’s being said this episode will challenge you to slow down, ask better questions, and choose growth over ego.
The Challenge: The 7-Day Curiosity Shift
Pick one area of your life home, work, friendships, or your relationship and for 7 days:
- Ask more questions than you make statements
- Wait 60 seconds before responding when you feel triggered
- Notice what changes in your conversations and connections
Connect With Us
🌐 Website: www.learnedthehardwaypod.com
🎙️ Leave a Voice Note: Drop Kier a message directly on the site
📧 Email: learnedthehardwaypod@gmail.com
📱 Follow the Show: @learnedthehardwaypod
👤 Follow Kier: @kiergaines
Tap in: Share your thoughts, leave a review, or send this episode to someone who needs it.
Produced & Edited by Idea to Launch Productions
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to Learn the hard Way. My name is Kire Games.
We talk about purpose, we talk about pressure, we talk
about what it actually tastes. Become a full comprehensive man.
Welcome back to another episode of Learning the hard Way.
I am care Games hosts. I am a licensed therapist.
I am a husband, I'm a father, I'm a community leader.
(00:26):
I'm a lot of things, including a man that had
to learn way too many things the hard way. Just
like a lot of y'all, I know you feel me
on that. So on today's episode, we're going to talk
about growth because from all those lessons learned, man, there's
a lot of growth that happened. And when we talk
about growth, we tend to look at it through this
(00:46):
particular lens that I'm not always so sure it should
be seen through. And that reminds me of this quote.
The quote says certainty is comfortable, but growth is not.
How many times have you heard people say, man, bro,
you just got it. You gotta get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
What does that mean? Bro? What does that mean? If
(01:08):
I'm at the bus stop and I'm cold and I'm shivering, man, a,
you just got to be cold while being cold. Yeah,
I know, Nah, that don't work. Hold on, if I'm
at the bus stop and I'm shivering, man, you just
gotta think warm while being cold. In theory, it makes sense,
but doesn't make sense and practice for you, because even
if it doesn't, it's still necessary. So today we're going
(01:31):
to talk about how to deal with that discomfort and
what to do with it, and how to navigate it
and all of the things. Now, all growth ain't the
same kind of growth. When we think about growth, we
typically think about it in a positive direction, but you
can also grow to a negative direction. You can grow
into the person that you never ever imagine that you become.
(01:55):
But you can also grow into the type of person
that you simply do not care for. And growth isn't
this rise and tide that lifts all ships. You can
grow very heavily in one direction of your life and
not so much in the other. You can grow in
a direction where you're very very good at making it
earning money, but you cannot grow in the area of
(02:17):
keeping and saving money. You can grow in your confidence
to go to the bar or be out and talk
to that person that you find attractive, but not really
growing the area of communication and mutuality that keeps a
relationship going. You understand what I'm saying, Growth ain't growth.
It goes in all different types of directions, and I
think we got to think about that when we think
(02:38):
about ourselves and how it applies to us. Now I'm
not exempt. I had to learn how to get comfortable
with being uncomfortable in my own growth journey. Let me
tell you a story about me and my wife. So
I set up used to be when she worked full
time corporate. My wife's a lawyer, and I work full
time corporate and education. We pretty much split our bis
(03:00):
don't tell the internet fifty to fifty. We both took
a percentage of our paycheck put it to the bills.
Everything was cool, But things changed when I started doing
this full time. She left her job to work for
our company, and she also wanted to spend more time
with the kids. So she's at home. She does the
logistics of the house and the family and all of
the stuff. She's amazing at it. She's a wizard with it.
(03:22):
Were early on in this journey, it wasn't but a
smooth When I started becoming the breadwinner for the family,
the money conversation's changed because money doesn't look the same
to both of us anymore. And I remember one time
she told me, she said, kid, you're hard to talk
to about money. That pissed me off. I ain't even
(03:42):
gonna hold you. It made me so angry so fast,
and my response it reflects that, what do you mean
I'm hard to talk to about money? I ain't hard
to talk to about money. I don't question you on spending.
I don't question you on where you go. I don't
track this Amazon package, the show up at the door.
I don't say anything. How am I talking? I had
to talk to about money? I jumped into an immediate
(04:03):
defensive mode for a number of reasons. One because I think,
deeply I knew that she was right, and I know
that I come from financial scarcity, and financial scarcity, or
when you don't have enough creates hyper vigilance, or when
you are seeing everything to the point where it's affecting
you deeply. You even seeing ghosts, You're seeing things that
aren't there. You're worried about money problems that you don't
(04:26):
even have yet, because you're so afraid to be poor
like you were back then, to struggle like you did
back then. Your brain doesn't always realize that you're in
a different spot. Bruh. This ain't that, even though it
feels similar. So we're in this argument, this conversation. She's
saying that I'm hard to talk to about money, and
in the moment, I approached it with a defensiveness that
(04:48):
was the opposite of the curiosity that I should have
approached it with. And this is what I've learned over time. Curiosity.
Curiosity is so important for growth. Curiosit is the thing
that allows us to wonder and to discover and the
change perspectives and the shift trajectories. It makes us limber
(05:09):
and flexible and fluid so that we can adapt to
so many different situations by understanding what's going on in
the world, what's going on with us, and how those
two things meet. Curiosity. Here's where I didn't make the
best decision. So in the face of uncertainty, I got defensive,
(05:29):
and I got defensive because I got exposed for not
having all the answers and not having all the solutions.
And perhaps that guy presented to me in a moment
that I wasn't ready to face at the time. So
what I do Boom, My immediately fire back. What I've
changed in my approach from then to now is I
stopped trying to be right and I started getting more curious.
(05:53):
Care what does that even look like?
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Bro?
Speaker 1 (05:54):
What are you talking about? I got you. Here's what
curiosity would have sounded like when she approached me with
that part. If she would have said, care, you're hard
to talk to about money, Curiosity would say, huh, well,
when do you notice I'm the hardest to talk to
about money? Is it when we're talking about budget or
when we're talking about overspending? What's the biggest pain point?
Is it when I disagree with you? Or when I'm
(06:17):
holding tight and I'm inflexible on my perspective? What do
I How do I come across when I'm hard to
talk to? Do I feel angry? Do I feel upset?
Do I feel tired? Do I feel frustrated? What vibe
am I giving off? These are questions that lead me
the clues that are going to help me fix and
remedy the problem. It's not gonna make it worse. I'm
(06:38):
not really trying to go back and forth. I'm trying
to solve an equation. And right now, when I'm defensive,
I don't know the numbers to the equation. I don't
know if we add it. I don't know if we subtracted.
I don't know if we divide it. I just know
I gotta do something. But when I'm curious, I get
to know what's going where, what are we doing with
the number, what our goal is. I get all the
(06:58):
ingredients to make the thing that I need to make.
And in this moment, the thing that I need to
make is a reasonable solution the questions that are framing
curiosity would have given me intel. It allows me to
answer her questions and answer her inquiries in a way
that not only satisfies whatever she's uncertain about, but also
(07:20):
gives me the confidence to know what I'm talking about.
It gives me a moment to be reflective and really think.
I think sometimes when we get defensive, myself included, I mean,
you know what I'm not gonna say. We want to
say me and I'm invite you to tag along if
you feel like it too. But sometimes when I get defensive,
I don't always look at all the possibilities. It's like
(07:41):
a shutdown immediately, and I'm more concerned on protecting what
I think is right. Than really trying to figure out
what everybody thinks, because all relationships are built on mutuality.
Were trying to come to a mutual decision. We're trying
to build something that makes sense for the both of us,
which means it takes both of our opinions. If I'm
closed off, if I'm not asking questions, if I'm not
(08:03):
leaning in the then I'm not really pulling my weight
and doing my part to bring solutions to the table.
I know, what what do you bring to the tables?
Become a nasty thing to ask somebody when the table
is a relationship. Yeah, but when the table is solution finding,
I think that's a reasonable question, especially if you ask
yourself what am I bringing to this table. I'm bringing
(08:24):
the ability to self reflect, the pause, to think for
a moment, to readjust and if necessary, I don't need
to always have an answer in that moment. Hey, let
me think about this for a second, because it's hard
to be curious about what's going on when emotions are high,
when it's tugging a part to your personality that are
a little sensitive or a little tender. It's alrighty, be sensitive.
(08:45):
Ain't nothing wrong with that That don't mean you a sucker,
just means you human. So those are things to think
about when you're walking into that conversation, because remember, you're
not always having a conversation you're having You're having every
conversation you've ever had since the beginning of time that's
around the thing that you may be sensitive about, or
you may be uncertain of, or you may be afraid of.
(09:06):
All those things matter, All those things count that moment.
So question for you, have you ever noticed how fast
your mind jumps to prove that you were right? It's easy,
you go on social media. Everybody will talk about how
other people do that, and I get it, and those
people do it. I feel it most deeply, But it
doesn't mean that we don't just a real, live, legit
(09:28):
self reflective moment. Have you ever noticed how fast you
jump to prove that you were right? Jumping to prove
that you were right. That's not something that's unique to
those people or unique to you. Everybody does it. I
do it too, and I want to break down why
it is that we do that, especially for men, especially
(09:48):
especially for black men. I think that when we talk
about masculinity, just go onto the world and look at
people talking about dating as they see masculinity, one of
the things that comes up most frequent is leader. I
want you to be a leader. I want you to
be authoritative, I want you to be decisive. These very
(10:09):
strong personality types, these characteristics that you're supposed to embody
when you are in a place of speaking your mind
or opinion, or you're trying to give someone direction, and
your masculine constellation, your understanding of how your manhood works
is so firmly built on the fact that you have
(10:30):
to be decisive, and you have to be forward thinking,
and you have to take initiative that somebody telling you
that you're wrong questions and threatens that entire identity. When
they question and threaten your authority, because masculinity is so
heavily tied to authority, it feels like they're questioning you.
(10:51):
It feels like they're questioning how smart you are. They're
questioning how much of a man you are. They're questioning
how much they should trust your decision making, no matter
how how much you've proved, no matter how well you've performed,
no matter how much your track record shows that you're
capable of doing this thing. When people question that it
feels like that thing is under attack. That's why there's
(11:12):
such a swift move to make sure that you're right.
People crave certainty, People crave absolutes, People crave being right.
No matter how smart you are, no matter how forward
thinking you are, you can't outpace your own human instincts,
and at some point they're going to catch up with you.
