by Ryan Michler
That’s a difficult pill to swallow, but isn’t that better information? Choosing to be offended because someone suggested you’re a bad driver via a certain nonverbal communication is insignificant to the actual understanding you can’t drive worth a shit. The former keeps you where you are. The later allows you to grow.
This is why emotional resiliency is an absolute must on the journey to your own sovereignty. Allowing others or outside situations to dictate how you’re feeling is a sure path to bondage. The desire and ability to use those feelings as simple metrics to produce a desired outcome is much more powerful.
PHYSICAL STRENGTH
To complete the trifecta of masculine strength, we turn to physical strength. Bottom line, strong men can do more. Is it possible to be a good man and not be strong? Yes. Is it possible to fully be the man you’re meant to be if you’re not strong? No.
In his book The Way of Men, Jack Donovan makes the distinction between being a good man and being good at being a man. Being “good at being a man” requires physical strength. Strong men have the capacity to work harder, longer, and more effectively. At the end of the day, strong men produce.
In 2015, I was the heaviest I’ve ever been. I was topping the scales at 235 pounds and, for a man who stands only five foot ten, it was not a pretty sight. As many excuses as I came up with, I could not deny the fact that my physical health was affecting my ability to produce results on every front of my life: business, wealth, relationships, etc.
I remember at that point in my life receiving a flyer for CrossFit. The owners were opening a new gym near me. I decided enough was enough; it was time for me to do something about my failing physical health.
Up until that point, I had always been physical. I lettered in three sports in high school. I never had any problems performing in the Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT). I knew getting back in shape wouldn’t be a problem, but what I didn’t realize was the unintended positive consequences of getting my ass back in gear.
This isn’t a book about physical fitness. I don’t know what exercise regimen or diet program is going to work best for you. I personally participate in CrossFit, Starting Strength, and Spartan Races, and, as far as nutrition goes, I eat clean (limited processed sugars, lots of vegetables, lean meats, and plenty of water). What works for you may be the same or it may be entirely different. Either way, I’d encourage you to check out the vast collection of health-related material online, in books, or through gym memberships and fitness coaching.
What I can tell you is that since 2015, when I set out on this fitness journey, my life has drastically improved. My financial planning began to grow; the Order of Man has exploded; my wealth has increased substantially; and my relationships with my wife, children, and friends have never been better.
Some might claim that I’ve figured something else out—that the results I’ve experienced in my life are correlated with new information or access to an expanding network. That may be true to a degree, but none of that would have happened had I not developed the skill set to improve my health, which was, interestingly enough, the same skill set required to thrive in every other area of my life: dedication, discipline, commitment, hard work, sacrifice, and resiliency.
Often, men who feel they have lost their way ask me, “Where should I start this journey to improve?” My answer is, “The gym. It all starts in the gym.”
THE MINDSET—I AM MENTALLY TOUGH, EMOTIONALLY RESILIENT, AND PHYSICALLY STRONG
The unfortunate reality is that we are designed to look for the path of least resistance. In many ways, our natural inclination to choose the easy route is the exact factor that has kept us alive and thriving as a species for thousands of years.
But as new advancements in health, comfort, and technology continue to develop, the likelihood of running across a scenario that will kill us is drastically reduced. While the easy route may be comfortable, the hard route is what builds the mental fortitude, emotional resilience, and physical strength required to step fully into our role as men. The easy route makes us weak. The hard route makes us strong.
To become a man of strength, you must wrap your head around and adopt the mantra “I embrace the challenge.” I was in my home gym this morning, doing a particularly heavy set of squats. The programming called for four sets of five squats. I had just completed my fourth rep in the third set when my mind said, “Ryan, that’s good enough. You can call it quits here.” I almost fell prey to the easy route as I caught myself racking the weight. When I realized what I was doing, I repeated the mantra in my head, “I embrace the challenge.” I lifted the bar back off the rack and completed the set. As trivial as that experience may sound, I’m a better man for it.
Deciding whether to finish the set is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of choices we will be faced with throughout the day. Your natural tendency will always be to choose the path of least resistance. You must fight the urge to take the easy route and, instead, embrace the challenge.
THE SKILL SET
Make the Hard Path the Easy Path. Understanding that we have a natural tendency to choose the easy path can be used to our advantage. Many times, we understand that choosing to do something hard is the better route, but we place so many barriers between where we are and where we want to be that the task becomes almost impossible to complete.
When I set out on my fitness journey three years ago, one of the biggest challenges for me was getting out of bed and into the gym. I didn’t know what workout I was going to do. I didn’t want to get my gym clothes out. I didn’t want to get my water and/or preworkout ready. So I stayed in bed.
