Unhidden

by Robert Kandell

  I recommend you move from the Jeez to the curious camp. In my humble opinion, it makes life much more interesting.

  Don’t Fix Her - She’s not Broken

  In the fall of 1993, I was on a solo road trip to visit a friend. To entertain myself, I played the audio version of a new book I had heard about called Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by John Gray. I was 23 years old at the time, newly single from a codependent college relationship, and was suffering from my inability to meet women in a new city.

  While dubious about self-help books, I had picked it up at the local library and planned to switch to a more action-oriented fiction book if I became bored. However, after listening to just a few minutes of the book, I was deeply hooked by what I was hearing. Mr. Gray’s words had a had a powerful and immediate impact. I was struck by the following viewpoint:

  Men need to remember that when women are upset and talk about problems, it is not the time to offer solutions; instead she needs to be heard, and gradually, she will feel better on her own. She does not need to be fixed.

  I almost crashed my car after hearing this. It was completely new, truthful, and informative—and 100 percent representative of who I had been with my ex. I was the embodiment of the Mr. Fix-it guy discussed in this book. I had constantly tried to fix her problems. I now realized how much of my self-worth was tied up in being that white knight. I also realized that, while gratifying, this pattern had led to a very unbalanced and unhealthy relationship.

  Let’s back this up a step: Men get self-worth from their ability to solve problems and produce results. Women, on the other hand, receive their self-worth from their ability to attract. There is both benefit and detriment from these behaviors. Men, in their single-minded focus on accomplishing goals, are useful. In my household, Morgan enjoys my obsessive organization of the garage and my willingness to take out of the trash. She also valued my mental clarity when we moved houses. However, beyond these skills, there is a cost when I am more focused on the outcome of a problem than noticing and validating her feelings. She wants, as John Gray would write, for me to simply listen. Women like men to listen first and then to offer a menu of possible action steps. She doesn’t want you to do it, nor to have it all left to her to do. She wants to do it together. The most important thing you can provide is the space for her to be her fullest expression of who she is with your approval. In the next section, we will explore the practical side of what to do to improve your relationships with women.

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  THE IMPACT OF PORN

  I’ve been an on-again, off-again user of pornography for most of my life. When I was younger, I discovered my father’s stack of Playboy magazines in our garage and, like a moth to flame, I was pulled in by this provocative new world. As I grew older, my usage grew from renting DVDs, reading stories on newsgroups, and then, with the advent of free porn, many hours watching it. While I would not call myself addicted, there were lonely times in my life where I used it as a crutch. I would sit alone in my room, deeply fearful of being discovered, towel to my side, and search desperately for relief. This self-pleasure would scratch an itch, but only for a short period of time before I would go back on the hunt for more. While I do believe it’s possible to have a balanced relationship with porn, this is actually very difficult to achieve.

  In the last several years, I’ve stopped using porn because I realized its detrimental effects on me, on my relationship with Morgan, and on our sex life. I was deeply affected by the audio book, The Butterfly Effect by Jon Ronson, which illustrates the impact of the advent of free porn by entrepreneur Fabian Thylmann. This journey put the nail in the coffin on my porn usage. I was also impressed by Gary Wilson’s book, Your Brain on Porn, and his website of the same name. Once you have read this literature, you will have more insight into what your frequent use of porn is doing to your heart, your sex drive, your connection to women, and your soul.

  Since the United States still does not have effective sex education, porn has become the de facto source for young boys around their sexuality. As most porn is written, produced, and aimed towards men, the women presented in the videos rarely describe a realistic expectation of a healthy sexual experience. By watching these videos, you will begin to equate what you are watching with real life, which simply isn’t realistic. The women on the screen are paid actresses. Porn is also linked to erectile dysfunction (ED). In 2014, the US Armed Forces released survey findings that rates of ED had more than doubled during the preceding decade and could be accounted for by the expansive growth of available porn on the Internet.

  I highly recommend that, if you have an issue with pornography or even a concern, please do some investigation into your usage around it. I have spent enough time in a 12-step meetings (e.g., Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous) to see the damage it can cause. Even if it is impacting your relationships in a minor way, it is important for you confront it and understand.

  YOUR PRACTICE

  The preliminaries are complete: you’re ready to jump into the doing to uplevel your life. This section focuses on the concept of the what to do and the how to do it. In the Integration section, I will share my favorite exercises to implement these changes.