Just from a human perspective, people crave certainty, They crave absolutes,
(11:35):
They crave the satisfaction of being right. And no matter
how smart you are, no matter how forward thinking you are,
you can't outpace your own humanity. You're still a person,
and these things are want to catch up with you
at some point. So one of the reasons I broke
that down is because I don't want you to continue
to be in a cycle where you're doing these things
(11:55):
and you don't know why. I want you to understand
the way your brain works, what your brain is doing
in that moment, so that you can pause it, be reflective,
and move about it in a different way. One thing
that I want you to pause and think about for
a second is why do you behave the way that
you do when you're wrong? We know what we know
(12:16):
the wrongness exists, we know defensiveness exists. We know that
that's the what, but the larger why why do you
do it? And all my years of practice I found
out or I kind of arrived at this understanding that
people do that for four reasons. Either they're trying to project,
they're trying to protect, they're trying to connect, or they're
(12:40):
trying to correct. Those are the four reasons that people
really jump into the I always got to be right,
I gotta be right. It's for those four reasons. Let's
let's break them down a little bit more. I believe
that some of the most powerful people in the world
are not the ones that stand on whatever they say
and they be come these boulders of unmovability. Man, I'm
(13:03):
ten toes on this joint. I ain't moving. Those aren't
the strongest people in the world to me. Sometimes they're
the most stubborn people. The strongest people in the world
to me are people who can make a public statement
and share their mind with the world, realize that they're wrong,
and make an ideological u turn. You know how much
heart that takes to say, oh, damn, my bad job,
(13:24):
I'm tripping. I was wrong about that and bravely walk
back what you said and move in another direction that
fits where you are in the present moment. That's strength
to me. And when I look at leaders, not just
leaders of countries or something large like that, I mean
even nonprofit organizations like leaders on very small but impactful
(13:46):
large in their own way levels, they're able to do that.
They're able to say, hey, whoa this ain't this ain't
going the way I thought it would. Or you know what,
I got some new information and I think I'm changing
my mind about things. Man, set yourself free, doob. You
are allowed to get new information and completely change your mind.
You are allowed to get curious about what else is
(14:08):
out there? What else is included in the things that
you may think that have never occurred to you before,
And how are you going to go about getting that insight?
You're allowed to do that. Matter of fact, I recommend
you do that as often as possible. That's what makes
you a steadfast leader for show. I believe in my
heart of hearts that being right feels powerful, and power
(14:32):
is important. I'm never going to take anything away from that.
But being curious feels vulnerable. If vulnerability is equally as important.
Power is going to dictate how you move about the
structures of life, how you climb systems and meet people
and gain material success. A vulnerability is going to be
(14:54):
about the closeness of the relationships. It's going to be
your quiet moments, the people that you decide to share
and do life with, how those people look at you,
how they think about you, how they love you. All
of that's going to be tied up in vulnerability. And
there's no way you can hear that and decide that
that's not important too. Something to think about now, Please
(15:18):
allow me to take this moment to dig a little
deeper into why this is especially difficult for black men
to hear something about yourself that's uncomfortable. I get asked
this question all the time. How do I tell my husband,
how do I tell my father? How do I tell
my uncle? How do I tell my friend? How do
I tell my boyfriend something that's uncomfortable? It seems like
(15:39):
he doesn't take it well. Before we go there, let's
talk about the why. Talk about the why that's uncomfortable.
The black male identity is one that catches strays from
every single point of society, and that's not to eliminate
anyone else's experience, because that's not unique to black men.
(16:03):
But the way that black men deal with it, the vitriol,
the violence, that is unique to black men. And I
think when you live in a world where you can
cut on social media and you can scroll, and you
can just hear a myriad of detegrating things about black men,
and you're out in society, and all black men are
(16:25):
measured by the actions, thoughts, and behaviors of the worst
examples of us, they get they get to speak for
all of us. They get to speak for all of us,
whether we know him or not. When you live in
a world where your body and your voice and your
intellectualism is a threat. I said it on threads. I said,
(16:46):
being a confident black man is a full contact sport,
and so many people reposted it because that confidence can
get misinterpreted. But when you're in the world and all
these things are at you at a million miles per hour,
it becomes more difficult to hear another wrong or bad
(17:08):
or unsavory thing about you from the people you love
that come in the spaces that you feel are supposed
to keep you safe, supposed to safeguard you from that
thing in the world, and it sometimes it feels like
they're just adding fuel to the fire. Men, ain't shit
has become a drum beat, and gentlemen, we gotta be
we gotta be honest about it. It's not for no reason.
(17:30):
It is not for no reason at all. But inside
of that, it's also a lack of counterbalance to tell
the human stories of men, where our perspectives in our
lives exist beyond the dating world and what people who
date us think about us. It doesn't tell the story
of the friend or the brother. It doesn't tell the
(17:51):
story of the man that doesn't assume a massive amount
of wealth or success, just the average everyday God just
kind of gets lost. And when you that guy, I
think it's hard to hear another wrong thing about you.
And I hold that and I honor that real talk
because I've been there. But also, you gotta make it
(18:12):
to a point where you can hear things about yourself
that do not jive with your perspective, and you could
take that information and you can feel You can allow
yourself to feel bad. You can allow yourself to feel
sad or hurt or angry or frustrated or confused. You
deserve to be able to feel those things. But also
you have to do something with that information. How can
(18:34):
you improve with that information? How can you shift? How
can you change? What can you better? What can you differ.
I'm not saying that negative things that or criticisms about
you ever going to feel good. If you're waiting for
it to feel good, man, you're finn to be waiting forever. However,
there's something valuable in that feedback. And if you can
(18:55):
get past the discomfort of the negative feelings, which means
you ain't ignoring or you're not ignoring that what you said, Shanty,
you heard my feelings when you said that. You know,
results may vary hot because you know, being a black
man talking about your feelings, I don't know. Wow, there
is a dangerous proposition. But when you're open enough to
admit that your feelings actually exist, then you can start
(19:16):
to move past them. It's the conversation doesn't just stop there.
You move into that and all right, it's that, and
I'm gonna listen to what you're saying because perhaps there
is there's something in there that make me a better human,
not just a better man. Bro elevate past that. There's
something in there and make me a better person. Our
feelings don't disappear when we ignore them. What the quotes say,
(19:40):
unaware doesn't mean unaffected. Just because you don't you choose
not to feel your feelings, or you've been conditioned not
to feel them, doesn't mean that they don't exist. When
you hear these suggest that you interpret his negative feedback continually,
(20:03):
there's a reframe there. There's a resounding voice that plays
over and over, and do you know what that voice says?
I am not enough, which is almost all of our
deepest fear, is that I'm not enough. I see that
sometimes in young boys' relationships with their father. When I
be out in the wild, you see a man with
(20:24):
a young son, and he'll introduce you to his young son,
and he'll just get all of these directors. Hey, hey,
make sure, straighten up your posture, man, lift your chin up,
look him in the eye, shake his hand, firmer, shake
his hand. And it's like the little boy don't even
have a chance to figure it out for himself before
orders of being barked at him, and whatever his mind
tells him to do. Keep in mind, there's value in
(20:46):
that and being around circles of men and knowing how
to operate within the power systems of men. It's important.
It'll get you, it'll take you far. I'm not gonna
hold you. But also it robs you with something because
the thing that you're trying to do it can sometimes
be communicated as not enough. And it's hard to hear
as a kid that there's another thing that you're not
(21:06):
doing well, just like it's hard to hear that as
an adult. Now, how we interpret criticism, it depends on
what the criticism is around. I teach just think called
it Joe Harry window. Can I nerd out on y'all
little bit? It's gonna be quick. So that Joe Hairy
window is comprised of four parts. It's the open self,
which are things you know about yourself and other people
know about you. It's the hidden self, which are things
(21:27):
that you know about yourself but other people don't know
about you. And then there's this third window that's man.
Sometimes it's the trickiest window to work on. It's called
the blind self, and these are things that other people
know about you, but you may not know about yourself.
And when you're getting criticism, either your handshake is not
(21:49):
tight enough, or you're hard to talk to about money,
or you're not looking at someone in the eye. Sometimes
it lives in your blind self. You don't see these
things in yourself like the people see it in you,
and when they present it to you, it kind of
you feel like you just you got hit with a
right hook in the jaw. It blindside you. It comes
(22:11):
from nowhere, and that's what sometimes arouses that defensive mechanism
Wait a minute, hold where you feel like you need
to protect yourself from what's being said because it feels
like an attack. And it feels like an attack because
it's exposing something in your blind self, the things that
other people can see but you cannot. And one important
(22:31):
thing that I tell people all the time is don't
underestimate how many things live in your blind self. It
is a massive part of your identity, and you only
get to know what things live in your blind self
by doing what by taking feedback, accepting criticism, and doing
something useful with it. Takes practice, though I ain't gonna
(22:53):
it ain't something that you're gonna get overnight, So don't
beat yourself up if you're not able to do that
right now, you ain't about to go in the gym
right now and start squatting four hundred and fifty pounds. Bro,
You gotta work yourself from the bar up to four fifty,
all right, So this is working on the bar, being
aware of it. You gotta start light before you start
doing your heavier sets. You know, criticism is dope because
(23:15):
it shines a light on deficits that you have or
areas that you need to improve. And you hear athletes
talk about it a lot. Man, Yeah, I got I
got a coach. In the off season. We were we
were working on my weaknesses. Oh, I'm working on my weaknesses.
I'm trying to get better at that. Athletes are really
good at focusing on the things they're not good at
(23:37):
in order to build their overall game. And I would
love if some of us out in the world adopted
the same mentality because I think it's possible one percent.
Just like we talked about comfort at the top of
the episode, only focusing on changing things that you're comfortable
with changing. Only focusing on the things that you're comfortable
(23:57):
with changing. Man, that's like going to the gym every
day and only doing upper body Monday. You do buys
and tries to day. You do chesting back Wednesday, you
do ads, Thursday, you do shoulders, and then you take
a few days break and then you right back at it.
You're only working a particular muscle system, and then you
(24:20):
look down the road eight months later and you got
twigs for legs because you avoided the uncomfortable part. You
hate doing squats. A lot of us hate doing squats.
You hate doing the lower leg, you hate doing calf raises.
But those muscles will not grow if you don't exercise them.
And just because you're comfortable with the upper body, it
goes back to the improving on things that you're not
(24:42):
good at. You avoid the lower body so much and
you focus on the things that feel good. It gives
you good feedback when you can feel your arms getting bigger,
and you're already pretty good at that, so you just
keep going on on what you get. You get better
at where you're already good at. That's amazing. But when
you do that, when youocus on the things that feel good,
that focus on the things that are comfortable, there's always
(25:04):
something you neglect on the other side. What's being neglected?
