8 Important Life Lessons Learnt in Manhood

Manhood is an interesting thing. In my 31 years of living, I’ve always thought about the ins and outs of what it means to be a man. In my younger years, I had a certain picture of what it meant, centered around physical and tangible traits such as money, strength, intelligence, etc. As I’ve gotten older I would say that I’ve gained a bigger and more well-rounded picture of what it means, reflecting on what I’ve been through in my life up to this date.

My newer perspective takes into account that your mentality plays a big part in who you are and your mentality — although can be influenced, is not 100% determined by physical or tangible characteristics such as height, weight, race, financial or social status.

This post is simply an overview of the lessons I’ve learned during my journey of manhood up to date. There’s much out there that we are all told about manhood from a young age, but I do find that a lot of it is quite surface-level related — get on your purpose, find good women, get your finances up, etc.

This particular post is less so about outward-related issues and heavily about inward ones because the inward issues are just as important, if not more than the outward ones. Your brain is where your experiences are formed and shaped so if you can’t get your brain operating in the right ways, then you can end up missing out on a lot of what life has to offer you.

I was one of those people that focused a lot on the outward things in my life but when I was made to look inward, I realized that I had a lot of work to do internally. My pursuit of certain things thrust me into negative and toxic patterns which I’m doing my best to unlearn day by day as all those negative patterns have brought me further from being who I want to be. Focusing on who I wasn’t and what I didn’t have, rather than who I was and what I did have, brought me into bitterness when I should have been brought closer to contentment.

Regardless of how you grew up or what kind of situation you are in life now, the below ideas are things that we all can take into our lives. The thing about life is that many of us were dealt bad cards, however, we can’t dwell on the situation we are in, it’s our reaction to it that is the key. This is why we owe it to ourselves to take in the following ideas.

Have Urgency In The Way You Go About Things

When I look at where I am now in life, I see things mainly through an eye acceptance that wherever I am now has been a result of certain decisions that I have made in my life. I own my decisions as ultimately if I had known better, I’d have done better.

In the new journey of parenthood that I am on now, I’ve found that I have a newfound urgency for my life. An urgency for getting my life together. The urgency for getting my career together. An urgency for bettering myself and being the best me possible because if I’m at my best then I can give the best to my partner and also to my child as well. But when I see the kind of urgency that I have now, I do wonder where this has been in the previous years of my life.

That is when I realized how important having urgency is in your life. You need to be fast in how you go about things and you cannot let life pass you by because the more you do so, the more comfortable you become.

This lack of urgency I’ve had in my life has contributed to things like previously putting off learning to drive, developing my cooking skills further, and generally striving to improve myself in many different areas, having actively used the excuse of “I’ll sort it out down the line”. In my life, I’ve applied this mindset to long-term goals such as driving, to short-term actions such as even washing dishes. It’s always about later. The problem is that later is a time frame that is always in the air, now is the most important thing.

We can’t continue to live life with a lack of urgency and make no misunderstanding, this doesn’t mean rushing things, as rushing can make you cut corners. It just means to live our lives with a thrust, a push, and a pro-activeness to make things happen.

It’s been an eye-opening experience to see how negative thinking has made me slower to react to things in my life, even on a day-to-day basis. I got comfortable in a comfort zone to the point that I was starting to let my life pass me by. Things I’m learning now could have been learned 5 years ago had I made the effort to make the necessary actions.

My focus was made so narrow by thinking about what wasn’t happening for me in life that I wasn’t even seeing the possibilities and opportunities that I was missing out on. Being the man I’ve been called to be is all about having that mindset of being a master of my domain and being that pushing force in making things happen around me, by spotting the positive opportunities and following through with them to the end.

Question Everything

The more I started to question certain aspects of my life, the clearer it was made to me that a lot of my mindset was built off things that I learned from my parents or other people in society. Some of it made sense but realistically, a lot of things that I did and incorporated into my life just didn’t make sense, the more I thought about it.

My journey of becoming the man I want to become has all been about questioning the things around me. Questioning things lead to you forming your conclusion about the world around you, from independent thought and from consciously using that thought to going out to do my research.

Do you even know why you do the things that you do on a day to day basis? Do you know why you like what you like? Do you know why you think how you think? Do you know why certain actions make you react in certain ways?

These were the type of questions I asked myself and the answers I was coming to were staggering: “It’s how I’ve always been”, “it’s who I am”, and “this is just me”. All in all, these types of answers just weren’t good enough. I’m now being forced to challenge my thinking daily which is proving hard but is making me stronger mentally as this is giving me more mastery of myself.