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  ELEMENTS OF ACHIEVING EXCELLENCE

  Good to Better

  You spend time and money on training for how to do your job, hit a baseball, or play the piano. You watch Youtube videos to understand your favorite TV show, to learn to add special effects to your IMovie project, or for tips on beating a video game. However, ironically, you have resistance to investing time and money into your personal development. It is estimated that 80 percent of all books are purchased by women, with the percentages on self-help books even higher. Before my experience at Erwan’s workshop (see the Introduction), I was the same way. The books I enjoyed were mystery and sci-fi novels. The only non-fiction I read were computer program manuals. After I had my embarrassing moment, I threw myself into the deep end of the pool of learning about how things worked in relationships. Since then I’ve read hundreds of books, sat in hundreds of hours of therapy, and spent thousands of hours in the classroom both as student and teacher. I sit here now feeling grateful for every single challenging moment of my journey.

  My baseline belief is this: You can only go from bad to good, not bad to better. Therefore, you must declare at this beginning point of your practice that things are good (perfect in fact) and that there is plenty of room to optimize moving towards mastery. If you want to learn how to hit a fastball by an experienced pitcher, it is not likely you will be able to smack it over the fence your first time at bat. You understand that every great skill you wish to learn takes a commitment to practicing, striking out, getting advice from great coaches, and practicing some more with an expectation that mastery could take a significant length of time.

  However, I’ve found in my coaching of men that they do not give themselves the same space when it comes to learning self-love, interacting with powerful women, and knowing who they want to be in this world. We have an unrealistic expectation of our skills in terms of communication and sexuality and this hubris stops us from enjoying our apprenticeship of human relating. We also have a very loud self-critic, which tends to lead us to quit quickly and dramatically.

  I would like to introduce the concept that learning to relate with yourself, women, and the world is a practice. There are times where you will make great strides and days where you make embarrassing miscues. Regardless, live knowing you are in the process of learning rather than diminishing yourself because you are not at an expert level. It is also important to take your time rather than overdoing it from the start. Have you ever worked out intensely on the first day back to the gym, only to injure yourself? My goal is to make you push yourself to stretch past your comfort zone but never to the point of hurting yourself. When I start with my coaching clients, I will always start this way:

  Do you know that feeling when you’re working out or in a yoga class when your le
gs start to shake? They’re burning, and it's uncomfortable, and you just want to quit? Then, there is that point where you know if you pushed it just a little bit more, you could pull a muscle? I want you in the shaking, not the ripping. I want you to feel the burn of our work together, but I never want to harm you.

  This is my concept of bending not breaking. Give yourself absolute permission to modify your program if it will cause harm to you or to another person.

  One Unit of Fear Equals Ten Units of Life

  I had a coaching client who was a good man but had some serious challenges in the women department. To call him shy would be an understatement. In order to have him move out of his isolation, we co-created a practice routine with a simple motivation: we were going to keep him out of his comfort zone as much as humanly possible. Some of his missions were to attend Meetups, to ask his co-workers out to lunch, and to contact women via online dating apps. To him, these were some significant steps and, each week, he would express his trepidation. Still, he kept going and, within a few months, he started meeting friends and his life expanded.

  During one session, I gave him a significantly more difficult assignment. We were moving through his usual response process of resistance to upping his program when he said, “I already feel overwhelmed in my life.” I responded with a new viewpoint I made up on the spot. “I think one unit of fear equals ten units of life.” In other words, if he was able to move through this one patch of fear, then 10x the amount of life was waiting for him around the corner. He just needed to move steadily through the intense barrier of his own self-imposed constraint. We live in a world where there is an incredible amount of fear present. My practice, however, when I am feeling fear is to head in the opposite direction. I look at fear as a wake-up call from my body based on a changing environment to increase my level of attention and awareness. I will feel the feelings as much as possible and then look around to see what is happening in my sphere.

  Like my client, however, I have witnessed most people getting stuck in their fear, which only increases their state of discomfort. The more you stand still in the fear, the more you feel isolated, the more the fear increases. A great description of fear is this: False Evidence Appearing Real. In other words, we take a reality that may or may not be true and make it real. In my experience, fear often boils down to a basic dread of abandonment or ending up alone.

  The ironic part is that most people fear success more than they fear failure. We are well schooled in not getting what we want, but are less skilled in having our desires. Those ten units of life could be the thing you are avoiding. You are used to living in fear, but not used to living in desire. Like a felon more comfortable in his jail cell, you return to your fear-based reality time and time again. It takes incredible strength and determination to move through the fear into the bright light of our desire. I’ve found moving through just one unit of fear produces an extraordinary amount of possibility, hence the ten units of life. I’ve found telling the truth is the fastest way to move through fear and into that 10x’s life experience. How often do you allow your fear to take the driver’s wheel and steer you in the wrong direction? Create powerful relationships that allow space for all of your and your intimate friends’ humanity to be welcomed and rewarded. One of the biggest human blocks, especially in men—who are supposed to be super heroes—is admitting you are scared.

