The first time a friend asked him to be best man at his wedding, Nathan Loewen wasn’t the best man he could be.

Some years ago I was in my twenties, I was foolish and selfish. I was engaged to the woman of my dreams, friends were all around us, family was great, and our future looked bright. Then my best friend got engaged.

A few months before that happened, my girlfriend (now wife) and I, thought it would be a good idea if two of our friends who didn’t know each other could meet and date. We thought they seemed like a perfect match for each other, and wouldn’t you know it, they hit it off.

The two of them were inseparable, spending all of their free time with each other. This is when things began to change for me. As a selfish twenty-something I did not like the fact that she was dominating his life. That I was no longer the most important person in his life, and after they got engaged these feelings bubbled to the top.

Instead of being excited and overjoyed for them, I felt sad. So when my best friend called me up to tell me he was engaged, all I could do was ask, “Are you sure you want to do this?” Our conversation continued but not for too long as it was too much for me to take at the time.

Later, he called to tell me about his wedding plans. It ended up being a couple weeks before my wedding and all the way in North Carolina—that is a long way from Texas, for sure. I wasn’t sure how I was going to swing it, making it to his wedding, the Christmas holidays, and then my own wedding.

So I made a mistake that I would forever regret. I proceeded to tell my best friend what I honestly thought about his future wife. These would be words I could never take back, words that were so cheap but cost me so much. The phone call ended and I felt sick to my stomach. I told my fiancee, “I think I just lost my best friend.”

I still was going to try to make his wedding until word came around that I was no longer invited to be the best man or even a groomsman. I couldn’t be too upset because who would want someone like me to stand up with them at their wedding? Our relationship became more and more strained and soon he would inform me that he could not make it to my wedding and be my best man. I was hurt deeply and knew that I was the one who caused my pain and his.

Over the year I would try to contact him, but he changed his phone number. I would try to catch him on Facebook, but I was blocked so I would get my wife to contact him for me. No luck. I finally wrote a letter to his wife as an apology. No word ever came back.

I screwed up. I chose to voice my selfish opinion, costing me my best friend since high school. Only time would tell if this would be it.

About a year later I heard the call to go into ministry, and so my wife and I packed up our life and moved back to Fort Worth so I could attend seminary. I reached out to my friend’s mom a couple times as she worked at the university. However, it was still not the right time for us to reconcile our relationship.

After I graduated from seminary three years later, I was called by First Christian Church in Cleburne, Texas to be their Senior Minister. This was the very church my friend grew up in, the one he served as a leader in the youth group, and took him to church camp where we met and became the best of buds.

On my first Sunday as the new Senior Minister my friend showed up. I saw him and we embraced in a hug that was strong, that was full of love, full of grace, full of missed years being friends, full of forgiveness. It warmed my heart to see and talk with him. Then he broke the news to me that his wife wanted a divorce, and my heart sank.

Here we were back together, reconciling, and he was going through the worst days of his life. I was glad I could be there for him again as his friend, that I could just hang out with him, not to relive the past but to be friends going forward.

Now it has been a year since I have been at First Christian Church, and I was overjoyed when a couple weeks ago my friend announced his engagement to his new fiancee. Then my heart was warmed as I was asked to officiate his wedding. He told me he wanted his two best friends to be part of his wedding one standing as his best man, and me standing as the officiant.

Things change over the course of six years. Life goes on. To be a best man, to be a true  best friend is not about looking out for yourself. I made that mistake and lost my friend. I have learned the hard way, the hardest way, to be a best man is to stand up with your friend when he is happy and to hold and embrace him when times are tough. Being a best man is more than toasts and bachelor parties, it is a relationship that understands it isn’t about me: it is about making room for them to grow in love together.

Read more in Weddings on The Good Life.

Image credit: Katsunojiri/Flickr

How ready are you to fail for the sake of your success? Shane Burroughs explores how some of the world’s greatest innovators embrace their failures in order to acquire such greatness.

Let me ask you a question.

In your opinion, what personality trait is mostly likely to lead to a life filled with failure?

You might think that answer is bone idle laziness, brutish ignorance, a complete lack of ambition or some equally negative trait.  Surprisingly, the answer is none of these! They don’t even come close, because the trait most likely to cause failure is creativity. Even in its mildest form, creativity delivers failure in abundance.

This isn’t just an unsupported opinion; there is plenty of evidence. The person who is held by many to be one of the most creative inventors of the industrial era developed more than 10,000 failed prototypes for just one of his ideas. The most creative painter of the modern era produced more 13,500 paintings, 99.9% of which you will never have seen or even heard of. The world’s most creative and most important animator filed for bankruptcy 7 times while trying to establish his animation studio.

It seems that Thomas Edison, Pablo Picasso and Walt Disney bounced happily from failure to failure all of their lives, and yet they were tremendously successful people.

Move Fast and Break Things

Recently I attended a presentation given by a senior brand manager at Cadbury. The presentation discussed Cadbury’s new “Joyville” campaign and how Cadbury creates successful viral campaigns. I asked the speaker to tell me what Cadbury’s success-to-failure ratio is for their campaigns. The speaker was stumped at first and stood silently for a long moment before finally smiling and saying that the fail rate for their campaigns is “huge.” He said, “We just give it a try and see how it works; if it doesn’t, we don’t beat ourselves up about it.” A month earlier I was at a presentation given by a director of sales at Facebook. During that presentation we were told that Facebook’s motto is “Move Fast and Break Things.” The speaker explained that at Facebook, they believe that if they are not breaking things, if they are not failing, then they are not moving fast enough. Cadbury and Facebook are failing faster and more often than most companies and as a result, they are the most successful companies in their sectors.

Fail to Succeed or Fail, to Succeed

Edison, Picasso, Disney, Cadbury, and Facebook learned that to be creative we have to venture new ground at the of risk failure, because always knowing what you are doing and always doing what you know is not a recipe for creativity: it’s the fast track to irrelevance.

Today, the most ambitious companies know that they have just two options; they can “fail to succeed” or they can “fail, to succeed.”

What would you do if you weren’t afraid to fail?

Read more Advice & Confessions.

Image courtesy of the author

Marie Roker-Jones teaches us how to be independent without disrespecting an entire gender.

The other day I saw an image on a Facebook page in which a mom and her daughter stated “I don’t need a man” with a shadow of a man leaving the house in the background. The picture represents one of  the most celebrated statements uttered by women. I have to be honest and say that I hear this most often from black women than any other group of women.

Some women use this statement as a defense mechanism to explain being single or express their disappointment  or distrust of men. Where does that leave boys and men? In the effort to raise girls to be strong and independent, women are conveying the wrong message by telling girls that they don’t need men. First of all, we should teach all children to be independent and self-sufficient. People shouldn’t need other people. However, we were created for human relationships. By nature, we are social creatures and benefit from connecting and interacting with others.

Stating “I don’t need a man” doesn’t help girls or women become strong, confident, and independent. I get it, we want to ensure girls and young women understand that they don’t need a man to be or feel complete. What we really should be telling girls is:

• You don’t need a man who’ll disrespect you
• You don’t need a man who doesn’t appreciate your efforts and contribution
• You don’t need a man who is too insecure to let you own your greatness
• You don’t need a man who only sees you as a sexual object

My mother taught my brother and I life skills so that we can care for ourselves and not rely on anyone for our financial, emotional, spiritual or physical well-being. She never stated to me “You don’t need a man”. When I was a child, I never doubted my mother’s confidence, power or strength. She didn’t depend on my father to make her feel whole. I understood the difference between “want” and “need”.

Also, let’s think about what this statement tells boys. If our sons overhear us saying this, what are they learning about themselves as men? We don’t want to undermine the roles that boys and men play in our lives. If we want to raise a generation of empowered women and compassionate men, we must begin to change our what we say. It’s not about needing anyone, it’s about being true to yourself, practicing self-care and  maintaining your individuality, even when you’re in a relationship. Let’s not dismiss boys and men as an inconvenience in our lives.

Originally appeared on Raising Great Men 

 Image Credit: myravery/Flickr

UCMJ – Unjustly Coddling Military Jerks

If you are a woman in the military you have to put up with a lot of shit. And any women who is in the military would like to tell you this but she has to contend with a few forces which make that almost impossible, so I am going to tell you for her. And lest you think this is about all men in the military, it isn’t. I served my time in the United States Navy,  and I am certain what I am about to say does not apply to every man in the military, but it does apply to enough to make it both a cautionary tale and something I am ashamed to say is happening in ever-increasing numbers.

A woman is always reminded, using subtle or not so subtle jabs, that no matter how strong she is, or how smart she is, she will never be as good as a man, no matter the job, no matter the circumstance. That a woman only has one purpose for a man and when no one is within earshot he will be only too happy to tell her. And worse, if no one is around at the time, he may even show her. Forcefully.

The military is a paternalistic and patriarchal culture which tells you, if you are a woman, without saying it, you are a second-class citizen in what should be an all-male club. No good reason is ever made for why this should be an-all male club; a woman should have the same right to fight and die for what she believes in as any man, and that is really what it SHOULD be about, but it almost never is.

And yes, there are those men who will be decent to her, who will act as if she is a member of the team and they will mean it—while they are with her. When they return to the male-only part of the armed force, they will be forced to admit women are inferior, they will be forced to admit—through peer pressure, through limited opportunities for advancement, through working the good-ole boy network—women are less than men. If they don’t, they don’t advance.

This is a reflection of our current society, where advancement in the military replaces money. Power and rank are a reflection of what you can do and who has to listen to you; once you become powerful enough you don’t even have to report what you don’t want to, further shaping the world to your liking.

