Stoicism is an ancient Greek philosophy that describes men to act in such a way to be able to endure pain, without displaying feelings.
You have often heard me say many times on this channel that men need to do what they need to do regardless of how they feel about it.
Men need to be able to have clear focus and a vision so that they continue to do the work, regardless of whatever obstacles life decides to throw at them.
What makes men into men is our ability to have emotional control over things we cannot control, and be able to control the things that we can control mentally and physically.
As men, we must work to build ourselves up into men because there is no shortcut.
Men have to be willing to go through hardship to gain strength - it is the way that we are engineered.
This does not go without mentioning that as a man, we still feel like shit sometimes...
There are many times when you won't feel like doing anything because life decides to get hard.
But the thing I have found about life is that life is always going to be hard, but we get to choose which hard we want to endure.
Would you rather take the path of least resistance and live a hard life that is depressing and miserable? Or would you rather go out and build your value to become a useful man?
Both of these things are hard, but I would argue that it is harder doing absolutely nothing to try and make a better life for yourself than to it is to work and build yourself into someone of value.
As humans, we are biologically programmed with a fight or flight response and this is something that we have had in our DNA from the earliest periods of human history.
All of us still live in this fight or flight response to this day in our everyday lives.
The flight response has always been the path of least resistance - it is a reactionary fleeing response to a threat.
The fight response has always taken more work, more action, and more planning - it is a response to face challenges head on.
Think of the earliest humans that had to fight to survive for food - they would have to plan how to trap and kill other predators to feed themselves and their families so that evolution could continue.
Then boom - here we are hundreds of thousands of years later, still living with these primal responses that are encoded into our DNA.
The difference between now and then is that I would argue that most people today (especially men), are living on cruise control in flight mode.
Most people react to everything they consume and everything around them, instead of stopping to think something through.
Most people grow content with being miserable, instead of building themselves into someone that is strong and confident.
It takes work, action, and planning to build yourself into someone that is strong, confident, and respectable.
It is easy to sit there and be average, working a regular job, doing normal things, and living a normal life.
It takes a different kind of mindset to want to take control of your life, build yourself into someone of strength and good character, and create your own life path.
As a man, the key to building ourselves is through self-control - control over our actions, control over our mindset, and control over our emotions.
If we as men cannot control our emotions, we become destructive - we become destructive to ourselves and everybody and everything around us.
Violence and aggression is something that lives in male DNA, and failing to control ones emotions can allow things like aggression to control a mans thoughts and actions in real time.
I learned as a young man that I had nothing but rage given the fact that I had a different upbringing and had to internalize everything that I have ever felt.
I look back on it now and realize that playing hockey my entire childhood into my early adult life saved me from myself.
If I didn't have something like competitive hockey to channel my anger and aggression, God only knows what kind of man I would have become - my guess is someone of addiction and pure destruction.
Ever since I stopped playing hockey, I have always needed something to contain myself and that is where I found the gym and still find the gym all these years later.
One thing I have learned as I have gotten older is that there is not a single person on the planet that is ever truly going to care about how men feel.
It is easy for someone to sit there and say that "it's okay for a man to express his feelings and be vulnerable", but the reality of it is, no-one actually gives even a single bit of a fuck.
As a man, you can tell someone something bad that happened to you, they will pretend like they care for 10 minutes and then they don't anymore. Why? Because people have their own lives and their own shit to worry about.
Why would anyone waste their time trying to sympathize with your feelings as a grown man when people have feelings of their own?
Women can say whatever they want about wanting men to be vulnerable, but the reality is they are immediately turned off at the first sign of weakness.
As soon as a man shows weakness and acts on his emotions, a woman will see this as a sign of weakness and no longer see him as being a strong and capable protector.
I have learned through internalizing things my entire life that there are ways as a man to express how we feel without actually telling people how we feel, and that is simply learning how to process emotions and communicate - emotional control.
I am the type of man that I will always tell people that I am "good" even when I am not.
I have learned that no-one (with the exception of those in my closest friends circle) is ever going to give a fuck about how I feel, so why should I?
I still have things that I need to get done - I still have horses to train, I still have to it the gym, I still have animals to take care of, and I still have blogs and other shit to do for building up this brand.
The point is that it doesn't matter if I went through a big loss, or things aren't working out in certain areas of my life, I still have to do the things that make me a strong, willing, and competent man.
For women, everything works differently for them.
Women have never been taught to have to control their emotions because the reality of it is, there are just too many of them.
Women are highly reactive creatures because of their hormones and different emotions that they feel on an everyday basis.
This is also why things like trauma play an entirely different effect on the female psyche.
Trauma creates emotions, and those emotions and feelings create subconscious thoughts, feelings, and actions.
This is why women are so easily triggered if they have experienced trauma on the emotional level because just about anything can trigger that emotion and cause her to slip into a mental breakdown.
The reality of it is that women were not biologically hardwired to have to deal with and control their emotions to the extent that men do.
The problem is, most women today have all experienced emotional trauma on some level - some much more than others.
What I have found is that many women realize that they have trauma, they can identify the source of their trauma, but have no idea how to fix it.
As men, we turn our trauma and insecurities into strengths by building ourselves into strong, stoic, confident men - it takes work!
Women were not taught to build themselves the way men are and truthfully, they were not designed to have to build themselves the way that men do.
Men are protectors and providers, we have always been designed to go out and be useful regardless of how stressful the situation is.
Women are biological caregivers - designed to keep children alive.
So this then begs the question of what should a woman do if she has experienced a lot of trauma and has no idea how to control her emotions?
Well, for starters it all starts with behavior and changing the way that you do things.
If we often find ourselves unhappy, a simple change in behavior will produce different results and open you up to be able to learn something new.
If you cannot change the way that you do things, you will always find yourself living in the same repetitive cycle over and over again.
Because most women today have experienced trauma to some degree, they now also need to learn how to build themselves into women of character and true femininity.
When a woman experiences trauma, especially if she has experienced a lot, she will naturally develop masculine qualities by becoming defensive and independent.
Many times these kinds of women want a good strong man to protect and provide for them, but good strong men are unfamiliar to them because of trauma and failure of being able to deal with insecurities and emotions.
The truth is, it is okay for women to feel this way because they naturally do not know any better.
But moving forward, if you are a woman who has experienced past emotional trauma, just know that it is always going to come back to haunt you if you do not learn self-control and how to deal with your emotions.
It is unfortunate that a woman would have to do this in the first place, but no man is ever going to be able to walk into your life and solve all of your problems, especially if they are YOUR problems.
All that you can really ask for is a man that will support you regardless, and a man that can provide you with solutions to help you change your behavior into something that is productive and not destructive.
Whether you are a man or a woman, emotional intelligence is key when choosing to be with one another.
As a man, you HAVE to accept that women are emotional and they are going to feel bad sometimes - you have to be a man that will support her, listen to her, and give her what she needs when she needs it.
As a woman, you have to understand that men are not always going to tell you how they feel, but they just need to know that you are always going to be there to support him.
Both men and women should be able to confide in one another and know everything about the other so that they know how to handle each other emotionally.
When you find a person you can have a true authentic connection with, tell them everything about you, and know they will always be there to support you is a partner worth having.