Episode 26 - MATURE MASCULINITY: Teach Boys How to Be Men with Simon Smart

DESIRE DRIVES BOYS, DUTY DRIVES MEN.

Welcome to another inspiring episode of The Resilient Dad Show. Today we speak with Simon Smart, a men's coach with a background in business, martial arts, and military combatives. He recalls growing up in Asia and his first exposure to rites of passage and growing into a man.

Simon digs into a man's stages of growth, from being a baby to a boy and, finally, to a man. He talks about how a boy will grow in power, like in mobility and in strength, but also in duty and responsibility. For Simon, mature masculinity takes pride in duty, while juvenile masculinity is focused on desires.

A man must be able to look at himself in the mirror and ask "am I a man worth following?" To guide this question, Simon shares his 4 V's: Vision, Vitality, Veritas (truth), and Virtus (courage). He also talks about fighting, defending the people you love, and gaining confidence through combat sports.

WORDS OF RESILIENCE

A guide is needed to teach a boy how to be a man - Simon: "There has to be a guide or a mentor. And in a lot of traditions, there's more than just the day or the night or the week of the rite of passage. There's training that comes before. A lot of the training for boys is around what is a man in our culture?"

A man's vision for himself keeps him grounded - Simon: "When they have no grounding, I think this is an important point to make when you have a vision, quest, and thus a vision of yourself, you spend a lot of your time building yourself into that vision. When you don't have a vision, you spend your time building yourself into everyone else's vision of you. In other words, you worry a lot more about others' vision of who you are than your own, and that's when men drift into being people pleasers."

Duty for others is what sets apart mature and juvenile masculinity - Simon: "What we can maybe make is a simple distinction between mature masculinity and juvenile masculinity is that distinction between living for others and living for your duties versus living for your attachments and your desires and whatever you want. I think that mature masculinity is what eventually ties into what I would call manhood. Juvenile masculinity may have a lot of masculine elements, but it doesn't access manhood in the way that mature masculinity does." 

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