What are we not looking at here? What are we
not getting the opportunity to work on the way I
see curiosity is it allows you to train the weaker
spot to your life. It allows you to focus on
that a little bit more. It allows you to since
(25:25):
we talking about working out, it allows you to work
the small muscle groups that contribute to the big movements.
Anybody who's ever bench pressed before, nos, Yeah, your chest,
Your tries are going to move that weight. But if
you don't take care of that rotator cuff, if you
don't strengthen that infra spinatus super spinatas back there. I'm
digging this to my personal trainer bag for real. Now
(25:46):
that was another lifetime ago. But if you don't work
on those smaller muscle groups, you won't be able to
make the big movements in the big push. Breaking out
of a sense of comfort does not feel good in
the short term, but it's a long term investment. It
pays them dividends on the back end. Something crazy. So
I want you to give at some thought because sometimes
(26:08):
the thing that we're avoiding the most is the thing
that we need to crash through in order to get
to where we need to be. All right, I want
to jump to this clip of this guy named Derek
Grant on Instagram and he talks about uncertainty. He has
this quote. He says, the only thing for certain is
the uncertainty of life. The key to growth is to
embrace the uncertainty of life to grow into something new.
(26:32):
Check it out.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
We have to understand how our mind actually works. Your
mind is looking for patterns and your mind is looking
for familiarity. Okay, so this is why most of us
struggle with uncertainty.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
It's not uncertainy because here's the reality of it. Ain't
nothing certain. The only thing that's for certain is uncertainty.
You can't tell me what you're gonna eat here in
three days for dinner.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Do you know? You don't?
Speaker 2 (26:55):
And you're not stressed out about that uncertainty. But you
see what the ego does. The mind puts itself and
attaches it self worth to control into knowing why because
that's familiarity.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
And if that's familiarity, we're still alive.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
It doesn't want the new thing because the new thing
means an old version has to die.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
And the eagle's whole premise is.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Rooted in survival.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
So this is why when you start to embrace uncertainty
and not look at it as a negative. But this
is an opportunity for me to shed an old skin
so I can take in the new skin, so I
can become a new version of me, so I can
grow and evolve. Uncertainty is really a hotbed for growth.
(27:45):
Uncertainty is really a hot bed for growth. That's bars
shut out to this guy. Make sure y'all follow him
on Instagram. His name is DG Mindset.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
And a few things that I take away from that
short clip one And he was talking about safety. When
he talks about familiarity, that's safety. That's safety in the nutshell.
And I know with men, and perhaps we'll get to
this on the episode. The word safety can be triggering
because it assumes that you can't protect or take care
(28:17):
of yourself. But all humans need safety, and emotional safety
is really important in our society. Another thing that he
said that was really important. He reminds me of this
book I read called Unwinding Anxiety by this guy named
doctor Judson Brewer. When the speaker just now was talking
about how your mind tries to predict. That's how the
brain works. The brain is really a prediction machine. And
(28:40):
when the brain can't predict what's about to happen next.
That's a lot of times where anxiety comes from, and
the brain doesn't always have enough evidence to predict what happens.
So uncertainty sometimes when you're trying to figure it out.
The way doctor Brewer explains it, he said, the brain
is like a slot machine. You press the lever, but
it just keeps spinning. And sometimes it will spinning. You
(29:03):
think that you're working towards a solution, and you're not.
You're just spinning. You're wasting brain space and brain power
or something that isn't going to bring you any relief.
And sometimes we think that if we keep thinking or
we keep plotting, that somehow, some way, we'll outpaced uncertainty.
And that's not true. So I think that there is
(29:26):
tremendous power. And embracing uncertain don't mean you gotta like it.
You got a cousin at a cookout, you don't like
that much, but you still hug them, Right, you're still
embrace them. I don't like you as an individual, Come on,
come get a hug. Damn. That's embracing uncertainty. Take it
away from being favorable, from being comfortable any shame or
(29:50):
guilt that you may feel around it. It could be complex,
but uncertainty is the only thing in your life that's
going to be consistent. And if you're going to have
something in your life that that long, that powerful, I
think you got it. You gotta get a little bit
more comfortable with it, you know what. Let's talk about.
Can we talk about safety a little bit more? Because
I feel like I kind of brush past that, But
(30:12):
that's important because there's different types of safety. Now, there
is the emotional safety where you surround yourself with people
who pour into you, who love you, who feed your soul.
And then there's another emotional safety where you don't really
engage with things that threaten your comfort. If it threatens
your comfort, you avoid it at all costs. Surrounding yourself
(30:34):
with people who love you. That's a great kind of
emotional safety. Staying in your comfort zone can potentially be
a dangerous type of emotional safety. And let me tell
you why. My freshman year of college, my first macroeconomics class,
my professor said, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
(30:56):
Nothing is free. And when it comes to emotional safety
and saying safe in a way that could be dangerous.
Nothing that's not free. It's gonna cost you something. And
I want to talk about the emotional costs of doing that.
Making sure you don't impede on anything dangerous, you're gonna
have to run in pocket. Son one thousand percent. Here's
(31:18):
how it looks. By staying in a place where you
don't really challenge yourself, or you don't allow yourself to
be challenged deeply, you stunt your growth. It puts the
lid on the job of how much you can grow,
who you can be, and who you can become. Think
about it. If you only keep the things that you
know and you're familiar with, you don't try anything different.
(31:42):
You don't step out on a limb to do something
that frightens you just a little bit. You don't take
as many chances, and when you don't take the chances,
you don't get the different rewards. It can leave you
in a place of just sticking with the part of
yourself that feels most familiar. Just like the speaker was saying,
you know, you're scared shared old skin because you're terrified
(32:03):
to let go of what is. And that's because you
can't really conceptualize the bigness of what may be on
the other side. That's the dangerous part of it. Man,
staying on a porch like that, the only thing you'll
ever know is the porch. You never know the outside world.
You never know it's another playground right down the street.
But kids you never met before then become your best friends.
(32:27):
That type of emotional safety cost you. Man, You never
stretch with that type of emotional safety. It makes you
fear the possibility of being wrong. I just had my
oldest daughter. We just had a parent teacher conference, and
her teachers are so proud of her because she's doing
better in math, but she's taking risks. She raises her
hand and she gets the answer wrong sometimes, and I'm
(32:50):
so proud of her for raising her hand and getting
an answer wrong. That might sound crazy to some of
y'all out there, but that speaks to the emotional safety part.
Because she was a little baby. She's the person who
rather be quiet than be wrong. She does not want
to get the answer wrong. But when she doesn't get
the answer wrong, she doesn't get her perspective challenge, or
(33:11):
she doesn't get the satisfaction of understanding that the thing
she originally thought was the right answer. You had it
all along, and it affects the confidence when you don't
get to try and fail, Try and fail, try and fail,
try and succeed a little bit. Up, we got some momentum, y'all.
We're working with something. Hold up, try and fail. That's okay.
(33:33):
I succeeded a little bit. I know I could do
it again. Try and succeed, Try and succeed more, Try
and succeed more. That does not come without his regressions.
But I say all that to say, if you never
step your foot off the square that feels so good, right,
warm and cozy, you never jump into a world of
endless possibilities for you. You know how hard the bed
(33:56):
is to leave on my alarm clock goes off at
five point thirty. I be up under the duvet cover.
I don't want to move. I be warm, dreaming, snoring, slobbing,
being good, feeling great. All type of crust trails down
the side of my lips. However, it's stuff in the
world that I need to get to. And if I
(34:18):
don't leave the comfort of my mattress and that warm
duvet that my wife spend God knows how much on,
don't kill me if you hit this, babe. But if
I never step out of that comfort, I never get
to do anything like this. I never get to interact,
I never get to grow, I never get to be
anything to what I've always been. So one type of
(34:40):
emotional safety I would love for you to walk toward,
Walk toward the communities that love you and embrace you.
The other type of emotional safety where you don't really
you know, you're not trying new foods in a metaphorical sense,
want you to challenge that, challenge that man, challenge that
what is something different off the menu? Give it a
chance to surprise you. Gentlemen, let's also talk about the
(35:08):
professional costs. Let's let's talk about what it costs you professionally,
because we talk about men and money and how men
are obsessed with the idea of money, which I don't
necessarily disagree with. I think all Western civilization is obsessed
with money. But with men, the value of who you
are and your identity is closely tied to your access
(35:31):
to money, and staying safe calls you professionally. Man. Let
me let me go back to my corporate America days.
I can remember it like it's yesterday. Stupid questions about weather.
See the weather another day, people talking about their kids.
You don't care. It's not because you're a bad person.
You just you genuinely have other things to think about.
(35:54):
But it cost you professionally. What about when you are
in an end of the year review. You think you've
been doing a bang up job, I mean an absolute
bang up job. You think you crushing it, and the
end of the year review your marxis needs improvement, needs
improvement on what? And then you get to talk into
(36:16):
your immediate supervisor about what you need improvement on, and
you're not open to the feedback. Now, granted, sometimes it
could be some bullshit. It could be a tactic where
they're just saying you need improvement so they don't have
to give you a raise. But there are opportunities to
learn when you're sitting down and you're hearing things about
your performance that you may not see remember the blind self,
(36:37):
things that other people may see about you that you
may not be privy to just yet. How you react,
how you respond in those moments are really key to
the trajectory that you have and how you can move
up the ladder in those spaces. I want you to
think about an athlete real quick. Let's take it from
the ballroom back to the field or back to the court.
(36:59):
And an athlete, i mean completely messes up a play
and the coach calls him over, come over his son,
and the coach talks to him. There's different types of athletes,
but there's two that we be seeing on the sideline.
One when a coach is jawing. He's just getting at you,
digging into your skin and telling you very things, son,
you know better than this. Not got the program I
running yet, DA D D D. And the athlete looks
(37:21):
right at him. He just nodded, yes, sir, yes, coach,
do it different next time, all right. He takes that
moment and he becomes a culturable young man. Or he
could take the moment he'd be like, man, you don't
know nothing. He go to position coaches and he in
the face of the position coaches too, and there's just
a lot of testosterone flowing about, and this this close
(37:42):
to fist of cuffs, and he takes his helmet and
he throws it and it looks like he's throwing away
his entire future. Now that's extreme. You're not gonna do
that in the meeting with your boss. I hate the
word boss. You're not gonna do that in the meeting
with your supervisor. But how you respond to someone telling
you that you need improvement may say a lot about
how they look at you for a leadership role. If
(38:04):
you look at it as some type of admonishment of
your character, if you look at it as them trying
to degrade you or just beat you up unnecessarily. Sometimes
that is the case, but an instance is where it's not.