As a man, how can I hope to be flexible enough to compromise with my partner or expand my thinking with my children if I’m rigid in my thinking because I do not wish to question or challenge myself? How can I help other people to see other sides of things if I can’t question them on it from other sides? How can I hold myself or others accountable if I am not actively questioning everything regularly?

When you don’t question things, you take them at face value and that is a surefire way to be swindled. You become easily controlled and persuaded and we all have a responsibility to be conscious enough to have our own opinions about things instead of simply going with the crowd or what people are telling us. Questioning things in your life can trigger the necessary brain functions that can allow you to make drastic changes and actions and we all can be able to do this.

Know How To Speak Up For Yourself

You absolutely have to know to speak up for yourself in this life. Knowing how to talk is an instrumental thing when it comes to family, interactions with the workplace, and interactions with people when you’re out and about. Everywhere.

In my life, situations have shown me that I hadn’t fully realized how to talk — I’d have something on my mind and when I tried to address it verbally it wouldn’t come out in the way that I had imagined it in my head. Interactions would come out more rudely than I’d hoped, or it would come out wishy-washy as I tried to sugarcoat the information or say it in a way that wouldn’t paint me as the bad guy. In both instances, I’d mostly always get the type of reaction from the other person that had made me wish that I had never talked in the first place.

Over the years that has made me bite my tongue in many instances and hold those feelings in, which ultimately was done to my detriment to myself. As the man that I wanted to be, how could I not know how to communicate effectively? In relationships, work settings, and family settings I bit my tongue repeatedly for fear of saying something which I would regret later.

As men, we have to know how to talk up for ourselves. If you have an issue with someone in your life, you need to have the capacity to be able to communicate that issue to that person if possible and not let these things wash over you. Speak up for your friends and your partner. Know how to use your words to defend yourself and to be proactive in your life.

Overcoming Your Childhood Issues Are Important

A lot of the issues that we face as grown people stem from issues in our childhood growing up. Many people grow up with the mindset of either denying or learning to live with childhood trauma that they may have, whether major or minor. But what I learned about was the importance of facing your childhood issues head-on and overcoming them.

As a grown person, there is no reason I should be letting myself experience mindsets that I felt when I was a child. No reason. When I was younger being told off by my parents, I felt like the floor was swallowing me up whole.

When I was older and being scolded at work, or my partner was complaining to me about certain issues, my mind would instantly go back to those same feelings of being told off as a child, feeling helpless and like the floor was swallowing me whole. When I was younger being told off I’d shut down and become unresponsive, then when I was older being told off I’d shut down and become unresponsive. Can you see how childhood situations can affect you when you’re older?

As a man, I was made to see that I had a responsibility to unlearn all the traits I had when I was a boy and to learn all the things that I needed to learn to be the grown man that I embody. Practical ways forward to traverse this simply included talking to myself in the mirror — looking at myself in the mirror and telling myself “I am no longer the boy I was in the past, I’m a grown man and I love myself and I forgive myself for what I’ve been through in the past”. The more I’ve done that, the more I’ve been able to start rewiring my brain with the right mindsets instead of the negative ones that took me back to my childhood.

You might have the childhood traumas that have led to you being who you are today. You might not even know what they are. But this is why I say that you need to question everything because by questioning yourself and why you are who you are, you have a good chance of pinpointing these things from your childhood. Realize them. Unlearn them and in doing so you have the best chance to be able to make the necessary growth changes in your life.

Finding Yourself Is Key

When you ask yourself — ‘who am I?’, what kind of response do you give yourself? Can you be honest with yourself and say that you are the master of yourself? Are you living in an image that you have created of yourself? Or are you living in an image created to please other people or to portray what you think people want to see from you?

In my journey, I saw that I was falling into the bracket of trying to live up to an image of portraying what I thought people wanted and as a result, I went even further away from myself in several different areas. Living to please or impress others will only drain you in the long run. I was making content that I felt people wanted to consume. I was talking about the things that everything else was talking about, always being someone that wanted to give my two pence into what everyone else was giving their two pence about.

Finding yourself. Truly finding yourself, is something that will dramatically have a positive effect on your life. In finding myself more, I’m connecting more with my source which has allowed me to access deeper levels of introspection for myself, discovering more about who I am and what I’m able to offer. I’ve discovered that writing (especially posts like this) is a genuine passion of mine and I have a thirst to gain information that will allow me to improve my craft in this area. I’ve gained more confidence in myself and in the man that I am now and that I’m becoming.

We all have a responsibility to ourselves to find ourselves, but it involves taking a step back from everything in your life, evaluating, questioning and listening to what your heart and soul is telling you. Your brain will tell you what you tell yourself and what you tell yourself may or may not be true, to but your heart and soul will tell you the truth of who you are. Always.