So what we have is a sociopathic environment in which participation requires you either play the game, find your way around it, or accept what is being done and embrace secondary sociopathic tendencies. This is how good people end up doing bad things. If you want to get ahead, you want to play with the big boys, you want the rank, you want to go as far as the military allows, then you will find, winnow and cull the weak: those who won’t tow the party line, those who won’t allow the abuse, those who fight against what the military deems to be the Darwinian method of fitness. Survival by any means, and the weak shall perish.

This is an environment ripe for rape. And rape is everywhere. It is not just women being raped. Men are suffering the same brutal treatment and there is just as little being reported about this phenomenon. We have another article this month addressing the fact that: Men are being sexually assaulted in the military but nobody is talking about it.

Getting justice comes at a price

Any woman at any time can, if she is unfortunate enough, be on a base where an accused rapist has already been pardoned by a base commander as a “misunderstanding” or a “lack of evidence” and reassigned there as a means of keeping the accused rapist in the military because he is a “good soldier.”

In those times when a woman is willing to fall on her sword and do whatever it takes to bring a man to justice, and can find someone in the military willing to take her case, the man is accused and tried by the UCMJ (Uniformed Code of Military Justice). He goes to the brig (military jail) for sixty days and is given a dishonorable discharge. End of story.

In the civilian world he would be, if convicted, looking at ten to fifteen years for rape.

But the woman suffers a far worse fate. For standing up to her attackers and the male-dominated culture of the military, she is expelled from the service, no matter how exemplary her time in the military has been. A reason is made—post-traumatic stress disorder is the current favorite—for having women who challenge the status quo removed without question.

The ultimate affront is to find that so many of the people in charge of managing military staff, who should be protecting women from the horrors of rape, are being accused of sexual harassment, assault, or rape themselves. Lt Colonel Jeffrey Krunsinski was accused of approaching and assaulting a woman in a parking lot. He was the chief of the sexual assault prevention and response branch. A second sergeant at Fort Hood, Texas, has been investigated for pandering, abusive sexual contact, and maltreatment of subordinates.

In 2012, 26,000 cases of sexual assault are estimated to have happened with only 3,500 actually being reported. If the people being reported to are themselves rapists or willing to assault, pander, or abuse their subordinates, who are the subordinates suppose to go to for recourse?

The military has proven it lacks the moral fortitude to prosecute rapists and protect its members from rape. The Uniformed Code of Military Justice is toothless and the structures for reporting the crimes of sexual harassment, rape, and abuse are all far too easily swept under the hierarchical rug where one abuser can protect dozens under his control, if it is in his interest to do so. Judging from the staggering numbers, it is clearly time for a change.

This unfortunately will not help the women who have been harmed, twice—once as victims of rape and the other as victims of the system.

Raped, abused, mistreated, then maligned and accused of falsehoods, then watching their abuser go free and go back to work while they are escorted to their barracks, made to pack their bags and head back to their homes as failures for defending their right to not have to be abused.

These are women who have made a sacrifice, sometimes of family, to be away from home, to handle harsh physical conditions, and tolerate cultures which may not give them the same respect as men; and yet they persevere, they endure, they carry the standards of a military which is supposedly out making the world safer for everyone. They are going to the hardest work you could ever learn to love, protecting a nation whose internal workings are not designed to protect them.

Is this the best we can do?

It better not be. I didn’t serve my nation to watch the supposed best we have to offer become the worst in my lifetime.  All of you so-called leaders at the Pentagon with your shiny brass and all-too-impressive breadboards, you are not living up to the standards I was willing to die for. You were fond of telling me while I was a member of the military to give it my all, to fight the good fight until there was nothing left. Well, gentlemen. I would say you have come up short. This cannot be your all.

There are women and men who are depending on you to lead them into battle, whether it be on foreign soil or in a domestic barracks. They are expecting to be safe with the men under your commands, expecting no matter what conditions they may find themselves in, the last thing they will be forced to do is endure indignities and personal assaults.

The time when this could be considered acceptable is over. Just so we are clear, it was never acceptable. But what I have learned about large organizations is they stay the same until someone acknowledges there is a problem. We are now aware there is a problem and it must be done away with. The same way we did away with keelhauling as a cruel and unnecessary punishment, the same way we did away with slavery as an affront to our nation’s ethical standards, the same way we stopped putting children in unsafe conditions in coal mines and factories, we must now stop accepting rape as a price of service in the military.

The fear of assault undermines the very fabric of trust necessary on the field of battle. It destroys the sense of pride and honor that every soldier, male or female, wants to have when they don their uniform or gird their loins for battle. Armies win battles, face enemies, withstand hardship based on the strength of their morale. Sexual harassment, assault, and rape, if they are a hidden part of your culture, undermine morale, destroying your military from within. You must stop this, lest one day you find no one willing to serve.

My commanding officers were fond of reminding me we were part of the finest fighting forces on Earth. I think its time for the leaders of the Pentagon and of the civilian agencies which provide oversight to the military to take another look.

Some of the shine has worn off. I am certain you still extol your troops to do better, daily. I remind you now, of the same. Do better.

Thaddeus Howze, Operations Specialist Third Class, retired, USN

REFERENCES:

The Invisible War, documentary, June 2012

The academy-award nominated documentary has helped bring the military’s rape crisis to national attention. Filmmakers interviewed victims and military personnel to reveal the overwhelming obstacles to prosecuting military rape, and how inadequate efforts have been so far to curbing sexual assault.

Trauma Sets Female Veterans Adrift Back Home, New York Times, February 2013

According to the Pentagon report, 48,100 women (and 43,700 men) reported military sexual trauma last year, which studies say makes them nine times more likely to suffer from PTSD. This two-part New York Times series documents the struggles facing women veterans who’ve suffered from sexual assault, including homelessness and unemployment.

The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer, Rolling Stone, February 2013

The story of one naval officer’s rape details the consequences victims face for coming forward — consequences that keep most victims from reporting sexual attacks. After telling her superiors she had been raped, Rebecca Blumer was accused of lying, sexually harassed, denied promotions and ultimately discharged.

Rape victims say military labels them ‘crazy’, CNN, April 2012

A CNN investigation found another way the military handles rape accusations: labeling victims as emotionally unstable. After reporting a sexual assault, multiple service members were diagnosed with a personality disorder and discharged. Their abuse allegations were ignored.

The Enemy Within, National Journal, September 2012

What is it about the military that makes sexual assault so pervasive? The National Journal digs into the policies behind the statistics, and the legal loopholes exploited by sexual predators.

Pentagon grapples with sex crimes by military recruiters, Washington Post, May 2013

Active service members aren’t the only ones vulnerable to sexual assault. A recent series of scandals across the country exposed military recruiters accused of sexually abusing young people looking to enlist.

Betrayal in the Ranks, The Denver Post, 2004

The Denver Post spoke with more than 60 victims about their battle for justice, and the psychological trauma that lasted long after their assault. Many felt the military blamed them for their rape, while shielding their attackers from punishment.

Photo: The U.S. Army/Flickr

This is a comment by Cameron Brown on the post “Makeup for Men? Why?“

Cameron Brown said:

“What I would love to see is gender equality going in the opposite direction, where expensive makeup and plastic surgeries were ridiculous to both sexes, instead of bringing men into this beauty-magazine insanity.”

I have to agree with this standpoint. There is now such a push for females to look genuine, that makeup, weight etc don’t matter as much as confidence does. I believe the Dove product line very much looks at minimalism in beauty, rather than going over the top. The idea of “real women” (or more appropriately, average shape and size) as models is gaining ground … Yet now there is makeup for men!? It doesn’t make any sense at all, push for women to be their most genuine selves, but men to begin wearing makeup.

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Here’s one way to say goodbye.

Bill Murray spent a few minutes talking about a fellow cast member from SNL, Gilda Radner. This incredible snippet was spotted by a Tumblr user from the book “Live from New York: an Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live“. It will take your breath away and gives you a glimpse into these kinds of perfect, fragile, and yet immortal moments we store in our hearts.

Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever.

So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?”

We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know.

And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there.

It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.

Have you ever had a moment like this? How did you say goodbye?

[Via: Tumblr & Live from New York: an Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live]

Photo credit: Flickr / david_shankbone

The Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek died Monday, he was 74 years old.

Hear the original interviews here.

A father of five takes one hockey worshipping son to Maple Leaf Gardens who will never forget the time he spent with his Dad.

It was Saturday afternoon, October 17, 1971.  I was 10 years old, just a skinny, freckle-faced Irish looking kid (red hair and all), sitting at the kitchen table of our London, Ontario home.  Mom was there, preparing something for dinner when my father came in carrying my jacket.  ”Come on Pat, we’re going for a drive.”

“Where are we going, Dad?”

“You’ll see.”  I looked at Mom for a clue, but all she did was smile.  She knew what was up, and it made her happy.  Dad and I kissed her good-bye then hurried out the door.

I sat there squirming in the front seat of our Ford Country Squire station wagon, a car perfect for the five kids and boxer dog of an Irish-French Canadian family of seven.  This day, though, it was just me and Dad—Dennis to folks in the adult world.

As we drove out of the city, I peppered my father with impatient questions about where we were going and what we were doing, but would not give in.

“Aw, come on, Dad!  What’s going on?  Where are we going?”  I whined.  Finally, after 20 minutes of torture, he smiled, reached slowly and surely into his inside coat pocket, and drew out what appeared to be two tickets with a blue and white logo with a maple leaf. The text read:

October 17, 1971, 8:00p.m.

Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto, Ontario

Toronto Maple Leafs verses the New York Rangers.