To combat this, I simply programmed my workouts the night before and had my gym bag ready and my drink waiting for me in the fridge. When I woke up in the morning, I had no excuses.
Take some time to understand what barriers are keeping you from achieving what you want and find a way to tear them down ahead of time.
Reset the Default. Our default answer is always “whatever is easier.” We all know this and have been abiding by it for so long that we rarely give ourselves the chance to critically analyze if that’s the right answer at all. What if, instead, we reprogrammed our thought process to respond with “whatever is the hardest” as the default answer?
I’m not suggesting it always will be, but choosing the hard thing first will force you to stop and actually think about what you should be doing in the first place. It will also give you the opportunity to consider the mantra “I embrace a challenge.”
CHAPTER 13
HUMILITY
“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
-Epictetus
The longer I’m alive, the more I realize how little I actually know. Sure, I like to put on a front. All of us feel good when we know what we’re talking about. But make no mistake, there is a huge difference between knowing what we’re talking about and thinking or, even worse, pretending we know what we’re talking about.
Knowing what we’re talking about requires effort. Through this effort to gain new understanding, and with a desire and ability to act on that understanding, we earn the right to that knowledge. However, pretending we know what we’re talking about requires only deceit.
Doesn’t it feel wonderful to deceive? When we trick people into thinking we know more than we do, we receive the accolades and praise of the unsuspecting victims of our deceit. Just as damaging is the fact that we deceive ourselves. When a man lies to himself about how much he actually knows, he robs himself of the opportunity to learn new information that would propel his life forward rather than simply make him feel good about himself in the moment.
Why then do we, as men, work so hard to maintain the appearance of knowledge? One word: ego. To put it frankly, we refuse to look foolish. Therefore, we’d prefer to run the risk associated with making something up rather than appearing dumb.
Somewhere along our journey from boys to men, we transform from “inquisitive” to “know
-it-all.” We begin to worry about what others think of us and how we portray ourselves to the people we care about. Couple that with the fact that society would have you believe you should know it all and that, somehow, if you don’t already know how to do X, Y, and Z, you’re not a “real man.”
As evidence, you see that most of society does not mock toddlers when they fall or young boys when they mispronounce a word. They’re not expected to know it all, so they get a pass. But there comes a time in our lives when the passes expire. When that day comes, we do the only thing we know how to do when we don’t know the answer: we make something up.
We lie because we remember the first time someone mocked or ridiculed us for not knowing. Rather than experience the feeling of embarrassment or rejection again, we utilize one of our most basic and frequently used defense mechanisms—our imagination.
That’s all an ego is, anyway—it’s delusion, it’s a fantasy land. We begin to create a false reality in our own minds about how good we are and how much we actually know. If we tell ourselves something long enough, we start to believe it. This tactic preserves our ego, but it destroys our sovereignty. We become slaves to ourselves and the egomaniacs we create.
I know how this works firsthand. As I was building my financial planning practice, I was trained to give all the answers (whether or not I actually knew them). If I didn’t know the answer, I was expected to make something up. Heaven forbid I ever tell a client, “I don’t know.”
That’s what I did, day in and day out. I put on the nice suit, I kept my face shaved, I wore my hair just right, and I said all the right things. And I deceived myself. I placed so much pressure on myself to be the kind of man that everyone told me I should be, but inside I knew this wasn’t real and I wasn’t happy with who I had become.
HUBRIS
Man’s desire to keep his ego safe is nothing new. Naturally, we’ve been engaging in this behavior since the dawn of man. The ancient Greeks used the word “hubris” to define someone who exhibited extreme foolishness or dangerous overconfidence. In Greek mythology, Nemesis was the goddess who delivered retribution for those who displayed hubris. Proverbs 16:18 says, “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” It seems everywhere we turn we are warned of the destructive consequences of an inflated ego.
In 2006, I had just returned from Iraq and begun my career in the financial industry. I was nervous but excited to enter a new chapter in my life, and, although I had never done anything in this line of work before, I was confident in my ability to succeed.
I had always enjoyed relative success in anything that I engaged in. I started varsity football as a sophomore, lettered in three sports, consistently made honor roll, graduated at the top of my class in Advanced Individual Training in the Army, earned a promotion to store manager from part-time employee, and ran a successful retail clothing store my company had asked me to open. Surely, this venture wouldn’t be any different.
It wasn’t long before the reality of the situation hit me. My first year in the business, I made roughly $30,000; my second-year earnings weren’t much more; and by the third year, I was ready to throw in the towel.