Carry Yourself In High Regard, Always

The power of positive thinking can be powerful in changing your perceptions of yourself and your life. No matter who you are, there is no reason why you shouldn’t carry yourself in the highest regard possible, whether tall or short, fat or thin, black or white, it’s all a mental thing. If you talk positively to yourself whether possible and you live your life embodying confident energy, naturally you will become more confident in the way you think and go about your life because you create those patterns in your head. What you tell yourself will be what you will embody.

I’ve always thought that only when certain external factors start aligning — mainly money, career, or success related, that that would help to make me the kind of person that I want to become. Where the penny dropped was in the realization that my situation doesn’t make me who I am, but that I define my situation. That means that I create the energy that I want in my life and my situation is defined by that. So I always need to carry myself as I want to go on and as the man that I want to be, I always need to carry myself highly in every area.

How people see me is a reflection of how I see myself, so if I take pride in my appearance, carry myself with my shoulders and chin held high with a confident posture, with a walk that communicates that I am someone of importance, people will take that I’m a confident person of importance. Before I’ve even said a word. People won’t even know anything about you or your current situation but if you carry yourself as someone of high regard, then they will instantly imagine you are, someone of high regard. The aura speaks for itself.

It’s not about being arrogant, it’s about consistently holding yourself in the highest regard possible and that is all about how you speak to yourself. Are you speaking to yourself positively regularly? Or when you are faced with setbacks do you start to speak negatively of yourself and start to doubt your abilities? Do you look after yourself to the point you are constantly building yourself up? Are you embracing failure and doing your best to learn the lesson to allow yourself to springboard back up?

Your Bank Account Doesn’t Make You Who You Are

I’ve had money in my life, and I’ve been broke, but ultimately I’ve always been the same person. It’s always been a thing for men to get our finances up so we can take care of people, look after ourselves and provide for others, however, I’ve seen this pursuit of money bring out negative sides to me and other people as well.

Going after money as the main thing in life can give make you lack contentment in your life, where you’re so focused on the goals that you end up neglecting your self-care. You can’t be blessed with what you want if you are constantly trying to force these things, the universe will fight you every step of the way.

Lessening my focus on money and investing more into my mental self has seen me make more positive shifts and has seen me mentally make improvements in my mood and thinking and thus have had me living more in the present than constantly thinking about a future where I imagine having more money. The best way I can go about my life now is by choosing to focus on my present and making today more positive which can create ripple effects that can impact my week, month, or even year for the better.

Ultimately, we don’t walk around with our bank account balance on our foreheads. We don’t have our credit scores showing above us. So why would we let our money situation define how we view ourselves and the world? You can be broke yet still have a positive mindset, yet be rich and have a negative mindset, this is a reality in the world we live in today. It’s all about perspective.

The People You Have Around You Are Vital, So Is How You Are To The People Around You

People always say things like your network is your net worth and having a circle of people and friends around you that help you to grow and that you can help grow is important. But what is ultimately important is being that friend to others. There came a time in my life some time ago when I evaluated many of my friendships and realized that in my pursuit of going for what I thought I wanted in life, I missed out on fostering certain friendships in terms of checking in with them, encouraging them and being a solid person in terms of hearing out and helping out with problems.

Furthermore, I was made to see why I rarely received feedback or constructive criticism on my work from people around me. All in all, it came back to me not being that person who gave constructive criticism to my people as well. As I think about it more and more I see that my lack of being able to talk even affected this as well.

No man can get to where they want to get alone and no man can make the necessary changes in their life with yes people around them. We need people around us that will challenge us and our thinking and we need people who can challenge their thinking also. Yes, it’s about our community but it’s also about fostering the community that will get the best out of us. Holding your people accountable and having them do the same for you. Telling someone not what they want to hear but what they need to hear.

But as I found for myself, how can I tell people what they need to hear when I’m not telling myself what I need to hear? How can I tell people the truth when I was living in delusion? This is when it hit me that I need to make the necessary growth in my life so that I can attract and foster the type of community that can help me (and I to them) to elevate in the best way possible.

In closing, the journey of personal growth is one that we all need to take on our own, but there are a lot of shared principles that I believe will have a serious impact on many of our lives, especially as men. Focusing on the external is something that will always be in the thing, yet doing so at the detriment of the inward will have an impact on how we view ourselves and the world around us.

If we view ourselves, carry ourselves, and speak to ourselves more positively, it’s no surprise that we will achieve more positive results in almost every area of our life — work, relationships, etc, since we will be focusing more on solving issues and more on making things happen around us. Once we shift into negative patterns, from personal experience I’ve found that it only puts us on a downward slope of more negativity as our brains start creating more and more walls in our lives.

I wish you all the utmost strength in your journey of being the best version of yourselves.