I could hardly believe my eyes.  This was the greatest thing ever!  As a 10 year-old kid, watching an NHL hockey game—live—in Toronto, at Maple Leaf Gardens, alone with my Dad, was the greatest thing I could imagine.   Hockey was my life; I lived, ate, dreamt, talked, and played hockey—ice hockey, pond hockey, road hockey, floor hockey, table hockey, and mini-sticks hockey.

I read hockey books, hockey magazines, traded hockey cards.  Every Saturday night, we watched Hockey Night in Canada on TV; my Dad and mom in their chairs, me and my brothers laying on the floor, bouncing, rolling, hitting and play fighting— reacting to whatever happened on the screen.

I recall that one report card read, “If Patrick paid as much attention to his school work as he does to hockey….”

Going to an NHL hockey game with my Dad was elevated to a sacred event.  In a family of five children, alone time with Dad was at a premium and this outing made for a time of grace.

A strength of heart passed between us that night as we hurtled down dark Highway 401 toward Toronto.  In the depths of my young boy’s heart, a stability, a foundation of being, grew from the connection between my father and I.

There are many things a boy is afraid of when he’s growing up; the world can seem a scary place. But in those moments when my father was present to me, when he turned to me and reflected his love for me, especially through our mutual love of hockey, I knew I was all right—better than that, I knew I was loved beyond telling.

Dad drove to the western edge of Toronto and we took the subway downtown. We got off the subway down the street from the Gardens and we were swept along by the hordes of fans. Yet, I felt safe by my father’s side. I marveled at his confidence among the mass and how to get around the metropolis of Toronto.

Inside the Gardens, Dad walked me along hallways full of big black and white framed pictures of famous Leaf players, such as Lyle Conacher, Toe Blake, Davie Keon, George Armstrong, Bobby Baun, Tim Horton, many of them holding the Stanley Cup above their heads.

In the corridors, men in suits talked confidently, among themselves. Dad  leaned over to me, pointed a finger, and said, “See that guy?  He was a star when I was your age.”  I was awed.

We made our way to our seats and I couldn’t get over the colors: the red of the pipes in the net, the white of the ice, and the crisp blues of the uniforms of the Leafs and the Rangers. As the players skated around during the warm-up, I pointed out to my Dad all the players I knew—and I knew most of them. “Hey Dad, look, there’s Jean Ratelle.  Brad Park. Vic Hadfield.  And look! There’s Jacques Plante, and Bernie Parent!”   They were goaltenders and I was a goalie too. On the Leafs side were players like Ron Ellis, Dave Keon, Paul Henderson, Bruce Gamble, and Norm Ullman, all of them stars in my eyes.

I don’t remember who won the game, or even if it was a good one.  It doesn’t matter. All that matters was that I was with my Dad during a magical moment of my life, sharing with him the greatest game in the world.

My childhood wasn’t perfect.  My father had a highly stressful job in the insurance business and he liked his golf, which made me feel like I didn’t see him as much as I wanted or needed.

But, as I look back on this day in 1971, I remember how much it meant to me and how the message was received in the depths of my heart; my father loved me then, as he does now.  It was the happiest day of my young life.

Photo: JasonParis flickr

Can women actually make the first move? Jerry Stocking takes a look at 3 sexual myths influencing our sexual relationships.

Whether you know it or not and whether you like or not, you are under the influence of hidden myths that restrict your sexual pleasure, and bringing attention to these will open a whole new world of sexual expression, sexual energy and ecstasy.

These hidden myths aren’t yours, they are cultural myths. They are imposed upon you by people you don’t know, by people you will never have sex with and by people who hold values and morality quite differently than yours.

Cultural influences aren’t avoidable. Every time you watch TV, go to the movies, read a book or newspaper or talk to anyone you receive doses of culture.

Cultural inhibitions are waiting in ambush, making sex more predictable, less personal and less fun. Sexuality is influenced about as much as anything else, by cultural inhibitions and beliefs, simply because most of us are not sexually comfortable, sexually happy, and sexually mature.

You may think that you are exempt from culture’s input, but that just makes you an easy mark. Or you may be paranoid about culture’s input, but that is simply a waste of time and energy.

If you are interested in reclaiming your sexuality, please read on as I reveal three common cultural sexual myths. Even if you are the most liberated cat on the block you still are still being influenced by these myths without even realizing. Let’s bring them into the light.

 Three Sexual Myths

 The three myths are:

Men want sex more than women do.

Men have to make the first move sexually or drive the sexual process.

And the oddest one of the three: Men think they just almost got laid.

Let’s explore, and debunk these three myths one at a time. And in the process, liberate you so that you can discover your own sexuality independent of culture’s bias.

I am not suggesting that these myths are true or untrue. I am saying that they are believed by enough people that they influence you and me. Culture uses these myths to generalize and impose mass thinking on all of us. Bringing the myths to your attention can free you from most of their influence, making you sexually independent and making your sexuality your own. Reclaiming your sexuality is a good thing in a culture where sex is more marketing and taboo than it is fun and fruitful.

Myth 1: Men Want Sex More than Women Do

Culture says that men think about sex all the time, and the stereotype played out on TV or in movies is that the guy wants sex all the time and the woman doesn’t. Along with this common myth comes the idea that the man is continually demanding sex and the woman is the reason sex doesn’t happen more often.

This is a sad myth which results in a lot of frustration. It also demands that men and women play the roles that are expected of them and never really feel their way into what they want personally.

While I can certainly identify with this myth, and while it seems to be true, let’s look more deeply at it. But let’s not look at its truth; let’s explore what the world might be like if its opposite were true. Imagine, for a few moments, that women want sex more than men do.

Not only is that true in my current relationship, but it is also the case at many moments in the act of having sex. Women, it seems, derive much deeper and more bountiful pleasure from sex than men do. They feel more, they express more and they open more fully. The complaint I hear most often from women in workshops isn’t that they don’t want to have sex, but that men aren’t sensitive to what women need.

Oddly, in our culture, men drive the sexual dance by being the one who has to ask the woman out, has to make the first sexual move and is the one who wants sex. This puts women on the defensive and it has men be in charge of sex. But they aren’t really the sexual driving force. Putting them in charge, given the nature of male orgasm and female sensuality, is a terrible mistake.

The myth of male availability and female reluctance has the less sexually able male lead the way, when the much more sexually open and pleasure enhancing female ought to be driving the game. Which leads us to myth number two.

Myth 2: Men Have to Make the First Move Sexually or Drive the Sexual Process

If you want to continually risk rejection, be frustrated, scared and seeking something you may not even want (sex), then be a man. You will quickly discover that it isn’t much fun.

Men are tired of having to approach women. Whether it is someone new in a coffee shop or a spouse of thirty years, the guy has to make the first move. Women aren’t allowed to propose sex, or even ask for a date.

Women who do those sorts of things are considered to be aggressive or worse. I am not suggesting that this never happens, but women making advances isn’t common.

 A friend of mine and I were walking down the street in London. Two rather attractive women approached us, speaking to us first and expressing interest in us.

Like us, you probably imagine that they were prostitutes, because women just don’t approach men very often. And even with couples married for a long time, the first step is often left up to the fella.

Myth one and two support each other. And if you consider either one of them as true then your sexuality and behavior will be dictated by cultural myths. You will be less free sexually than you might be.

I am not asking you to change your behavior, nor am I asking that women take the lead. What is needed is the discovery that the way things are is often based on cultural directives. Noticing how things are is the most powerful first step to them changing for the better. Shedding the light of attention on these myths reduces their influence and frees you to express yourself.

Myth 3: Men Think They Just Almost Got Laid

This myth is a bit more invisible than the first two. Even men who believe it often don’t notice it, mostly because they are so used to it.

Imagine this, guys: You walk into the library and there is an attractive woman behind the counter. You check out books or get a library card and you dare to “connect” with the librarian by chatting a bit about something other than books.

Ladies and gentlemen, believe it or not, in this scenario, the guy might think that he just almost had sex. He thinks that he not only could have her but that he almost did. That isn’t, of course, how the librarian probably views it. She is just doing her job.

But, if you, the spouse, are waiting in the car and he returns a little sheepish or bold it might be because he thinks he just almost got laid.

The result of guys thinking they almost got laid is a frustrated preoccupation with sex. When a guy almost gets laid, he thinks about sex. Thinking about sex isn’t the same as sex, it is just more thinking.

Notice, guys, how often you get laid and how often you think you almost got laid. The math of these two, if you will pardon the expression, is out of whack.

Guys, relax; notice your sexual energy. Stop directing it toward librarians, random women in the grocery store, life guards and women on TV. Really. Keeping and then flowing sexual energy within will have you be happier, healthier and more satisfied. It will also make it more likely that you can satisfy the women in your life.

♦◊♦

 More Myths

 Just discovering these myths is enough to free up your sexual energy.

 It will relieve sexual inhibitions and lighten you up. It will also have you discover a whole messy nest of other cultural imperatives and myths that aren’t true but are blocking you from free expression and the experience of sexuality.

Examining these myths with attention and with levity will allow you to regain your own sexual will power and energy.

There are lots of other cultural myths about sex. We are one frustrated culture and are continually minting new myths to contain sexual expression.

Other myths that are probably influencing your sexual expression include ideas such as these:

• Orgasms are hard to come by, when they are actually difficult to avoid.
• Ejaculation and orgasm need to come together for a man, when men can actually orgasm many times and even ejaculate a few too.
• Sexual energy is located  only at specific places in your body, when it is, in fact, in every nook and cell and cranny of this sexy planet.

Please feel free to share the sexual myths you have discovered by commenting below. If you want me to address and undress more myths please let me know and I will be glad to do so.