If you look at it that way and you respond
that way, I want you to think about what signals
it sends to the person who's giving you that information,
(38:24):
who's telling you where you could be better, as opposed
to you being curious about what they say, Oh the
midiear review, Oh yeah, let's look at that together. If
you even become proactive, where do you think I can
improve because I'm really trying to be the best that
I can be in this position. When now you're coachable,
now you're an athlete that's not and understanding what the
(38:45):
cult is saying. Who's taking that information? That does not
feel good. It is not comfortable to hear you're taking
that information, you're processing it and you're going to apply
it to your practice so that you can apply it
to your gain, so that you can do something meaningful
with it. Doesn't have to feel good, just has to
(39:05):
be useful. Again, not telling you they know your feelings, dog,
That's not what I'm saying here. Not saying ignore them.
I'm saying that, acknowledge them, but also recognize what else
is there. Get your hands dirty and utilize. There's nothing
wrong with that because if you can't become a good
leader at work, you know what that's going to affect
(39:27):
your money, y'all. You're checking your pockets and I don't
know how any of y'all lie. I'm very open on
this podcast. Man, I got scarce to be Trump. I
grew up poor. That's why I got forty five thousand
pairs of Jordan's. I'm over compensating, absolutely, and I love
every minute of it. I apologize for none of it.
But there is a direct correlation to the way that
(39:50):
you feel about yourself and the amount of money in
your bank account. And it's okay if economically you're just
not where you want to be because the situation is
just not the best for you. Man. Been there, been there,
hopefully won't be there again, but been there. But if
your economic situation is jacked up because you are not
(40:10):
seeing your area for improvement and doing something about it,
I think that's a deeper, worse feeling because then it
becomes a cycle that you might not necessarily be able
to get out of. You feel me without stepping back
and looking at this thing with a thousand yard view.
So that emotional safety, that discomfort, that pushing through the discomfort,
(40:31):
that curiosity is not just about your relationships out in
the world with people who you dig. It's about people
who you may need in order to secure some economic
self sustainability. My boy, very important, and even in my
own life, the cost on your innerpersonal relationships, the people
(40:51):
who you love, the people who you romantically involved with.
If I stayed in a place where I was reluctant
to hear criticism about myself, if I stayed in the
safety of I know what I'm talking about with money,
you tripping. This is a youth thing, not a me thing.
If I stayed in that place, I wouldn't have the
marriage I have. Now. Let me tell y'all something. Work
(41:14):
is crazy. My kids are crazy. I'm almost forty when
you get there. Your health, the things you got to
eat to stay healthy is crazy. The amount of doctors
you see is crazy. My life is crazy. You want
to know the most stable thing in my world, it's
(41:35):
my marriage. Why Because I can take the information that
she gives me and I can think about it, not
just attach it to my body as bulletshot wounds, gunshot wounds,
but actually hear it as a perspective that lives somewhere
in my blind self. I don't know if you can
enjoy your healthy relationship if you are enjoying the sweet, sweet,
(41:58):
beautiful warmth of emotional safety. And I think it's important
to say that I can't emphasize this enough. Not the
type of emotional safety where you're with someone who is
not good to or for you. That's not what I
mean here, talking about the emotional safety that stops you
from stepping forward, that stops you from hearing things about
(42:19):
yourself that you don't like. My ability to hear something
that I'm not fond of and think about it with
a big picture, big brain perspective is one of the
reasons that we have the type of trust we do.
We have the connection and the chemistry that we do.
And when you do that in your relationship, when you're
able to hear those things, guess what it emboldens the
(42:41):
other person to do the same thing. So, now you
have a partner that's matching your energy, and when they
do that to you, guess what it emboldens you to
keep doing it more. And y'all just keep taking chances
to be more vulnerable with each other. And what it
does is it brings you closer together. You don't go
outside there relationship to find safety, solace or warmth for softness.
(43:02):
It's there already. It doesn't just happen, man, These are
things that you got to work towards. And this is
the way that you work towards by recognizing this and
actually doing it, practicing it, get not being scared to
get it wrong, Practicing practice, and practicing after a while
just becomes a part of the way y'all approach each other.
Don't need to pay the cost, man, You pay enough taxes.
(43:24):
Don't pay the emotional, the relational, or the economic costs
of not being able to do something with the feedback
that you get that doesn't feel great to hear.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
Man.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
I don't care what y'all say, Curiosity is strength. Curiosity
is strength. I'm actually, oh, I'm reading this book called
Along Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandella. I don't know
if you ever read it. Incredible book, just the first
three chapters. It's a banger already. But I got this
quote for y'all, and it was about curiosity. All right.
(44:03):
So early in the book, he's talking about his childhood
and I kind of paraphrased it, but he said this,
you know, know some Mandela South Africa. He says, like
most children from my tribe, I acquire knowledge through observation.
He said that he believed that we are meant to
learn through emulation and imitation, not through questions. When he
visited the houses of white people, he was often dumbfounded
(44:26):
by the number of questions that children asked their parents,
and he was dumbfounded by their parents' unfailing willingness to
answer those questions. He said that in his household, questions
were considered a nuisance. Adults and parted information as they
considered necessary. His life, like most people at the time,
were shaped by customs, rituals, and taboo. That's nosing mandellas
(44:52):
LM one of the most powerful leaders of our time
talking about how curiosity affected his life and how he
saw curiosity different in more Western style cultures than in
his home. And I'm half Nigerian, and anybody who's West
African can tell you. Man, you know, sometimes you ask questions,
(45:15):
there's no need to ask questions. Even my family from
South Carolina, a Black American family, African American family stay
in a child's place, the kid ain't supposed to ask
her to ask them questions. My mom used to always
say they told her kids to be seen and not heard.
And I know that we have a different philosophy now
in this year in time, but we weren't born this
(45:37):
year in time. We were born when those sayings were
still very prominent. So I don't care what nobody said.
Curiosity is a superpower because when you live under that
adult understanding, it stops you from being curious. You stop
asking questions because you feel like you are annoying the
people around you, or you feel like it's not your
place to ask questions, so you might just take whatever
(45:59):
comes your way, or you don't question it or investigate things.
And it starts by you not questioning and investigating your surroundings,
and it moves to you, not questioning and investigating your
own thoughts and beliefs. Curiosity is not some feeble surrender.
It's to me, curiosity is regaining control of your life.
(46:22):
To me, curiosity is trying to understand the grand narrative
that's playing out in front of you constantly. Curiosity is
an unquenchable thirst for understanding, for knowledge. If the smartest
people I know are forever students, and a forever student
is a person who has a mind that's infinitely curious.
(46:44):
So if you think that curiosity is weakness, I disagree,
and I'll debate you anytime, any day, anywhere. I completely disagree.
And I had to disrob myself of that thinking that
understanding man, and long ago, y'all, I'd say, maybe, like
in the last decade or so, I became more comfortable
(47:06):
with it. So you know, if it's not a part
of your upbringing, it might not be something you can
immediately employ. But you don't just jump into a hot
bath all that once. You don't cannonball into that joint.
You dip your toe end and you know, you get
up the mid foot, then you get up the ankle,
then you get up the shin, and you get up
the neat next thing. You know, you sliding your whole
body into it, one piece at a time. So, with
(47:29):
all of this being said, with all the stuff that
we talked about, this is the shift that I want
you to make right here. I want you to make
a shift from let me prove my point to help
me understand Those are two different responses I want you
to go from hold on, I got to prove my point,
Let me prove my point real quick, to hold on,
(47:52):
help me understand this even in the posture of it.
Those are two completely different ways of going about it.
I want you to start practicing making that shift even
in your everyday interactions and conversations, just little opportunities that
you get to put that to use. I want you
to try. Here's some other things that you can try
to I call these micro practices. When you're triggered by something,
(48:14):
or when something brings up a memory or a thought
or a response for you, I want you to ask
yourself what am I protecting right now? What is the
thing that I'm protecting in this moment? And I want
you to really think hard about it, give yourself a
couple of seconds. What am I protecting you? Can also
try to replace one defensive response every week with a question.
(48:38):
So instead of shooting back at the person in defensiveness,
just replace it with a clarifying question, not a nasty one,
you know, not a not a subtle jab, but one
that is rooted in sheer curiosity and genuine curiosity. Also,
when you're in disagreements with people, when you don't see
eye to eye, I want you to kick back to
(48:59):
them your solf of what they said, what your understanding is.
So to start like, hold on, let me make sure
I got this right. You're singing that, and to summarize
what they said. That's useful. It can get you some
incredible feedback and make sure that you heard it right,
and also gives the person a chance to think about
the thing that they said. They may actually change it
(49:21):
once they hear it come out of your mouth and
they brain can process in a different way. Now, if
you're feeling really brave, if you want to make a
bigger commitment to this change, let's do a seven day challenge,
a seven day challenge around curiosity. Hit me out for
seven days. I want you to get curious. I want
(49:42):
you to ask more questions than you make statements for
seven days. I want you to delay your rebuttal, delay
your response for sixty seconds. We're gonna have to be
okay with silence for sixty seconds. I want you to
pause before you respond. I want you to resist the
(50:03):
urge to disagree right away. I want you to consider
what's being said just a little bit longer than you
normally would, just a little bit. Here's how it's going
to go. I want you to choose a space. It
could be your house, it could be your office, it
could be the gym, it could be the court, it
could be any space that you frequent and for seven days,
I want you to just get curious. I'm saying the
(50:24):
word curious a lot so you can get used to it,
because that's not a word that's accepted in groups of men. Nah.
I want you to do that. Lean into it, bro.
If you want to change, this is how change happens.
We just spent the whole episode talking about moving through
what's uncomfortable. This is how we do it. This is
how the sausage is made. Because anybody can be right.
(50:44):
Being right just wins you the moment, but being curious
can change the landscape of your entire life. Don't just
keep all this good stuff to yourself. I want to
hear it. I want to hear about this challenge. I
want to hear about the wins. I want to hear
about what you stumbled upon, what worked for you, what didn't,
(51:07):
what surprised you, what stayed the same like you knew
it would. Share. Man, this is a community, and the
only way we get better is if everybody starts. It
can't be gatekeeping the secrets, bro, Everybody starts sharing out
what it is that's working for So hit me up.
The number is two four oh two seven three four
six two eight. Call or text me. Let me know
(51:28):
how the seven day challenge went for you. Two four
oh two seven three four six two eight. I got
faith in you, dog. I feel like you're going to
complete the seven day challenge no problem. But if something
hung you up and you couldn't finish, tell me about it.
It's not just about the wins, It's about the journey.
That's how we learn things. I appreciate y'all for rocking
(51:49):
with me. This was a dope episode and we got
plenty more in the future, and then the episodes ahead
we're going to really be unpacking what real strength looks like.