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  LEARN TO COMMUNICATE

  The Power of Telling the Truth

  A problem many men face is that we don’t have a deep inner connection to our own truth. We don’t have access to our emotions or permission to speak the truth, both internally or externally. We deeply fear the consequences of being authentic because of the possibility that we will be rejected or even abandoned. We have learned that only a certain amount of truth is acceptable in today’s society and in our relationships, so we try to live inside a very small box. The consequence is not connecting to our fear and desire. I believe this is a root cause of toxic masculinity (bad behavior). Please see my article around this topic in the FURTHER SUPPORT section of the book.

  Several things need to happen in order for truth to be told in relationships.

  Make the commitment—either from desperation or inspiration—to start speaking the truth to your intimate friends.

  Learn superior communication.

  Understand the differences between men and women and how they communicate.

  Find practice partners.

  Reward your practice partners on their truth and then continue to improve your own skills.

  Empowering Communication

  The world is experiencing a decrease both in the efficiency and power of personal communications with its massive adaptation in the use of electronic messaging. In the last decade alone, the number of text messages increased by 7,700 percent, with more than 22 billion texts being sent out daily worldwide, not including app to app messaging (e.g., Facebook Messenger). In our reliance on the typed message, the world has gotten lazy and people are missing each other. To counter this, I hold that the responsibility of the communication is on the one who is sending it, the communicator.

  You may believe that, when you send a text message, your job is done and complete. For example, you have a tentative plan to meet Sam at your favorite burger joint. You send him a text: “S - see you at 8p” and move on to your next text. Later, when you are sitting alone at 8:20 and stewing, you finally pick up your phone and text him again.

  You: S - dude WTF? Where are you? I’m waiting at the restaurant.

  Sam: Dude - I never got your text so assumed that we weren’t meeting tonight!

  You: I TEXTED YOU AT 5p and AM PISSED YOU’RE NOT HERE

  Sam: Never got it

  Sam: WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOUR PHONE??

  Result: Disconnection.

  We rely on electronic communication and believe that, when it’s sent, it’s complete. This is akin to writing your message and folding it like a paper airplane and throwing it towards Sam’s house. It might get there but, then again, it might not. I offer an alternative methodology. If I were going to coordinate with Sam, I would do the following:

  5pm

  You: S - see you at 8p

  5:30pm

  No reply

  6pm

  You: S - did you get my text? Meeting at 8p?

  6:02pm:

  Sam - Didn’t get it! Thanks for checking. See you there

  Result: Disconnection avoided.

  Here is the visual of my process. I have a communication I want to make to Sam. I open my front door, walk down the driveway, make a left on the street, and walk up the block to Sam’s house. I knock on his door. When he opens it, I will place the communication in his hand and stand there waiting. After he acknowledges the message with a “Thank you,” “Got it,” or even a “K,” I will only then consider my responsibility complete.

  Another communication casualty of the modern age might be your habit of constantly multi-tasking. You may switch between Facebook Messenger, your phone text app, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and maybe even a phone call. While you think you can handle multiple streams of communication at once, the human brain is not wired to do this efficiently. Cal Newport, in his excellent book Deep Work, characterizes this as shallow work. His hypothesis throughout the book is that, in order to produce exceptional work, we must turn off all our feeds in order to concentrate on the task at hand.

  The Power of Listening

  On the flip side, it is very important to engage in what is called active listening. More often than not, you are listening to another person speak with only a small percentage of your free attention. Either you are thinking, scheming, or—worse—formulating your response while the other person is in mid-sentence. Your lack of presence with the communicator creates a chasm between you and them. Personally, I’ve made the rule to never interrupt Morgan when she is speaking; I intentionally wait until she has completed her sentence before speaking. Even in our most heated discu
ssions (a.k.a arguments), our presence and deep listening to each other allows charge to diminish faster than with any relationship I’ve experienced.

  I also highly recommend the power of closing communication cycles. For example, imagine you work as a personal assistant to a manager at your firm. After your boss has left work, she sends you this text to you: “I forgot to do something very important. Would you please ensure the Patterson file got sent to billing before you go? It needs to get there before 6pm.”

  After reading the text, you drop your phone and spend a few moments finishing your post. Around 5:50 p.m., on your way out of the office, you drop the file off at the billing department and then head down to the metro for your hour commute home. As you emerge from underground, you check your phone to find a litany of messages from your frantic boss. She has been on edge because you (a) didn’t respond to her initial request or (b) didn’t send her a notification the cycle was completed. She has now been agitated for 90 minutes. You quickly send a text saying it is complete; still, you realize that your boss, already high-strung, will probably bring this up when you see her tomorrow.