Remember that cultural sexual myths aren’t true, but what they do to you is real. Focusing attention on them can set your sexual expression free and result in more and better sex.

Image Credit: je@n/Flickr 

Jerry Stocking  is a spirituality author who has been helping people eliminate fear, worry and stress from their lives. Doing so provides relief, presence, bliss and prosperity where there had been fear. Visit his blog, Lightening Up and Letting go at www.jerrystocking.com/blog and discover everything you need to jump head first out of fear and into the present.

Despite men being statistically less healthy than women, global health funding has been largely focused on women.

For the past decade, men’s health issues have taken backseat to women’s health issues as far as funding is concerned.

Sarah Hawkes from the University of London’s Institute of Global Health said that programs and policies for men have been “notably absent” for the past 10 years, even though men have shorter lifespans than women and are more likely to engage in risky behaviors like smoking and drinking. She is calling for more gender equality in global health funding.

“If you look at the top 10 health problems around the world, they are much more common in men,” she said, “but the current focus is predominantly on women’s health.”

Recent data has shown that men lose three times as many years of healthy living as women to tobacco and alcohol use.

in 2000, global leaders at the United Nations agreed on eight ways to improve the lives of the poorest people around the world: one goal is specifically targeted at maternal health, and all of the other goals “touch on essential aspects of women’s well-being, and in turn, women’s empowerment is critical for achieving the goals,” according to the U.N. Women’s website.

There are no goals specifically targeted to men, and men’s health doesn’t get its own website.

“We don’t want to see this money diverted away from women’s health,” said Hawkes, “but focusing on maternal health means you miss the biggest burdens of disease.”

Health economist Karen Grepin of New York University says, “If we focus on closing inequality, we’ll miss the boat. The goal is to reduce mortality, not to reduce inequalities in the measure of mortality.”

Grepin argues that unhealthy women—mothers specifically—have a devastating effect on households, especially to their children.

“There are really important consequences for women’s health. They play a large role in taking care of children. When they get sick, there’s a spillover effect in the house—for the next generation.”

But an argument like this negates the importance of men in families, addresses men’s health from the standpoint of a “normal” 1950s family, one in which the man is merely the breadwinner. But around the world that is not the case. Men play an equally important role as women in the lives of their children, and in families with gay parents, men are the only parents. If the goal of healthcare is to reduce mortality, shouldn’t equal attention be paid to the sex with the shorter lifespan? Wouldn’t equal healthcare funding actually reduce mortality by lengthening the lives of half of the world’s population?

Photo: francoiskarm/Flickr

More than 100 days have passed since the hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay started, and with no progress being made, an American minister has joined the strike.

On Sunday, May 12, Timothy Murphy began a fast of solidarity with the Guantanamo inmates who are on a hunger strike to protest their indefinite detention. Murphy is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ); knowing the suffering of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, he felt spiritually called on to participate in the hunger strike.

On a diet of only water, Murphy plans to stay on strike as long as he is physically able or until the Obama administration begins taking action to address the grievances of the Guantanamo inmates. The 100 prisoners on a hunger strike, some of whom have been force-fed against their wishes, have been going for over 100 days now. Murphy has been on strike for 9 days and has already lost 7-percent of his body weight and gets dizzy when standing.

“Many Americans,” Murphy said, “tend to think of the Guantanamo prisoners as ‘the worst of the worst.’ It’s easy to not pay attention to their plight, regardless of whether they die of hunger, have tubes shoved down their esophagus for force feeding, or languish in Guantanamo permanently—even the prisoners who have already been determined not to have been enemy combatants.”

Murphy urges other Americans to join in the hunger strike in the hopes that the government will address and resolve the situation with haste and decisiveness. Every day of the strike he is calling his senators and representatives to inquire about what they are doing and encourage swift action.

“I don’t know for how long I will do this,” he told Carlos Warner, attorney to some of the inmates, “but if nothing else, I want the men in Guantanamo to know that myself and others care about their situation enough to act in support of them so that the Obama administration responds to their grievances.”

Read more about the Guantanamo Bay hunger strike on The Good Men Project:

If They Were Somebody, They Are Somebody

NEW REPORT: Updated Guide to Guantanamo Force-Feeding

UN Declares Force-Feeding Breach of International Law

Photo: Evan Vucci/AP

Abigail Rine recaps Mad Men’s Episode 8, where the office gets high on uppers, and it’s revealed that Don Draper’s sex addiction may link back to having been raped as a teenager.

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The open images of this episode, “The Crash,” are an apt thematic frame: men careening out of control, chaos on wheels, a sense of imminent and epic destruction. More specifically, a terrified Kenny trying to maintain control of an Impala full of drunk, frenzied, gun-wielding GM clients. This scene cuts suddenly to one of stasis: Don loitering outside the backdoor of Sylvia’s apartment, the collection of cigarette butts around his feet signaling that he’s been there for quite awhile. There is turmoil here, too, but hidden.

Sylvia hasn’t gone back on her decision to end their affair – in fact, she’s furious at Don for hanging on like a heartsick Romeo and calls him at work to tell him so. Don begs for a chance to speak with her, vulnerably admitting that he’s “feeling a lot of emotions, too.” But, unlike during last episode’s “Fifty Shades of Draper” fantasy, Sylvia is calling the shots now, and she urges Don to recommit to his marriage – as she, apparently, is doing.

After Sylvia hangs up on him, Don erupts into a coughing fit so intense that it sends him into a flashback. Don Draper is beginning to fracture and a teenaged Dick Whitman, now living in his uncle’s whorehouse, is poking through. Young Dick is suffering from a nasty cough as well, and his stepmother interacts with him like a doctor with an icy bedside demeanor – no affection or comfort, just quarantine in the cellar.

Back in the present, the men of the office are lining up for shots of “energy serum” from Jim Cutler’s doctor. Chevy, the hot new client that brought these agencies together, is proving impossible to please and demanding a packet of new campaign ideas by Tuesday, which means working through the weekend.

As you can imagine, this is when things really start to unravel.

Don, fresh from his amphetamine shot, catches a glimpse of Peggy rubbing Ted’s arm in a comforting gesture, in the wake of news that Frank Gleason has died. This display of platonic affection seems to confuse Don, or at least fixate him enough to send him spiraling to the past again – or maybe his past is spiraling into the present. Either way, Dick is back, and he’s being comforted by a prostitute named Aimee, who lets him rest in her room and assures him that he’s not dying of consumption, but merely has a chest cold. Dick spies a picture of a baby on Aimee’s dresser, and for the moment we are given a comforting scene: a sick, motherless boy being comforted by a sonless mother.

Cut back to copywriters on speed, amidst a fruitless brainstorming session. Don is in his office, turning to the past for inspiration, rummaging frantically through old ads, until he’s interrupted by Kenny, who breaks into a feverish jig while giving a breathless account of his hellish duties as Chevy’s “favorite toy.”

Don then whisks over to the copywriters to deliver a nonsensical motivational speech, which is clearly more applicable to himself than anyone else: “I know you all feel the darkness here today, but there’s no reason to give in.” This is our first clue that Don’s quest for the “one great idea” isn’t really about Chevy at all, but about something far more personal. His next flashback provides the image, the “answer,” he’s been looking for – Aimee nursing sick young Dick through his fever, giving him spoonfuls of warm broth.

For Don, this memory is an instant, a flash of inspiration, but what seems to him like the next moment is actually the following day – Peggy and others, in black attire, have just returned from Frank’s funeral. The past, present, and immediate future jumble together and Don careens between them, with the viewers in tow.

A mysterious girl named Wendy, complete with I Ching coins and a gypsy vibe, has suddenly appeared; we learn later that she is Frank Gleason’s daughter, but for the moment she has no context, and when Don goes to his office after meeting her in another room, he finds her already there, sitting on his couch. Another time jump. She’s wearing a stethoscope, and Don seems bothered by this, maybe because it conjures Sylvia’s surgeon husband, or being “doctored” by Aimee, the prostitute. “I’m here to make you feel better,” says Wendy, and by this she means sex. She tries to listen to his heart, but can’t hear anything. “Oh, I think it’s broken,” she says, meaning the stethoscope, but Don is unsettled by the thought that she can detect his broken heart. “You can hear that?” He whispers.

Despite the absence of uppers, things are no less surreal on the home front. It’s Don’s weekend with the kids, but he’s busy ghost-hunting at work, so Megan leaves Sally to babysit her younger brothers while she goes out to hobnob with Broadway big shots. When a noise wakes Sally in the middle of the night, she discovers a middle-aged black woman, who claims to be Sally’s grandmother, digging through their drawers and cabinets. “I raised your daddy,” she says, and the initially skeptical Sally is soon lulled into believing the lie, which highlights how utterly obscure her father’s past is to her. For all she knows, Ida could be telling the truth.

In the meantime, Don’s quest for his “answer” leads him to the archives, where he finds an ad of a smiling mother leaning over her son while he beams up at her, raising the heaping spoon toward his mouth – not soup, but oatmeal. The copy reads: Because you know what he needs. The mother in the ad looks eerily like Sylvia, with her brunette hair and a matching mole – she’s even sporting a head wrap almost identical to the one Sylvia wears in her first appearance in this episode.

Don gazes at the ad, transfixed, and we are transported back to the whorehouse, where Dick awakes, his fever broken, and proceeds to get raped by Aimee.