Because the goal here isn't for you to just be
performing masculinity, for you to be performing manhood. It's for
you to actually become the man that you want to be.
So until next time, take care of yourself, take care
(52:11):
of the spaces around you, take care of your loved ones.
Make sure you see love, make sure you be loved,
make sure you be loved. Job or done. See y'all
next time.
Welcome to Learn the hard Way. My name is Kire Games.
We talk about purpose, we talk about pressure, we talk
about what it actually tastes. Become a full comprehensive man.
Welcome back to another episode of Learning the hard Way.
I am care Games hosts. I am a licensed therapist.
I am a husband, I'm a father, I'm a community leader.
(00:26):
I'm a lot of things, including a man that had
to learn way too many things the hard way. Just
like a lot of y'all, I know you feel me
on that. So on today's episode, we're going to talk
about growth because from all those lessons learned, man, there's
a lot of growth that happened. And when we talk
about growth, we tend to look at it through this
(00:46):
particular lens that I'm not always so sure it should
be seen through. And that reminds me of this quote.
The quote says certainty is comfortable, but growth is not.
How many times have you heard people say, man, bro,
you just got it. You gotta get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
What does that mean? Bro? What does that mean? If
(01:08):
I'm at the bus stop and I'm cold and I'm shivering, man, a,
you just got to be cold while being cold. Yeah,
I know, Nah, that don't work. Hold on, if I'm
at the bus stop and I'm shivering, man, you just
gotta think warm while being cold. In theory, it makes sense,
but doesn't make sense and practice for you, because even
if it doesn't, it's still necessary. So today we're going
(01:31):
to talk about how to deal with that discomfort and
what to do with it, and how to navigate it
and all of the things. Now, all growth ain't the
same kind of growth. When we think about growth, we
typically think about it in a positive direction, but you
can also grow to a negative direction. You can grow
into the person that you never ever imagine that you become.
(01:55):
But you can also grow into the type of person
that you simply do not care for. And growth isn't
this rise and tide that lifts all ships. You can
grow very heavily in one direction of your life and
not so much in the other. You can grow in
a direction where you're very very good at making it
earning money, but you cannot grow in the area of
(02:17):
keeping and saving money. You can grow in your confidence
to go to the bar or be out and talk
to that person that you find attractive, but not really
growing the area of communication and mutuality that keeps a
relationship going. You understand what I'm saying, Growth ain't growth.
It goes in all different types of directions, and I
think we got to think about that when we think
(02:38):
about ourselves and how it applies to us. Now I'm
not exempt. I had to learn how to get comfortable
with being uncomfortable in my own growth journey. Let me
tell you a story about me and my wife. So
I set up used to be when she worked full
time corporate. My wife's a lawyer, and I work full
time corporate and education. We pretty much split our bis
(03:00):
don't tell the internet fifty to fifty. We both took
a percentage of our paycheck put it to the bills.
Everything was cool, But things changed when I started doing
this full time. She left her job to work for
our company, and she also wanted to spend more time
with the kids. So she's at home. She does the
logistics of the house and the family and all of
the stuff. She's amazing at it. She's a wizard with it.
(03:22):
Were early on in this journey, it wasn't but a
smooth When I started becoming the breadwinner for the family,
the money conversation's changed because money doesn't look the same
to both of us anymore. And I remember one time
she told me, she said, kid, you're hard to talk
to about money. That pissed me off. I ain't even
(03:42):
gonna hold you. It made me so angry so fast,
and my response it reflects that, what do you mean
I'm hard to talk to about money? I ain't hard
to talk to about money. I don't question you on spending.
I don't question you on where you go. I don't
track this Amazon package, the show up at the door.
I don't say anything. How am I talking? I had
to talk to about money? I jumped into an immediate
(04:03):
defensive mode for a number of reasons. One because I think,
deeply I knew that she was right, and I know
that I come from financial scarcity, and financial scarcity, or
when you don't have enough creates hyper vigilance, or when
you are seeing everything to the point where it's affecting
you deeply. You even seeing ghosts, You're seeing things that
aren't there. You're worried about money problems that you don't
(04:26):
even have yet, because you're so afraid to be poor
like you were back then, to struggle like you did
back then. Your brain doesn't always realize that you're in
a different spot. Bruh. This ain't that, even though it
feels similar. So we're in this argument, this conversation. She's
saying that I'm hard to talk to about money, and
in the moment, I approached it with a defensiveness that
(04:48):
was the opposite of the curiosity that I should have
approached it with. And this is what I've learned over time. Curiosity.
Curiosity is so important for growth. Curiosit is the thing
that allows us to wonder and to discover and the
change perspectives and the shift trajectories. It makes us limber
(05:09):
and flexible and fluid so that we can adapt to
so many different situations by understanding what's going on in
the world, what's going on with us, and how those
two things meet. Curiosity. Here's where I didn't make the
best decision. So in the face of uncertainty, I got defensive,
(05:29):
and I got defensive because I got exposed for not
having all the answers and not having all the solutions.
And perhaps that guy presented to me in a moment
that I wasn't ready to face at the time. So
what I do Boom, My immediately fire back. What I've
changed in my approach from then to now is I
stopped trying to be right and I started getting more curious.
(05:53):
Care what does that even look like?
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Bro?
Speaker 1 (05:54):
What are you talking about? I got you. Here's what
curiosity would have sounded like when she approached me with
that part. If she would have said, care, you're hard
to talk to about money, Curiosity would say, huh, well,
when do you notice I'm the hardest to talk to
about money? Is it when we're talking about budget or
when we're talking about overspending? What's the biggest pain point?
Is it when I disagree with you? Or when I'm
(06:17):
holding tight and I'm inflexible on my perspective? What do
I How do I come across when I'm hard to
talk to? Do I feel angry? Do I feel upset?
Do I feel tired? Do I feel frustrated? What vibe
am I giving off? These are questions that lead me
the clues that are going to help me fix and
remedy the problem. It's not gonna make it worse. I'm
(06:38):
not really trying to go back and forth. I'm trying
to solve an equation. And right now, when I'm defensive,
I don't know the numbers to the equation. I don't
know if we add it. I don't know if we subtracted.
I don't know if we divide it. I just know
I gotta do something. But when I'm curious, I get
to know what's going where, what are we doing with
the number, what our goal is. I get all the
(06:58):
ingredients to make the thing that I need to make.
And in this moment, the thing that I need to
make is a reasonable solution the questions that are framing
curiosity would have given me intel. It allows me to
answer her questions and answer her inquiries in a way
that not only satisfies whatever she's uncertain about, but also
(07:20):
gives me the confidence to know what I'm talking about.
It gives me a moment to be reflective and really think.
I think sometimes when we get defensive, myself included, I mean,
you know what I'm not gonna say. We want to
say me and I'm invite you to tag along if
you feel like it too. But sometimes when I get defensive,
I don't always look at all the possibilities. It's like
(07:41):
a shutdown immediately, and I'm more concerned on protecting what
I think is right. Than really trying to figure out
what everybody thinks, because all relationships are built on mutuality.
Were trying to come to a mutual decision. We're trying
to build something that makes sense for the both of us,
which means it takes both of our opinions. If I'm
closed off, if I'm not asking questions, if I'm not
(08:03):
leaning in the then I'm not really pulling my weight
and doing my part to bring solutions to the table.
I know, what what do you bring to the tables?
Become a nasty thing to ask somebody when the table
is a relationship. Yeah, but when the table is solution finding,
I think that's a reasonable question, especially if you ask
yourself what am I bringing to this table. I'm bringing
(08:24):
the ability to self reflect, the pause, to think for
a moment, to readjust and if necessary, I don't need
to always have an answer in that moment. Hey, let
me think about this for a second, because it's hard
to be curious about what's going on when emotions are high,
when it's tugging a part to your personality that are
a little sensitive or a little tender. It's alrighty, be sensitive.
(08:45):
Ain't nothing wrong with that That don't mean you a sucker,
just means you human. So those are things to think
about when you're walking into that conversation, because remember, you're
not always having a conversation you're having You're having every
conversation you've ever had since the beginning of time that's
around the thing that you may be sensitive about, or
you may be uncertain of, or you may be afraid of.
(09:06):
All those things matter, All those things count that moment.
So question for you, have you ever noticed how fast
your mind jumps to prove that you were right? It's easy,
you go on social media. Everybody will talk about how
other people do that, and I get it, and those
people do it. I feel it most deeply, But it
doesn't mean that we don't just a real, live, legit
(09:28):
self reflective moment. Have you ever noticed how fast you
jump to prove that you were right? Jumping to prove
that you were right. That's not something that's unique to
those people or unique to you. Everybody does it. I
do it too, and I want to break down why
it is that we do that, especially for men, especially
(09:48):
especially for black men. I think that when we talk
about masculinity, just go onto the world and look at
people talking about dating as they see masculinity, one of
the things that comes up most frequent is leader. I
want you to be a leader. I want you to
be authoritative, I want you to be decisive. These very
(10:09):
strong personality types, these characteristics that you're supposed to embody
when you are in a place of speaking your mind
or opinion, or you're trying to give someone direction, and
your masculine constellation, your understanding of how your manhood works
is so firmly built on the fact that you have
(10:30):
to be decisive, and you have to be forward thinking,
and you have to take initiative that somebody telling you
that you're wrong questions and threatens that entire identity. When
they question and threaten your authority, because masculinity is so
heavily tied to authority, it feels like they're questioning you.
(10:51):
It feels like they're questioning how smart you are. They're
questioning how much of a man you are. They're questioning
how much they should trust your decision making, no matter
how how much you've proved, no matter how well you've performed,
no matter how much your track record shows that you're
capable of doing this thing. When people question that it
feels like that thing is under attack. That's why there's
(11:12):
such a swift move to make sure that you're right.
People crave certainty, People crave absolutes, People crave being right.
No matter how smart you are, no matter how forward
thinking you are, you can't outpace your own human instincts,
and at some point they're going to catch up with you.