I use the word rape intentionally. As soon as Aimee’s sexual intentions are clear, Dick becomes clearly uncomfortable, avoiding eye contact and clutching the blanket close. “Stop it,” he says, but she doesn’t. If the sexes were reversed here, if an older man caring for a sick, teenaged girl proceeded to have sex with her against her protestations, that would be immediately recognizable as rape – but what happens to Dick is no less tragic, no less a violation.

Don stares at the ad of the loving mother while a reel of his own warped, abusive encounter with maternal affection plays through his head. Don has dragged us down into his own archives and, in this moment, we do find an “answer,” an insight into why Don can’t seem to distinguish sex from love, and why his relationships with women are invariably toxic. His first experience of love (Aimee’s name is no coincidence) is entangled with sex and exploitation.

This scene recalls an earlier interaction between Peggy and Stan, who is trying to convince Peggy to sleep with him. “I need this,” he says, explaining that his cousin was just killed in Vietnam. But instead of sex, Peggy offers him sympathy, as well as the only real glimmer of wisdom to be found in this episode: “I’ve had loss in my life,” she says. “You have to let yourself feel it. You can’t dampen it with drugs or sex.”

Here, Peggy serves as stark contrast to Don, Aimee, Wendy, and Stan, as she refuses to reduce human contact and affection to a sexual encounter. Of course, as we see later, Stan doesn’t listen to her advice and ends up banging Wendy – who buried her father earlier that day – while Jim watches creepily through the doorway, much to Peggy’s disgust.

What goes up must come down, and Don is no exception. He wanders home – sweaty, shaky, and mumbling to himself about Sylvia, how he’ll convince her to take him back. He opens the door to find several policemen in his living room, along with Megan, his children, Henry, and an irate Betty, who is holding Gene protectively in her lap. Two seasons ago, Betty was an icon of maternal dysfunction, but now, in the context of this episode with its array of twisted mother figures, she’s looking pretty good.

All is now fine; Sally called the cops and Ida was nabbed by the police, but this welcome party proves too much for Don, who collapses on the floor. Crash. We are pulled into another memory. Aimee, as she is getting kicked out of the whorehouse, proclaims that she “took that boy’s cherry,” and, hearing this, Dick’s stepmother beats him with a wooden spoon and screams at him while he cowers on the floor.

The scene cuts from a shot of the stepmother’s enraged face to the adult Don, sitting on the edge of his bed, looking haunted and dazed. “I’m sorry,” says Megan, in the background. “Sally seems so grown up, but she is really still a kid.” The same could be said for Don – deep, but not too far down, Don is still a wounded, teenaged, love-starved Dick Whitman. It is impossible to completely separate the two, no matter how hard Don tries. Peggy puts it best earlier in the episode, while tossing out ideas for the Chevy campaign: “The child is the father of the man.”

Monday morning. Don is a new man, composed, showered, steel-eyed. He begins his elevator ride alone, and when Sylvia joins him, he doesn’t look at her, only offering a single dismissive word in response to her polite, “How are you?” No hint of vulnerability, no trace of the lovesick, chain-smoking loiterer. If Don’s Pandora’s box cracked open over the weekend, the lid is now locked down. Tight.

At work, Don calls Sally to reassure her that he didn’t have a heart attack. Sally is embarrassed at being fooled by Ida and attempts to explain why Ida’s vague story was persuasive. “I realized I don’t know anything about you,” she says. And Don, in an unusual display of self-deprecating honesty, admits what we already suspected – Ida’s invasion was his fault; he left the back door open when he went by his apartment building that night – not to see his children, who were alone inside, but to press his ear against Sylvia’s door.

In the closing scene of the episode, Ted, who was off mourning Frank and missed the festivities, is bewildered and indignant at the “gibberish” generated by the creative team over the weekend, who failed to even spell “Chevy” correctly. Don doesn’t offer any excuse, but simply announces that he will no longer be the idea man for the Chevy account. “Sorry, Ted,” Don says, “But every time we get a car, this place turns into a whorehouse.” And not just any whorehouse, but the haunted one of Don’s past, which he would like to pretend no longer exists.

Yet, as he walks away from Ted’s office, the twanging, ragtime piano music reminds us that even though it’s a new workweek, and time has temporarily reordered itself, the whorehouse, Aimee, and Dick Whitman are still there. For Don, they always will be.

***

Mad Men certainly lived up to its name this week. Thanks in part to the magic of “energy serum,” we were treated to a slew of men acting like maniacs. Whether or not this was a rock-bottom turning point remains unclear. I suspect things will continue to unravel for Don, as his life mirrors the upheavals and despair of 1968. And if the opening lines of this season from The Inferno are any indication, Don may have further yet to fall in his steady, hell-bound descent.

BIO: Abigail Rine teaches literature and gender studies at George Fox University. She is the author of the forthcoming book Irigaray, Incarnation and Contemporary Women’s Fiction. She writes regularly at Mama Unabridged, as well as for the The Atlantic Sexes Channel.

Peace Corps Deputy Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet today announced that the agency will begin accepting applications from same-sex domestic partners who want to serve together as volunteers overseas.

Following February’s news that the Pentagon is extending some benefits to same-sex partners of service members, the Peace Corps has taken equality a step further. Beginning June 3^rd, same-sex domestic couples can apply to serve overseas together as Volunteers.

“Service in the Peace Corps is a life-defining leadership experience for Americans who want to make a difference around the world,” Deputy Director Hessler-Radelet said. “I am proud that the agency is taking this important step forward to allow same-sex domestic partners to serve overseas together.”

Admittedly, LGBT Volunteers have had a history of acceptance within Peace Corps, but this is a new level of support that only married heterosexual Volunteers have had before. After pre-service training, Volunteers are sworn in and sent off to their work sites and most small towns and villages only receive one volunteer. However, married Volunteers may train for a couple months apart, but then are sent to the same site for their two or more years of service. The advantages of having another Volunteer nearby are too many to list, from the opportunities to work together on projects to simply having handy support from another American.

This announcement is also likely to bring on not only expected criticism, but a slew of problems for Peace Corps staff, to whom I would like to say “Bravo” ahead of time for dealing with everything. The U.S. is often criticized for being “Puritanical” when it comes to our values, but our strides in equal rights recently are considered liberal in many countries that Volunteers serve in. The problems that LGBT Volunteers would take on individually, for example—explaining why they don’t want to be set up with a perfectly lovely member of the opposite sex, will now be problems for the agency as a whole. The Peace Corps will be handling an uphill battle here, but at least they have some pretty amazing Volunteers who understand and can lend their experience.

Photo: PeaceCorps.org

Ernie R writes to The Good Life of two best men: his own, and himself.

My guess is you will get a lot more submissions from guys a lot younger than I am (50) because they are closer to getting married or have recently gotten married. My wedding took place 23 years ago. I want to tell you about two best men: myself, and my best man.

When I was a best man to my college roommate I did everything right (or as right as broke college students can do)—bachelor bash, help with whatever he needed, emotional support for him and his fiancee—he could not have hired a better one as either a best man or a best friend. But I did it all looking backward at an intense friendship that was dying. For a lot of reasons I won’t go into here, I was this guy’s best man because I earned it, for all I did for him, for all the shit  I put up with and because while he had other friends, good guys, I was the best of them all—no brag, just truth.

But I failed my own test of “best man-ness” because I looked at the “honor” as the final task, the last, best thing, I could do, before setting myself free from a friendship that had turned into a toxic burden. Though I occasionally wonder how this former friend is doing, being his best man “paid the bill” for whatever I felt I owed him. And I sincerely wanted to do the best I could, even though I knew our friendship was ending. That marriage lasted five years; ending for some of the same reasons our friendship ended. I find no vindication in that, just sadness for him because he just couldn’t seem to grasp the idea of loyalty, either to a friend or to a wife.

In contrast, my own best man was  a guy I had known, trusted and loved ever since we became friends in prep school. In a lot of ways he was “my brother from another mother.” We laughed a lot, cried some, too, shared some painful family secrets and discovered we could still look at each other without shame our condemnation. I knew this guy would always be my best man from the way he looked after both my wife and me, how he supported us as a couple. And then something happened about ten years ago: Due to some chronic illnesses, some extended family stuff, some middle age stuff, I ended up in a very dark place of depression. The people I worked for were kind and supportive; they gave me space in which to heal, but it was my best man who got me through: Two calls a day, every day; sometimes to talk, sometimes to listen; sometimes to hear the same story over and over again. But always to be a light at the end of the tunnel, keeping me connected and drawing me forward to wholeness. He made those calls for months, along with calls to my wife to support her, to my kids to encourage them.

What I’m saying to other guys who are choosing their best man is this: you can get a best man like I was, who did everything right, but couldn’t and wouldn’t be there for the long haul. Or you can get a best man like mine, who, through the best and worst of over 30 years has never bailed and rarely failed. I got the better deal.

Read more: Weddings on The Good Life.

Image credit: katielips/Flickr

Chantele Theroux on how to live and love like the Man in Black.

“Sometimes I am two people. Johnny is the nice one. Cash causes all the trouble. They fight.”—Johnny Cash

For as much of a progressively independent, stand-alone hellcat-in-heels as I can be, I’m the first to admit that I’m a sucker for old-fashioned flair and finesse in life, and in love.

Part natural-born talent or studied subtle art, believe me boys, it’s all sexy. It’s the hold-the-door-open, pull-my-chair-out, offering-your-coat-kinda man. You can’t buy that kind of charm, and charisma doesn’t come bottled or on tap.

You’re tearing apart your dirt bike by day and enjoying dinner with your grandma by night. Your rugged edges frame that wildly kind and considerate heart of yours, and we love you for it.

I’m not talking about launching ourselves back into a revivalist regression of gender stereotypes. From the royale femme fatale to the manliest man among men, we all seek to satiate that natural craving for a delicious balance of feminine strut and masculine swagger. It’s the yin and the yang of it, Baby, and we’re a limited edition of both.

While we oppose, there doesn’t have to be conflict or competition. It’s a hearty dose of resonant convergence where strength in doing meets the goodness of being. Rocking your very own, real balance is what makes anyone sexy. Especially the Man in Black.

Johnny Cash was a full on outlaw-country badass blessed with a locomotive voice so strong it busted through prison walls. He epitomized grandeur in complexity and the exquisite contradiction of soft and beautiful strength, expressed through the songs, stories, scars, triumphs and trials of his very real, remarkable life.

Here are six classic ways to live and love a little more like the one and only Man in Black:

1. Be compassion.

Compel with charm and sincerity. For over 20 years, Johnny Cash performed free prison concerts for inmates in the U.S., and even once in Sweden. ‘The Johnny Cash Show’ also provided a forum for social issues that ranged from the war in Vietnam to prison reform to the rights of Native Americans in the 1960s.

He helped build bridges of commonality by propelling unpopular opinion and often unmarketable ideas into the mainstream. He also passionately supported S.O.S. Children’s Villages, an international child charity that provides long-term care for orphans and children in need.

Written and performed for his first-ever prison performance, ‘San Quentin’ … at San Quentin:

2. Define devotion.

This love and life isn’t all happily ever after. It’s sometimes wrought with disappointment and near disastrous, total train wreck tragedy. For as bulletproof as a heart can become, most can still bleed and cause a bloody massacre. To those who have totally unraveled, full on fucking lost it or have met the rock-bottom versions of yourselves, I salute you, and welcome you to our club.

After you’ve been blinded by the full and colorfully real expression of the human spectrum, life seems different. You start to realize that beauty isn’t always pretty, that not much in life is black and white, and that the only real guarantee in any fairy tale is that one day it will end.

Believe me ladies, if you lose your shoe(s) at midnight, chances are you’re walking home barefoot. Please try your best to keep them both on your feet. Mr. Cash said (when asked about June), “she loves me in spite of everything, in spite of myself. She has saved my life more than once.”

He and his first wife, Vivian Liberto, wrote over 10,000 pages of love letters to each other during the time he was stationed in Germany and he proposed marriage, over the phone. Because sometimes when you know what you want, you do what needs to be done to make it happen.

Johnny Cash battled alcohol abuse and drug addiction most of his adult life, burned down over 500 acres of a national forest, and affairs were one of the main reasons for the breakdown of his first marriage.

He wasn’t a saint, but never claimed to be.

“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.”—Johnny Cash

In 1970, he also played a free concert at LaFayette’s High School football stadium along with other country artists. It attracted 12,000 people (amazing, considering the town’s population was about 8,500) and raised over $75,000 for their athletic association.

3. Simple is Sexy. Scars don’t hurt either.

Depth doesn’t have to be complicated.

Scars show the world you’ve risked it, came out wounded, but landed on your feet…eventually, and somehow.

Wear all of them with pride.

4. Stir.

Merle Haggard (another iconic country music Hall-of-Famer) credits Johnny Cash with giving him the inspiration to launch a music career after prison, recording an impressive 38 #1 hits on the country charts.

At age eleven, Haggard’s mother had turned him over to the juvenile authorities as “incorrigible.” By twenty, he was sentenced to fifteen years in San Quentin.

In 1958, Johnny Cash played that now legendary concert that helped steer his path to becoming a country music legend in his own right. The world has too many limitations as it is, be a motivating force.

5. Rage.

With the night. Against the dying of what’s light. Be fearless, and please find a cause beyond how much literal cash you carry, the ride you roll in, or style you rock.

He famously said,

“I wore black because I liked it. I still do, and wearing it still means something to me. It’s still my symbol of rebellion—against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others’ ideas.”

In addition to being a music legend, Johnny Cash was also a best-selling novelist and an artist. He showed the the world that your greatest gifts are what you can give back to it.

Rage and be a rebel with a cause, anyone worthy of 1-4 will love you for it.

6. Respectfully Yours.

Given and earned, esteem is one of the best gifts on earth.

Bob Dylan described to Rolling Stone Magazine that Johnny Cash used his gifts “to express all the various lost causes of the human soul.” Muhammad Ali was also a big Johnny Cash fan.

Johnny Cash also covered hundreds of other artists’ songs over the span of his career, always gave credit where credit was due, yet made them his own. Trent Reznor described hearing Johnny Cash’s cover of his Nine Inch Nails song, “Hurt,” to Rolling Stone Magazine:

“We were in the studio, getting ready to work—and I popped it in, by the end I was really on the verge of tears. I’m working with Zach de la Rocha, and I told him to take a look. At the end of it, there was just dead silence. There was, like, this moist clearing of our throats and then, ‘Uh, OK, let’s get some coffee.‘”

You can watch the tragically soulful video here:

Having just celebrated what would have been Johnny Cash’s 81^st birthday, take it from him, “be thrilled to death with life,” and remember that the fastest way to anyone’s heart is staying true to yours.

This was previously published on Rebelle Society. {Walk the Line} with Rebelle Society on Facebook

Read more in A&E.

Image credit: brehantodd/Flickr

An easy, energy efficient way to brew tea in your kitchen.

All right! The temperature’s finally changing from cool to warm, so how ‘bout we take tea from hot to cold as easily as possible? What you’ll see here is the fastest and easiest way I know to make fresh and flavorful iced tea. The key is warming the water only enough to get the tea bags to steep effectively and then getting the tea in the refrigerator to cool as quickly as possible.

Regarding flavor, though you’ll see four tea bags of the same flavor in the pictures below, you can add variety by mixing different flavored teas. I do that more often than not.

Preparation Time: 7-10 minutes plus cooling time

Needed
(to make 2 quarts)

4 Tea Bags
2 Quarts (64 Ounces) Cold Water
2-Quart Pot
Tablespoon
2-Quart Jar with Top
Timer

1. Put 4 tea bags in a 2-quart pot. I remove the string and paper tab from the tea bag making sure not to remove the staple or tie used to keep the tea bag closed as shown in the lower right picture.

2. Fill the pot mostly full with cold water. Put the pot on the stove,…

…turn on the burner to HIGH heat, and set a timer for 3 minutes.

3. When the timer sounds, turn off the stove and set a timer for 5 minutes to allow the tea bags to steep.

4. When the timer sounds again, remove the tea bags from the warm water, and pour the warm tea into a 2-quart jar. NOTE: If the tea is uncomfortably warm to handle, let it cool until it feels both safe to handle and safe to pour into a jar without causing the jar to break from a quick change in temperature.

5. Cover the jar with a top, and put the jar in the refrigerator.

6. To serve, fill a glass with ice and add the fresh cooled tea.

See more Food on The Good Life.

Images courtesy of the author

As makeup becomes more socially acceptable for men to wear, the benefits of it are called into question.

So I came across the article “Makeup for Men Is on the Rise—and No Longer a Taboo” the other day and couldn’t help but wonder about the second part of that headline. You see, for makeup to stop being taboo it means men have always wanted to wear it, but just couldn’t because of society rules. Now is that what’s really happened?

Let’s look at this from an evolutionary standpoint. Millions of years ago a cavewoman would want a man who had qualities to make him a good partner to have children with and to help her take care of their offspring.

I imagine she must have considered in him things such as heights and muscle mass to chase after lions and what have you, but taking care of a family probably meant much more than that. That’s what I always think about when I see a rich old man with a beautiful young girlfriend. People are very quick to judge them, but if you think about it from an evolutionary point of view both are making the best possible choices.

You could argue that men should be showing the same sort of behavior, but you’d be forgetting to consider that women have a lot more at stake when it comes to sex—and the very likely possibility of getting pregnant—so unlike us they need to be very picky. For millions of years (and for many women still today) pregnancy not only puts her health at risk but will often hinder her ability to provide for herself, not to mention the difficulties in taking care of the baby after they’re born. Not everyone gets to be born in 21st century Sweden.

That’s also why silicon implants in men have never made any sense to me. After all, not only women usually look at much more than just looks, what good can come from fake muscles if when push comes to shove he won’t be strong enough to defend her? And I know breast implants in women aren’t very evolutionarily smart either, but for men they have fewer implications in the success of their lineage so they don’t mind. Yes, we’re just very superficial that way.

We are not, of course, living in caves anymore and arguing from the perspective of men fighting lions sounds as stupid as getting biceps implants, but what I want to understand about the whole “breaking the taboo of makeup for men” is what good can come from introducing yet another useless, impractical beauty standard into our lives? Especially to a part of the population that today is moderately healthy in its approach to looks and fashion (at least compared to women)? Should we all just get on-board and suffer the agonies of high heels and hot waxing too?

What I would love to see is gender equality going in the opposite direction, where expensive makeup and plastic surgeries were ridiculous to both sexes, instead of bringing men into this beauty-magazine insanity.

Cosmetic companies have long tried to convince men to buy their products, but until now they’ve all failed over the fact that, let’s face it, men never really needed to look that good to impress women. In fact, we learn that men who “try too hard” must be overcompensating for a weakness he’s hiding, which naturally makes them unappealing to the opposite sex.

But times they are a-changing and we’re reaching a point where men “are allowed” by society to wear makeup. Though I am sure there is a portion of the male population who’ll enjoy the idea, the whole thing just smells like consumerist agenda. Like marketing forcing men to buy things they don’t need, cosmetic companies doubling their markets and more of us getting miserable and insecure about the way we look.