Just from a human perspective, people crave certainty, They crave absolutes,
(11:35):
They crave the satisfaction of being right. And no matter
how smart you are, no matter how forward thinking you are,
you can't outpace your own humanity. You're still a person,
and these things are want to catch up with you
at some point. So one of the reasons I broke
that down is because I don't want you to continue
to be in a cycle where you're doing these things
(11:55):
and you don't know why. I want you to understand
the way your brain works, what your brain is doing
in that moment, so that you can pause it, be reflective,
and move about it in a different way. One thing
that I want you to pause and think about for
a second is why do you behave the way that
you do when you're wrong? We know what we know
(12:16):
the wrongness exists, we know defensiveness exists. We know that
that's the what, but the larger why why do you
do it? And all my years of practice I found
out or I kind of arrived at this understanding that
people do that for four reasons. Either they're trying to project,
they're trying to protect, they're trying to connect, or they're
(12:40):
trying to correct. Those are the four reasons that people
really jump into the I always got to be right,
I gotta be right. It's for those four reasons. Let's
let's break them down a little bit more. I believe
that some of the most powerful people in the world
are not the ones that stand on whatever they say
and they be come these boulders of unmovability. Man, I'm
(13:03):
ten toes on this joint. I ain't moving. Those aren't
the strongest people in the world to me. Sometimes they're
the most stubborn people. The strongest people in the world
to me are people who can make a public statement
and share their mind with the world, realize that they're wrong,
and make an ideological u turn. You know how much
heart that takes to say, oh, damn, my bad job,
(13:24):
I'm tripping. I was wrong about that and bravely walk
back what you said and move in another direction that
fits where you are in the present moment. That's strength
to me. And when I look at leaders, not just
leaders of countries or something large like that, I mean
even nonprofit organizations like leaders on very small but impactful
(13:46):
large in their own way levels, they're able to do that.
They're able to say, hey, whoa this ain't this ain't
going the way I thought it would. Or you know what,
I got some new information and I think I'm changing
my mind about things. Man, set yourself free, doob. You
are allowed to get new information and completely change your mind.
You are allowed to get curious about what else is
(14:08):
out there? What else is included in the things that
you may think that have never occurred to you before,
And how are you going to go about getting that insight?
You're allowed to do that. Matter of fact, I recommend
you do that as often as possible. That's what makes
you a steadfast leader for show. I believe in my
heart of hearts that being right feels powerful, and power
(14:32):
is important. I'm never going to take anything away from that.
But being curious feels vulnerable. If vulnerability is equally as important.
Power is going to dictate how you move about the
structures of life, how you climb systems and meet people
and gain material success. A vulnerability is going to be
(14:54):
about the closeness of the relationships. It's going to be
your quiet moments, the people that you decide to share
and do life with, how those people look at you,
how they think about you, how they love you. All
of that's going to be tied up in vulnerability. And
there's no way you can hear that and decide that
that's not important too. Something to think about now, Please
(15:18):
allow me to take this moment to dig a little
deeper into why this is especially difficult for black men
to hear something about yourself that's uncomfortable. I get asked
this question all the time. How do I tell my husband,
how do I tell my father? How do I tell
my uncle? How do I tell my friend? How do
I tell my boyfriend something that's uncomfortable? It seems like
(15:39):
he doesn't take it well. Before we go there, let's
talk about the why. Talk about the why that's uncomfortable.
The black male identity is one that catches strays from
every single point of society, and that's not to eliminate
anyone else's experience, because that's not unique to black men.
(16:03):
But the way that black men deal with it, the vitriol,
the violence, that is unique to black men. And I
think when you live in a world where you can
cut on social media and you can scroll, and you
can just hear a myriad of detegrating things about black men,
and you're out in society, and all black men are
(16:25):
measured by the actions, thoughts, and behaviors of the worst
examples of us, they get they get to speak for
all of us. They get to speak for all of us,
whether we know him or not. When you live in
a world where your body and your voice and your
intellectualism is a threat. I said it on threads. I said,
(16:46):
being a confident black man is a full contact sport,
and so many people reposted it because that confidence can
get misinterpreted. But when you're in the world and all
these things are at you at a million miles per hour,
it becomes more difficult to hear another wrong or bad
(17:08):
or unsavory thing about you from the people you love
that come in the spaces that you feel are supposed
to keep you safe, supposed to safeguard you from that
thing in the world, and it sometimes it feels like
they're just adding fuel to the fire. Men, ain't shit
has become a drum beat, and gentlemen, we gotta be
we gotta be honest about it. It's not for no reason.
(17:30):
It is not for no reason at all. But inside
of that, it's also a lack of counterbalance to tell
the human stories of men, where our perspectives in our
lives exist beyond the dating world and what people who
date us think about us. It doesn't tell the story
of the friend or the brother. It doesn't tell the
(17:51):
story of the man that doesn't assume a massive amount
of wealth or success, just the average everyday God just
kind of gets lost. And when you that guy, I
think it's hard to hear another wrong thing about you.
And I hold that and I honor that real talk
because I've been there. But also, you gotta make it
(18:12):
to a point where you can hear things about yourself
that do not jive with your perspective, and you could
take that information and you can feel You can allow
yourself to feel bad. You can allow yourself to feel
sad or hurt or angry or frustrated or confused. You
deserve to be able to feel those things. But also
you have to do something with that information. How can
(18:34):
you improve with that information? How can you shift? How
can you change? What can you better? What can you differ.
I'm not saying that negative things that or criticisms about
you ever going to feel good. If you're waiting for
it to feel good, man, you're finn to be waiting forever. However,
there's something valuable in that feedback. And if you can
(18:55):
get past the discomfort of the negative feelings, which means
you ain't ignoring or you're not ignoring that what you said, Shanty,
you heard my feelings when you said that. You know,
results may vary hot because you know, being a black
man talking about your feelings, I don't know. Wow, there
is a dangerous proposition. But when you're open enough to
admit that your feelings actually exist, then you can start
(19:16):
to move past them. It's the conversation doesn't just stop there.
You move into that and all right, it's that, and
I'm gonna listen to what you're saying because perhaps there
is there's something in there that make me a better human,
not just a better man. Bro elevate past that. There's
something in there and make me a better person. Our
feelings don't disappear when we ignore them. What the quotes say,
(19:40):
unaware doesn't mean unaffected. Just because you don't you choose
not to feel your feelings, or you've been conditioned not
to feel them, doesn't mean that they don't exist. When
you hear these suggest that you interpret his negative feedback continually,
(20:03):
there's a reframe there. There's a resounding voice that plays
over and over, and do you know what that voice says?
I am not enough, which is almost all of our
deepest fear, is that I'm not enough. I see that
sometimes in young boys' relationships with their father. When I
be out in the wild, you see a man with
(20:24):
a young son, and he'll introduce you to his young son,
and he'll just get all of these directors. Hey, hey,
make sure, straighten up your posture, man, lift your chin up,
look him in the eye, shake his hand, firmer, shake
his hand. And it's like the little boy don't even
have a chance to figure it out for himself before
orders of being barked at him, and whatever his mind
tells him to do. Keep in mind, there's value in
(20:46):
that and being around circles of men and knowing how
to operate within the power systems of men. It's important.
It'll get you, it'll take you far. I'm not gonna
hold you. But also it robs you with something because
the thing that you're trying to do it can sometimes
be communicated as not enough. And it's hard to hear
as a kid that there's another thing that you're not
(21:06):
doing well, just like it's hard to hear that as
an adult. Now, how we interpret criticism, it depends on
what the criticism is around. I teach just think called
it Joe Harry window. Can I nerd out on y'all
little bit? It's gonna be quick. So that Joe Hairy
window is comprised of four parts. It's the open self,
which are things you know about yourself and other people
know about you. It's the hidden self, which are things
(21:27):
that you know about yourself but other people don't know
about you. And then there's this third window that's man.
Sometimes it's the trickiest window to work on. It's called
the blind self, and these are things that other people
know about you, but you may not know about yourself.
And when you're getting criticism, either your handshake is not
(21:49):
tight enough, or you're hard to talk to about money,
or you're not looking at someone in the eye. Sometimes
it lives in your blind self. You don't see these
things in yourself like the people see it in you,
and when they present it to you, it kind of
you feel like you just you got hit with a
right hook in the jaw. It blindside you. It comes
(22:11):
from nowhere, and that's what sometimes arouses that defensive mechanism
Wait a minute, hold where you feel like you need
to protect yourself from what's being said because it feels
like an attack. And it feels like an attack because
it's exposing something in your blind self, the things that
other people can see but you cannot. And one important
(22:31):
thing that I tell people all the time is don't
underestimate how many things live in your blind self. It
is a massive part of your identity, and you only
get to know what things live in your blind self
by doing what by taking feedback, accepting criticism, and doing
something useful with it. Takes practice, though I ain't gonna
(22:53):
it ain't something that you're gonna get overnight, So don't
beat yourself up if you're not able to do that
right now, you ain't about to go in the gym
right now and start squatting four hundred and fifty pounds. Bro,
You gotta work yourself from the bar up to four fifty,
all right, So this is working on the bar, being
aware of it. You gotta start light before you start
doing your heavier sets. You know, criticism is dope because
(23:15):
it shines a light on deficits that you have or
areas that you need to improve. And you hear athletes
talk about it a lot. Man, Yeah, I got I
got a coach. In the off season. We were we
were working on my weaknesses. Oh, I'm working on my weaknesses.
I'm trying to get better at that. Athletes are really
good at focusing on the things they're not good at
(23:37):
in order to build their overall game. And I would
love if some of us out in the world adopted
the same mentality because I think it's possible one percent.
Just like we talked about comfort at the top of
the episode, only focusing on changing things that you're comfortable
with changing. Only focusing on the things that you're comfortable
(23:57):
with changing. Man, that's like going to the gym every
day and only doing upper body Monday. You do buys
and tries to day. You do chesting back Wednesday, you
do ads, Thursday, you do shoulders, and then you take
a few days break and then you right back at it.
You're only working a particular muscle system, and then you
(24:20):
look down the road eight months later and you got
twigs for legs because you avoided the uncomfortable part. You
hate doing squats. A lot of us hate doing squats.
You hate doing the lower leg, you hate doing calf raises.
But those muscles will not grow if you don't exercise them.
And just because you're comfortable with the upper body, it
goes back to the improving on things that you're not
(24:42):
good at. You avoid the lower body so much and
you focus on the things that feel good. It gives
you good feedback when you can feel your arms getting bigger,
and you're already pretty good at that, so you just
keep going on on what you get. You get better
at where you're already good at. That's amazing. But when
you do that, when youocus on the things that feel good,
that focus on the things that are comfortable, there's always
(25:04):
something you neglect on the other side. What's being neglected?
What are we not looking at here? What are we
not getting the opportunity to work on the way I
see curiosity is it allows you to train the weaker
spot to your life. It allows you to focus on
that a little bit more. It allows you to since
(25:25):
we talking about working out, it allows you to work
the small muscle groups that contribute to the big movements.