Photo: Hye Soo Nah/AP

Relationship Guru Mort Fertel is often asked: “How do we know when it’s time to give up on our marriage?”

If you’re considering divorce, I suggest first trying to make it work for at least one more year.

Did you hear that?

Try for at least one more year!

And I mean really try. You can always call it quits. You always have that option. But once you pull that trigger, it’s over. No more chances. Your life will never be the same. And if you have kids, their lives will  never be the same.

If you end your marriage, you don’t want to have a shred of doubt about what might have been. You don’t ever want to look back and wonder if things could have been different. You don’t want to ask yourself What if I had tried this or that?


If you have to end your marriage, you want to know deep in your heart that you did everything you could to make it work.

♦◊♦

Giving it one year of serious effort will also help you to move on with your life and into another relationship with a clear head, should you ultimately divorce. You want to come to a place of healthy closure. That is crucial!  In my experience, the best way to do that is to work at your marriage for at least one additional year. I know it probably seems like a long  time, but it’s an investment in the rest of your life. That’s a key point: it will prove a good investment whether your marriage succeeds or not.

Obviously, it’s a good investment if you do turn your marriage around. But if you don’t, it will not have been a wasted year. It will have been the most important thing you could have done with that year because of the impact on your future and your next relationship.

I have seen too many cases of spouses ending their marriages prematurely; as a result, they never reached closure in the relationship. A few years later, they find themselves in the same situation with someone else.

◊♦◊

Sometimes the progress individuals make in relationship counseling turns out to be more beneficial for them in their next relationship than in their current one.

I remember an instance when a man’s marriage ended in the middle of a seven-week marriage boot camp. The individual asked whether he should continue with the final weeks of the program. I said, ”Absolutely.”

He responded, “Why? What’s the point? My marriage is over.”

“You’re not doing it for this marriage,” I explained. “You’re doing it for the benefit of your next one.”

Now don’t get me wrong: your intention for working on your marriage shouldn’t be simply to benefit your life after marriage. You need to be intent on restoring your current relationship.

But if you fail, your effort will not have been for naught.

♦◊♦

Bottom line is this. If you’re asking, “When is it time to call it quits?”

The answer is: one year after you think you’re done. If after one more year of trying everything in your power to make your marriage work you’re still miserable, then you should consider moving on. Until then, hang in there and don’t give up.

I’m speaking from experience. I remember learning late one night that my wife had an appointment with a divorce attorney the next morning. We were hours from done. Who would have thought we could turn things around at that point?

We did, of course.

Very often, the turning point in a marriage comes when a couple hits rock bottom. Sometimes it’s not until things couldn’t get worse that they can finally get better.

Photo by daBinsi

Alastair Hilton on his work with male survivors of sexual abuse and violence.

For over twenty years I have worked with male survivors of sexual abuse and violence, carried out research focusing on the sexual abuse of boys and men in Cambodia and am currently engaged in another study exploring the needs and challenges of service providers working with male survivors of sexual violence in developing countries. For me this is an issue that is all consuming – as a professional social worker, researcher, long time activist – and also as a man who was also once a vulnerable boy.

The silence endured by male survivors of sexual abuse should never be underestimated. Shame, stigma, the fear of discovery and responses of others, are just some of the factors that lead many to wait twenty years or more before they tell anyone. The vast majority of male survivors never seek ‘professional’ help, even if it is available. The culture of silence is paralysing and not restricted to survivors themselves.

My interest was drawn again in March of this year, when, in a blaze of publicity, the British Foreign Secretary William Hague and actor Angelina Jolie visited the Democratic Republic of Congo to meet victims of rape in conflict zones – and subsequently sought to engage governments in taking action at the April G8 foreign ministers meeting in London.

Whilst their efforts are commendable and the commitment of those G8 representatives long overdue, there was to my mind also something quite surreal at the sight of Ms. Jolie making her closing speech, surrounded by sombre looking men in suits, nodding in agreement as she spoke of the ‘forgotten victims of war’ and the ‘rights of women and children.’ There was a very brief mention of men as victims of course, which I guess is a step in the right direction, though subsequent media reports barely mentioned males at all.

Whilst progress is being made in many settings, the continued invisibility of men as victims and subsequent lack of meaningful debate is astonishing, especially taking into consideration the increasing evidence, both in peace and wartime settings, of an epidemic of sexual abuse where boys and men are concerned. As if further evidence of this invisibility were needed, a recent BBC Hardtalk programme broadcast at the beginning of May, featured Zainab Bangura, the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict. Unbelievably, there was not a single mention of men and boys by Bangura, and not a question asked about this by the interviewer. The overwhelming silence continues.

It’s not that I am ungrateful for the efforts of Hague and Jolie – I recognize that women and girls are predominantly the victims of rape and abuse in peace time and conflict, and that the vast majority of services and support for women and girls are not adequate – but I also have concerns that males are continually overlooked. Anyone with a commitment to social justice in all its forms should not be at all complacent and grateful for a few sound bites and being thrown a few ‘crumbs off the table’ in the form of politically expedient press releases. There is much to do if all victims of rape and abuse, whatever their gender or identity, are to receive the support they so richly deserve.

Back in 1990, Fran Sepler, quoted in Patrick Mendel’s seminal work The Male Survivor wrote of what she termed the ‘feminisation of victimisation’ – where essentially women and girls are perceived  as victims and men as the perpetrators of sexual violence. A generation later, little seems to have changed in so many respects. This is still very much the lens through which sexual violence is predominantly defined and viewed in communities, organisations and the corridors of power within most international organisations. When international NGOs and their representatives speak of ‘gender based violence’, they invariably mean women and children, when they speak of ‘women and children’ the reality, as I have discovered on numerous occasions, is that they are referring to ‘women and girls’. Somehow ‘the language of ‘gender’ has morphed into something that essentially excludes boys and men as victims.

The fact that this was so clearly illustrated by Bangura on the Hardtalk programme was no coincidence; this is the normal state of affairs.  When men and boys are included in gender based violence work, it is as ‘agents of change’, enlisted to prevent violence against females (and rightly so) but they are still predominantly excluded from the discourse where victimisation is discussed. It is simply not acceptable that males as victims are continually ignored or so often only briefly mentioned.

My own experiences and research in peace and wartime contexts identify that support and appropriate services for male victims are few and far between. Specific training and assistance for those working with males is conspicuous by its absence. Many professionals struggle to know how to help and often comment that they feel as isolated as those they are striving to support. Against this backdrop a lack of awareness in many settings leads to discrimination, and a continuation of the humiliation and paralysing silence many male survivors experience. Recent research with NGOs working in conflict zones illustrates this. Of 4076 surveyed – only 3% of their literature made any mention of males, and often only in passing. At the same time global estimates suggest one in six boys and men will experience some form of sexual abuse in their lives, whilst increasing evidence within conflict zones identifies that up to a third of men have experienced and continue to suffer unimaginable and horrific sexual violence. And yet, the silence continues.

UN Human Rights tools have been described by Laura Stemple, an academic from UCLA School of Law in the US  as ‘essentially inadequate’ for addressing the rape of men in conflict as they barely mention males –  leaving no room for analysis of male abuse and rape at all. Many if not most of the humanitarian tools and responses currently available, fundamentally ignore boys and men – and where they are included these documents prove inadequate. As someone who has spent most of his professional life working with female and male victims of abuse, it seems unbelievable that in the twenty first century, most are unable, or unwilling perhaps to take this issue seriously.

Setting the Agenda for Change: The Men of Peace, Hope and Courage.

But as the G8 foreign ministers were making their pledges and exchanging firm handshakes, a few thousand miles away, in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, something was stirring.

The week of April 8^th – 12^th 2013 witnessed the birth of the ‘South- South Institute for Sexual Violence Against men and Boys in Conflict and Displacement’. An historic event that brought together male survivors, service providers, researchers, law and medical students, activists and legal experts with a view to taking positive action in this long neglected field. There was some media coverage, as evidenced by this Al Jazeera clip.

From my own perspective, the origins of this event stretch back to July 2011 when I read a compelling and disturbing article by Will Storr, The Rape of Men published in the UK Observer.

In an article that I consider should be compulsory reading for anyone who has breath in their body, he described in shattering detail the abuse experiences of men from Uganda, The Democratic Republic of Congo and others from the Great Lakes region. Previously untold stories and struggles, and importantly, the article highlighted the work of Dr. Chris Dolan, the Director of the Kampala based Refugee Law Project (RLP) and his staff. After reading the article I was horrified – not only at the extent of the violence but also the prejudice experienced by survivors and those striving to support them. The report shares how attempts were made by UN agencies to prevent the showing of RLP’s groundbreaking 2009 film Gender Against Men and how at least one international donor responded to their work, by threatening to cease funding RLP if they worked with more than 30% of their total client group being male.

After a few brief email exchanges I was privileged to meet Chris Dolan in November 2012 at a conference held by US based ‘Male Survivor’ in New York, where we shared our frustrations at trying to raise this issue within the international community and the lack of genuine support that exists for males in many settings. We talked of our hopes for the future and of dreams of bringing people together from developing countries and those in the southern hemisphere to address the reality of this situation.

It was clear to me at least that we could not in many respects rely on the so called ‘international community’ to provide the leadership, support and momentum to get this off the ground. We teamed up with Ken Clearwater, the manager of The Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse Trust (MSSAT) in New Zealand, who has worked with over 1500 male victims of sexual abuse and hatched a plan.