Anybody who's ever bench pressed before, nos, Yeah, your chest,
Your tries are going to move that weight. But if
you don't take care of that rotator cuff, if you
don't strengthen that infra spinatus super spinatas back there. I'm
digging this to my personal trainer bag for real. Now
(25:46):
that was another lifetime ago. But if you don't work
on those smaller muscle groups, you won't be able to
make the big movements in the big push. Breaking out
of a sense of comfort does not feel good in
the short term, but it's a long term investment. It
pays them dividends on the back end. Something crazy. So
I want you to give at some thought because sometimes
(26:08):
the thing that we're avoiding the most is the thing
that we need to crash through in order to get
to where we need to be. All right, I want
to jump to this clip of this guy named Derek
Grant on Instagram and he talks about uncertainty. He has
this quote. He says, the only thing for certain is
the uncertainty of life. The key to growth is to
embrace the uncertainty of life to grow into something new.
(26:32):
Check it out.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
We have to understand how our mind actually works. Your
mind is looking for patterns and your mind is looking
for familiarity. Okay, so this is why most of us
struggle with uncertainty.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
It's not uncertainy because here's the reality of it. Ain't
nothing certain. The only thing that's for certain is uncertainty.
You can't tell me what you're gonna eat here in
three days for dinner.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Do you know? You don't?
Speaker 2 (26:55):
And you're not stressed out about that uncertainty. But you
see what the ego does. The mind puts itself and
attaches it self worth to control into knowing why because
that's familiarity.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
And if that's familiarity, we're still alive.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
It doesn't want the new thing because the new thing
means an old version has to die.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
And the eagle's whole premise is.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Rooted in survival.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
So this is why when you start to embrace uncertainty
and not look at it as a negative. But this
is an opportunity for me to shed an old skin
so I can take in the new skin, so I
can become a new version of me, so I can
grow and evolve. Uncertainty is really a hotbed for growth.
(27:45):
Uncertainty is really a hot bed for growth. That's bars
shut out to this guy. Make sure y'all follow him
on Instagram. His name is DG Mindset.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
And a few things that I take away from that
short clip one And he was talking about safety. When
he talks about familiarity, that's safety. That's safety in the nutshell.
And I know with men, and perhaps we'll get to
this on the episode. The word safety can be triggering
because it assumes that you can't protect or take care
(28:17):
of yourself. But all humans need safety, and emotional safety
is really important in our society. Another thing that he
said that was really important. He reminds me of this
book I read called Unwinding Anxiety by this guy named
doctor Judson Brewer. When the speaker just now was talking
about how your mind tries to predict. That's how the
brain works. The brain is really a prediction machine. And
(28:40):
when the brain can't predict what's about to happen next.
That's a lot of times where anxiety comes from, and
the brain doesn't always have enough evidence to predict what happens.
So uncertainty sometimes when you're trying to figure it out.
The way doctor Brewer explains it, he said, the brain
is like a slot machine. You press the lever, but
it just keeps spinning. And sometimes it will spinning. You
(29:03):
think that you're working towards a solution, and you're not.
You're just spinning. You're wasting brain space and brain power
or something that isn't going to bring you any relief.
And sometimes we think that if we keep thinking or
we keep plotting, that somehow, some way, we'll outpaced uncertainty.
And that's not true. So I think that there is
(29:26):
tremendous power. And embracing uncertain don't mean you gotta like it.
You got a cousin at a cookout, you don't like
that much, but you still hug them, Right, you're still
embrace them. I don't like you as an individual, Come on,
come get a hug. Damn. That's embracing uncertainty. Take it
away from being favorable, from being comfortable any shame or
(29:50):
guilt that you may feel around it. It could be complex,
but uncertainty is the only thing in your life that's
going to be consistent. And if you're going to have
something in your life that that long, that powerful, I
think you got it. You gotta get a little bit
more comfortable with it, you know what. Let's talk about.
Can we talk about safety a little bit more? Because
I feel like I kind of brush past that, But
(30:12):
that's important because there's different types of safety. Now, there
is the emotional safety where you surround yourself with people
who pour into you, who love you, who feed your soul.
And then there's another emotional safety where you don't really
engage with things that threaten your comfort. If it threatens
your comfort, you avoid it at all costs. Surrounding yourself
(30:34):
with people who love you. That's a great kind of
emotional safety. Staying in your comfort zone can potentially be
a dangerous type of emotional safety. And let me tell
you why. My freshman year of college, my first macroeconomics class,
my professor said, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
(30:56):
Nothing is free. And when it comes to emotional safety
and saying safe in a way that could be dangerous.
Nothing that's not free. It's gonna cost you something. And
I want to talk about the emotional costs of doing that.
Making sure you don't impede on anything dangerous, you're gonna
have to run in pocket. Son one thousand percent. Here's
(31:18):
how it looks. By staying in a place where you
don't really challenge yourself, or you don't allow yourself to
be challenged deeply, you stunt your growth. It puts the
lid on the job of how much you can grow,
who you can be, and who you can become. Think
about it. If you only keep the things that you
know and you're familiar with, you don't try anything different.
(31:42):
You don't step out on a limb to do something
that frightens you just a little bit. You don't take
as many chances, and when you don't take the chances,
you don't get the different rewards. It can leave you
in a place of just sticking with the part of
yourself that feels most familiar. Just like the speaker was saying,
you know, you're scared shared old skin because you're terrified
(32:03):
to let go of what is. And that's because you
can't really conceptualize the bigness of what may be on
the other side. That's the dangerous part of it. Man,
staying on a porch like that, the only thing you'll
ever know is the porch. You never know the outside world.
You never know it's another playground right down the street.
But kids you never met before then become your best friends.
(32:27):
That type of emotional safety cost you. Man, You never
stretch with that type of emotional safety. It makes you
fear the possibility of being wrong. I just had my
oldest daughter. We just had a parent teacher conference, and
her teachers are so proud of her because she's doing
better in math, but she's taking risks. She raises her
hand and she gets the answer wrong sometimes, and I'm
(32:50):
so proud of her for raising her hand and getting
an answer wrong. That might sound crazy to some of
y'all out there, but that speaks to the emotional safety part.
Because she was a little baby. She's the person who
rather be quiet than be wrong. She does not want
to get the answer wrong. But when she doesn't get
the answer wrong, she doesn't get her perspective challenge, or
(33:11):
she doesn't get the satisfaction of understanding that the thing
she originally thought was the right answer. You had it
all along, and it affects the confidence when you don't
get to try and fail, Try and fail, try and fail,
try and succeed a little bit. Up, we got some momentum, y'all.
We're working with something. Hold up, try and fail. That's okay.
(33:33):
I succeeded a little bit. I know I could do
it again. Try and succeed, Try and succeed more, Try
and succeed more. That does not come without his regressions.
But I say all that to say, if you never
step your foot off the square that feels so good, right,
warm and cozy, you never jump into a world of
endless possibilities for you. You know how hard the bed
(33:56):
is to leave on my alarm clock goes off at
five point thirty. I be up under the duvet cover.
I don't want to move. I be warm, dreaming, snoring, slobbing,
being good, feeling great. All type of crust trails down
the side of my lips. However, it's stuff in the
world that I need to get to. And if I
(34:18):
don't leave the comfort of my mattress and that warm
duvet that my wife spend God knows how much on,
don't kill me if you hit this, babe. But if
I never step out of that comfort, I never get
to do anything like this. I never get to interact,
I never get to grow, I never get to be
anything to what I've always been. So one type of
(34:40):
emotional safety I would love for you to walk toward,
Walk toward the communities that love you and embrace you.
The other type of emotional safety where you don't really
you know, you're not trying new foods in a metaphorical sense,
want you to challenge that, challenge that man, challenge that
what is something different off the menu? Give it a
chance to surprise you. Gentlemen, let's also talk about the
(35:08):
professional costs. Let's let's talk about what it costs you professionally,
because we talk about men and money and how men
are obsessed with the idea of money, which I don't
necessarily disagree with. I think all Western civilization is obsessed
with money. But with men, the value of who you
are and your identity is closely tied to your access
(35:31):
to money, and staying safe calls you professionally. Man. Let
me let me go back to my corporate America days.
I can remember it like it's yesterday. Stupid questions about weather.
See the weather another day, people talking about their kids.
You don't care. It's not because you're a bad person.
You just you genuinely have other things to think about.
(35:54):
But it cost you professionally. What about when you are
in an end of the year review. You think you've
been doing a bang up job, I mean an absolute
bang up job. You think you crushing it, and the
end of the year review your marxis needs improvement, needs
improvement on what? And then you get to talk into
(36:16):
your immediate supervisor about what you need improvement on, and
you're not open to the feedback. Now, granted, sometimes it
could be some bullshit. It could be a tactic where
they're just saying you need improvement so they don't have
to give you a raise. But there are opportunities to
learn when you're sitting down and you're hearing things about
your performance that you may not see remember the blind self,
(36:37):
things that other people may see about you that you
may not be privy to just yet. How you react,
how you respond in those moments are really key to
the trajectory that you have and how you can move
up the ladder in those spaces. I want you to
think about an athlete real quick. Let's take it from
the ballroom back to the field or back to the court.
(36:59):
And an athlete, i mean completely messes up a play
and the coach calls him over, come over his son,
and the coach talks to him. There's different types of athletes,
but there's two that we be seeing on the sideline.
One when a coach is jawing. He's just getting at you,
digging into your skin and telling you very things, son,
you know better than this. Not got the program I
running yet, DA D D D. And the athlete looks
(37:21):
right at him. He just nodded, yes, sir, yes, coach,
do it different next time, all right. He takes that
moment and he becomes a culturable young man. Or he
could take the moment he'd be like, man, you don't
know nothing. He go to position coaches and he in
the face of the position coaches too, and there's just
a lot of testosterone flowing about, and this this close
(37:42):
to fist of cuffs, and he takes his helmet and
he throws it and it looks like he's throwing away
his entire future. Now that's extreme. You're not gonna do
that in the meeting with your boss. I hate the
word boss. You're not gonna do that in the meeting
with your supervisor. But how you respond to someone telling
you that you need improvement may say a lot about
how they look at you for a leadership role. If
(38:04):
you look at it as some type of admonishment of
your character, if you look at it as them trying
to degrade you or just beat you up unnecessarily. Sometimes
that is the case, but an instance is where it's not.
If you look at it that way and you respond
that way, I want you to think about what signals
it sends to the person who's giving you that information,
(38:24):
who's telling you where you could be better, as opposed
to you being curious about what they say, Oh the
midiear review, Oh yeah, let's look at that together. If
you even become proactive, where do you think I can
improve because I'm really trying to be the best that
I can be in this position. When now you're coachable,
now you're an athlete that's not and understanding what the
(38:45):
cult is saying. Who's taking that information? That does not
feel good. It is not comfortable to hear you're taking
that information, you're processing it and you're going to apply
it to your practice so that you can apply it
to your gain, so that you can do something meaningful
with it. Doesn't have to feel good, just has to
(39:05):
be useful. Again, not telling you they know your feelings, dog,
That's not what I'm saying here. Not saying ignore them.