Guided by Chris and his team at RLP, over the next few months, a week of events was planned. What emerged was a groundbreaking and historic event surpassed all of our expectations. The Institute brought together 30 survivors from three groups that RLP has worked with in the last few years – all victims and survivors of horrifying sexual violence and abuse, designed to strip them of their very identity as men. As an honoured participant I was moved by their courage, their warmth and commitment to breaking the ‘culture of silence’ that for so long had fractured their communities, whilst shaming and subjugating them.

The members of the three survivor’s groups represented – the ‘Men of Hope’, based in Kampala, ‘Men of Peace’, based in Nakivale and ‘Men of Courage’ from Acholi sub- region of Northern Uganda, were truly inspirational. As those gathered felt safer and grew in confidence, initial cautious glances were replaced by a determination to speak out as courage was harnessed, and moving testaments were shared. Ken Clearwater shared his own inspirational story of childhood abuse, his search for support and understanding, and his subsequent efforts to influence change in his native land. As momentum gathered, many survivors were able to recognise their own courage through the words of others and stood and spoke publically of their experiences, fears and hopes – often for the very first time. Tears were shed, including my own, courage warmly applauded, and as the days passed – friendships formed and warm embraces exchanged.

Throughout the week, seminars and working groups identified important legal changes required, what male survivors need from service providers – which were shared later in the week with international and local NGOs and representatives of Government – setting the agenda for meaningful change. Workshops with legal students dismantled existing prejudices and identified action to transform the way survivors are treated. Medical protocols were turned on their head as the event transformed the perceptions and the lives of those attending. Training needs assessments carried out with service providers will lead to the development of focused and specific training curriculums for service providers – and importantly will be developed from the perspectives of survivors themselves.

For an inaugural event so much was achieved, that far exceeded expectations, as Chris Dolan, the modest inspiration behind the inaugural event  commented, “When we first started meeting with individual survivors we did not think it possible to get thirty men in one place meeting with a such wide range of civil society stakeholders in a way that has happened, it’s  a tribute to them and their courage, a comment on the importance for survivors to have their own safe space and voice and on the growing willingness of stakeholders in sexual and gender based violence work to look at this issue, to take notice and get involved”.

He further commented on the significance of breaking the silence and isolation for those involved – both now and in the future: “It was so important for survivors from different conflicts to see and meet with others from other situations and realise just how much they had in common… in many ways the significance of this event is still sinking in for many of us, what came out so clearly from the sharing and discussions over the week was just how specific and significant some of the dynamics of violence against men in conflict are”.

It is clear that many of the benefits of the inaugural South- South Institute will continue to be felt for many years to come. When men, women, boys and girls are abused, it is often said that the ‘ripples of abuse’ can be felt for many years. Those involved in Kampala have certainly created a few of their own.

For me the event will last long in the memory, evidence of what committed individuals, working together can achieve, in spite of the barriers placed before them. As for the future… the momentum has been set, something very special was unleashed in Kampala that in the experiences of many of those present will never be equalled. The documentation from the first Institute will be compiled and transformed into action plans for use within Uganda and across the region. Plans are afoot to hold the second South-South Institute in Phnom Penh in 2014, with a focus on addressing issues relating to sexual abuse of males within community settings. Participants will travel from Central and South America, Africa, South and South East Asia, the Pacific and Australasia to share experiences, best practice and garner support. A web site will soon be established, enabling those working in developing countries to reduce isolation, connect, mentor, build on what has already been achieved and for survivors to have a voice and break the culture of silence that characterises this issue.

It is that silence that emerged as one of important themes from the survivors groups. As they gained courage and shared their testimonies, there was talk of the need to break the considerable and suffocating culture of that silence. One participant described it as like having a snake in the house, one ‘that will kill you in the end’ unless you deal with it, whilst others identified how the it only serves to empower the perpetrators. All embraced the need to ‘shatter the silence’, ultimately leading to positive change for individuals, families and communities. There is no doubt in my mind that a force of nature was unleashed in Kampala, one that is compassionate, empowering, inspiring and energising in equal measure. I doubt that any of the lives of those present will ever be the same again.

As the week’s events drew to a close, I found time to sit quietly with Julius Okwera, the 78 year old leader of the ‘Men of Courage’ from Northern Uganda. Julius is a calm and dignified man, the kind of man that perhaps you might wish that your own father could be like. The kind of man with qualities that we may hope for ourselves. A man who has overcome his own considerable loss and pain to set an inspiring example of unassuming humanity, courage, warmth and leadership.

His own story is laid bare for all in the powerful and moving RLP produced film They Slept With Me.

He calmly recalls how Ugandan Government troops entered his compound in the 1980’s and raped and murdered women, children and many of the men. He shares how he lost his wife and unborn twins she was carrying as a result of their ordeal. Decades later, his experiences and voice echo the pain and horror – but have also opened the door to new possibilities of healing and justice for all victims of sexual violence in Uganda, the Great Lakes region of Africa and across the globe.

He paused, thoughtfully choosing his words as he explained how important it is for the world to know about what had happened to him and his community. He shared that there were still many men of his generation in his own village, survivors of sexual violence who have still not spoken of their experiences and remain smothered by the culture of silence, shame and fear. He stared into the night sky and smiled warmly as he explained “They will speak out… when they are ready… and we will be here to listen”. There was a calm reassurance in his voice that left me in no doubt at all that what I had witnessed in Kampala was truly an unforgettable and life changing experience and one, that if Julius has his way, will be repeated the world over.

***

For further information about how you can support the work of the South-South Institute for Sexual Violence Against Boys and Men, or become involved in future events, please contact Alastair at alastair@first-step-cambodia.org.

See More in Social Justice

See Also:

Human Trafficking: The Other 20%

Never To Be Sold Again

Until There’s Blood: The Sexual Abuse of Boys in Cambodia

Ken Goldstein talks about the challenges and rewards of mentoring people at the top. 

Consultant?  Mentor?  Coach?  However you might be trying to encourage someone who is already an outstanding professional do what they do better, what is most likely to get in your way? It is quite possible that professional is not accustomed to being on the receiving end of good coaching. Any leader who spends most of their time getting things done promptly, inspiring a team with excellence, may have forgotten or never have learned how to be open to quality feedback. That may seem like the executive’s problem, but it is clearly a challenge any great coach should be excited to accept.

One of the key problems many executives face is the impossibility of getting honest, useful feedback, often until it is too late. A study last fall from the Kellogg School of Management identified the Icarus Paradox as a particularly pernicious factor in the continuing success of accomplished CEOs. Where top executives are often most in need of quality feedback, they are often at the disadvantage of their own nervous circles. Exaggerated levels of flattery and opinion conformity are too often the norm within organizations, leaving the already exposed leader even more exposed than necessary, too often in the spirit of being well-meaning. “My advice would be to remember that the higher you are, the more likely you are to be ingratiated, and therefore you should make sure you get advice from people who do not depend on you,” wrote Northwestern professor Ithai Stern, one of the authors of the study.

There’s some interesting advice — seek input from someone who has no reason to flatter you, but rather is 100% aligned with you objectively for success. Sounds like opportunity with huge upside for the right person ready to provide that challenge in a manner where it is unfiltered, constructive, and uncompromised. The goal is not so much self-enhancement of the individual as it is strategic enhancement of the individual’s mission, upon which so many are depending.

Sounds like an ideal place to be, but how do you get there?  Surely it’s possible for someone like Baseball Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax to return to his Dodger roots and offer a pointer or two to Cy Young Award Winner Clayton Kershaw, who is still early in his career and confident enough in his own pitching to know how to listen to a legend. What if your experience is different from that of the person you are coaching — can you still be of high value? Because I do this every day with world-class individuals who do things I could never do, I promise you that you can — but you do have some immensely hard work ahead of you.

Imagine you could help anyone in the world get better at what they do in a professional context, regardless of his or her area of expertise or your own. Hey, this is for fun, pick anyone you want — an artist, an athlete, a headline corporate leader. Great, keep that person in mind, and presume you are not renowned for the same things they are. How are you going to get past the barrier of getting them to accept your insight?  That perhaps is a much bigger challenge than getting the fantasy assignment in the first place.

You might be saying to yourself your initial goal has to be to establish rapport, and that would be a good place to start, but what does it mean? In the Executive Coaching Workshop I lead with John Vercelli at Coaches Training institute, we talk less about the notion of rapport, and more about the notion of empathy. In the many exercises and role-playing scenarios we run, we have yet to find two individuals so disparate in life experience that they cannot find a path to empathy.  In this context, empathy is the basis of common understanding, an appreciation of shared aspirations and motivating factors, an interlinking of common goals outside the specifics of a work-oriented task. No matter how far apart people begin, if they make the effort and commit themselves to finding reciprocal empathy, they can find common ground to break down a set of complex problems quickly and consistently. The outreach that constitutes the task of discovering empathy leads to the bond of trust that is essential in any coaching relationship. Find empathy, establish trust, and the process of being open to outside support is not nearly as hard as it seems.

Is it any wonder that this kind of trust is difficult for an executive to exhibit in the hyper-competitive workplace?  Anyone in a position of leadership is constantly faced with endless conflicts of interest, mixed messages, hidden agendas, and far too much flattery.  When a coach can break through all that noise through the powerful act of focused listening, the next person likely to listen might be the executive.  That could constitute an unequaled breakthrough and the beginning of a powerful business friendship.

If Professor Stern and his colleagues are right about the Icarus Paradox, and senior business leaders can be set up for a fall by unrealistic levels of strategic confidence fostered by too many piled up compliments, then the smartest ones are going to look outward for the right kind of listening and more useful forms of feedback. That’s a field day for the executive coach willing to step up and be honest, empathetic, and a confidential source of creative exchange. With that kind of listening, flattery can be replaced with progress.

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photo: familymwr / flickr