I'm saying that, acknowledge them, but also recognize what else
is there. Get your hands dirty and utilize. There's nothing
wrong with that because if you can't become a good
leader at work, you know what that's going to affect
(39:27):
your money, y'all. You're checking your pockets and I don't
know how any of y'all lie. I'm very open on
this podcast. Man, I got scarce to be Trump. I
grew up poor. That's why I got forty five thousand
pairs of Jordan's. I'm over compensating, absolutely, and I love
every minute of it. I apologize for none of it.
But there is a direct correlation to the way that
(39:50):
you feel about yourself and the amount of money in
your bank account. And it's okay if economically you're just
not where you want to be because the situation is
just not the best for you. Man. Been there, been there,
hopefully won't be there again, but been there. But if
your economic situation is jacked up because you are not
(40:10):
seeing your area for improvement and doing something about it,
I think that's a deeper, worse feeling because then it
becomes a cycle that you might not necessarily be able
to get out of. You feel me without stepping back
and looking at this thing with a thousand yard view.
So that emotional safety, that discomfort, that pushing through the discomfort,
(40:31):
that curiosity is not just about your relationships out in
the world with people who you dig. It's about people
who you may need in order to secure some economic
self sustainability. My boy, very important, and even in my
own life, the cost on your innerpersonal relationships, the people
(40:51):
who you love, the people who you romantically involved with.
If I stayed in a place where I was reluctant
to hear criticism about myself, if I stayed in the
safety of I know what I'm talking about with money,
you tripping. This is a youth thing, not a me thing.
If I stayed in that place, I wouldn't have the
marriage I have. Now. Let me tell y'all something. Work
(41:14):
is crazy. My kids are crazy. I'm almost forty when
you get there. Your health, the things you got to
eat to stay healthy is crazy. The amount of doctors
you see is crazy. My life is crazy. You want
to know the most stable thing in my world, it's
(41:35):
my marriage. Why Because I can take the information that
she gives me and I can think about it, not
just attach it to my body as bulletshot wounds, gunshot wounds,
but actually hear it as a perspective that lives somewhere
in my blind self. I don't know if you can
enjoy your healthy relationship if you are enjoying the sweet, sweet,
(41:58):
beautiful warmth of emotional safety. And I think it's important
to say that I can't emphasize this enough. Not the
type of emotional safety where you're with someone who is
not good to or for you. That's not what I
mean here, talking about the emotional safety that stops you
from stepping forward, that stops you from hearing things about
(42:19):
yourself that you don't like. My ability to hear something
that I'm not fond of and think about it with
a big picture, big brain perspective is one of the
reasons that we have the type of trust we do.
We have the connection and the chemistry that we do.
And when you do that in your relationship, when you're
able to hear those things, guess what it emboldens the
(42:41):
other person to do the same thing. So, now you
have a partner that's matching your energy, and when they
do that to you, guess what it emboldens you to
keep doing it more. And y'all just keep taking chances
to be more vulnerable with each other. And what it
does is it brings you closer together. You don't go
outside there relationship to find safety, solace or warmth for softness.
(43:02):
It's there already. It doesn't just happen, man, These are
things that you got to work towards. And this is
the way that you work towards by recognizing this and
actually doing it, practicing it, get not being scared to
get it wrong, Practicing practice, and practicing after a while
just becomes a part of the way y'all approach each other.
Don't need to pay the cost, man, You pay enough taxes.
(43:24):
Don't pay the emotional, the relational, or the economic costs
of not being able to do something with the feedback
that you get that doesn't feel great to hear.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
Man.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
I don't care what y'all say, Curiosity is strength. Curiosity
is strength. I'm actually, oh, I'm reading this book called
Along Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandella. I don't know
if you ever read it. Incredible book, just the first
three chapters. It's a banger already. But I got this
quote for y'all, and it was about curiosity. All right.
(44:03):
So early in the book, he's talking about his childhood
and I kind of paraphrased it, but he said this,
you know, know some Mandela South Africa. He says, like
most children from my tribe, I acquire knowledge through observation.
He said that he believed that we are meant to
learn through emulation and imitation, not through questions. When he
visited the houses of white people, he was often dumbfounded
(44:26):
by the number of questions that children asked their parents,
and he was dumbfounded by their parents' unfailing willingness to
answer those questions. He said that in his household, questions
were considered a nuisance. Adults and parted information as they
considered necessary. His life, like most people at the time,
were shaped by customs, rituals, and taboo. That's nosing mandellas
(44:52):
LM one of the most powerful leaders of our time
talking about how curiosity affected his life and how he
saw curiosity different in more Western style cultures than in
his home. And I'm half Nigerian, and anybody who's West
African can tell you. Man, you know, sometimes you ask questions,
(45:15):
there's no need to ask questions. Even my family from
South Carolina, a Black American family, African American family stay
in a child's place, the kid ain't supposed to ask
her to ask them questions. My mom used to always
say they told her kids to be seen and not heard.
And I know that we have a different philosophy now
in this year in time, but we weren't born this
(45:37):
year in time. We were born when those sayings were
still very prominent. So I don't care what nobody said.
Curiosity is a superpower because when you live under that
adult understanding, it stops you from being curious. You stop
asking questions because you feel like you are annoying the
people around you, or you feel like it's not your
place to ask questions, so you might just take whatever
(45:59):
comes your way, or you don't question it or investigate things.
And it starts by you not questioning and investigating your surroundings,
and it moves to you, not questioning and investigating your
own thoughts and beliefs. Curiosity is not some feeble surrender.
It's to me, curiosity is regaining control of your life.
(46:22):
To me, curiosity is trying to understand the grand narrative
that's playing out in front of you constantly. Curiosity is
an unquenchable thirst for understanding, for knowledge. If the smartest
people I know are forever students, and a forever student
is a person who has a mind that's infinitely curious.
(46:44):
So if you think that curiosity is weakness, I disagree,
and I'll debate you anytime, any day, anywhere. I completely disagree.
And I had to disrob myself of that thinking that
understanding man, and long ago, y'all, I'd say, maybe, like
in the last decade or so, I became more comfortable
(47:06):
with it. So you know, if it's not a part
of your upbringing, it might not be something you can
immediately employ. But you don't just jump into a hot
bath all that once. You don't cannonball into that joint.
You dip your toe end and you know, you get
up the mid foot, then you get up the ankle,
then you get up the shin, and you get up
the neat next thing. You know, you sliding your whole
body into it, one piece at a time. So, with
(47:29):
all of this being said, with all the stuff that
we talked about, this is the shift that I want
you to make right here. I want you to make
a shift from let me prove my point to help
me understand Those are two different responses I want you
to go from hold on, I got to prove my point,
Let me prove my point real quick, to hold on,
(47:52):
help me understand this even in the posture of it.
Those are two completely different ways of going about it.
I want you to start practicing making that shift even
in your everyday interactions and conversations, just little opportunities that
you get to put that to use. I want you
to try. Here's some other things that you can try
to I call these micro practices. When you're triggered by something,
(48:14):
or when something brings up a memory or a thought
or a response for you, I want you to ask
yourself what am I protecting right now? What is the
thing that I'm protecting in this moment? And I want
you to really think hard about it, give yourself a
couple of seconds. What am I protecting you? Can also
try to replace one defensive response every week with a question.
(48:38):
So instead of shooting back at the person in defensiveness,
just replace it with a clarifying question, not a nasty one,
you know, not a not a subtle jab, but one
that is rooted in sheer curiosity and genuine curiosity. Also,
when you're in disagreements with people, when you don't see
eye to eye, I want you to kick back to
(48:59):
them your solf of what they said, what your understanding is.
So to start like, hold on, let me make sure
I got this right. You're singing that, and to summarize
what they said. That's useful. It can get you some
incredible feedback and make sure that you heard it right,
and also gives the person a chance to think about
the thing that they said. They may actually change it
(49:21):
once they hear it come out of your mouth and
they brain can process in a different way. Now, if
you're feeling really brave, if you want to make a
bigger commitment to this change, let's do a seven day challenge,
a seven day challenge around curiosity. Hit me out for
seven days. I want you to get curious. I want
(49:42):
you to ask more questions than you make statements for
seven days. I want you to delay your rebuttal, delay
your response for sixty seconds. We're gonna have to be
okay with silence for sixty seconds. I want you to
pause before you respond. I want you to resist the
(50:03):
urge to disagree right away. I want you to consider
what's being said just a little bit longer than you
normally would, just a little bit. Here's how it's going
to go. I want you to choose a space. It
could be your house, it could be your office, it
could be the gym, it could be the court, it
could be any space that you frequent and for seven days,
I want you to just get curious. I'm saying the
(50:24):
word curious a lot so you can get used to it,
because that's not a word that's accepted in groups of men. Nah.
I want you to do that. Lean into it, bro.
If you want to change, this is how change happens.
We just spent the whole episode talking about moving through
what's uncomfortable. This is how we do it. This is
how the sausage is made. Because anybody can be right.
(50:44):
Being right just wins you the moment, but being curious
can change the landscape of your entire life. Don't just
keep all this good stuff to yourself. I want to
hear it. I want to hear about this challenge. I
want to hear about the wins. I want to hear
about what you stumbled upon, what worked for you, what didn't,
(51:07):
what surprised you, what stayed the same like you knew
it would. Share. Man, this is a community, and the
only way we get better is if everybody starts. It
can't be gatekeeping the secrets, bro, Everybody starts sharing out
what it is that's working for So hit me up.
The number is two four oh two seven three four
six two eight. Call or text me. Let me know
(51:28):
how the seven day challenge went for you. Two four
oh two seven three four six two eight. I got
faith in you, dog. I feel like you're going to
complete the seven day challenge no problem. But if something
hung you up and you couldn't finish, tell me about it.
It's not just about the wins, It's about the journey.
That's how we learn things. I appreciate y'all for rocking
(51:49):
with me. This was a dope episode and we got
plenty more in the future, and then the episodes ahead
we're going to really be unpacking what real strength looks like.
Because the goal here isn't for you to just be
performing masculinity, for you to be performing manhood. It's for
you to actually become the man that you want to be.
So until next time, take care of yourself, take care
(52:11):
of the spaces around you, take care of your loved ones.
Make sure you see love, make sure you be loved,
make sure you be loved. Job or done. See y'all
next time.
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