Every night, I would come home from work upset, exhausted, and defeated. I would wander out to our backyard and pace around the perimeter while I wondered how I was going to make the mortgage payment. It was a humbling time in my life.
I looked around at the other agents in my office who were experiencing success and wondered how they were doing it. I told myself I was just as good as, if not better than, them.
“How do they get so lucky with their clients?” I would silently complain. It had to be luck. I was good. There was no way my lack of results could possibly have anything to do with me.
Fortunately for me, I had no fallback plan. I had to make this work. There was nothing else to do. So, as I contemplated quitting and moving on, I decided to try one more thing and do something I wasn’t used to doing: I asked for help.
ASKING FOR HELP
During my third year in my financial planning practice, I had identified several advisors in my office who were perpetual performers. It did not seem to matter what was going on in the market, what time of year it was, or what the political environment happened to be. Regardless of outside circumstances, these few men seemed to have figured out something I had not.
With all the courage I could muster (and without a plan B), I approached these advisors and asked if I could take them to lunch and ask a few questions. It was humiliating. For the first time in my life, I had to tell someone else that I had no idea what the hell I was doing and that I needed guidance.
To my surprise, each of these men accepted my offer and spent time with me over lunch, teaching me some of their tactics and strategies. Eventually, I asked them to go on client appointments with me. At the time, I didn’t have the money to pay them to coach me, so I suggested that we split any revenue from the clients we worked together with. This was a hard pill to swallow as I was barely making ends meet. But I realized 100 percent of zero is still zero.
It wasn’t long before I was picking up new clients and making more money than I ever had in the business, even after the split. Today, and with the help of those early coaches, I’ve turned my financial planning practice into a six-figure business.
Sometimes all it takes is the courage to ask for help.
I understand why we don’t. We’re afraid. We’re afraid because we’ve been conditioned to believe that we can’t ask for help without being thought less of. Our parents, teachers, coaches, employers, clients, friends, and colleagues, with all their good intentions, have crippled us into believing that if we ask for help, we’re not good enough or worthy of the relationship we have with them.
Asking for help is a risk. “What if people laugh at me?” “What if people mock me?” “What if people think less of me?” We ask ourselves these questions and worse.
Not asking for help is a sure bet. It may not produce the desired result, but at least we don’t have to expose our own vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and inadequacies.
But I’d have you consider that the greater threat lies not in asking for help, but in failing to live up to the potential that is locked inside you. Most men live their entire lives less than they’re capable of simply because they’d rather maintain their pride than admit they aren’t as smart as they think they are.
What an unfortunate reality. How many promotions have been lost? How much money has been left on the table? How much knowledge has been overlooked? How many opportunities have passed you by? All to maintain the appearance of power rather than the actual power that comes from recognizing, admitting, and doing something about the fact that you don’t know it all.
HUMILITY IS STRENGTH
Most men believe that simply appearing powerful garners the attention, respect, and admiration of others, along with all the accompanying benefits. While this may be true temporarily, the long-term consequence of an inflated ego is a level of suspicion and doubt among those a man works so hard to impress.
I’ve seen plenty of men who appeared to be strong only to reveal, down the road, that they were hiding their inadequacies and overcompensating for their lack of true understanding.
We hear phrases like “fake it ’til you make it” and begin to believe that pretending to know the answers will yield the desired results. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, if anything, overconfidence moves us further away from the results we’re after.
When we “fake it,” we give ourselves permission to neglect gaining the knowledge, information, skills, tools, and experience required to produce the long-term benefits of having a firm grasp of the knowledge we only pretend to have.
What if, instead of believing that arrogance is strength, we wrapped our head around the fact that it’s humility that makes us strong? Consider the characteristics tied to humility—inquisitive, realistic, likable, approachable, optimistic, educated, open-minded—versus
the characteristics of arrogance—close-minded, ignorant, delusional, guarded, deceitful, pessimistic.
See, when guys put on a front or show to maintain their pride, what they really end up doing is exposing themselves to all sorts of blind spots that could come back to destroy them. You hear of guys all the time who get blindsided with a separation or divorce or layoff, or they’re hit with news that someone else got the promotion.
I used to think these guys were complete morons if they couldn’t see some of this stuff happening. While I know we all get hit with surprises, I can’t help but think that if we get hit with surprise after surprise after surprise, we’ve got to be delusional about what’s really going on around us.
That’s what this false sense of pride, ego, and arrogance create—delusion, a false reality about how good we actually are and all the wonderful things we’re doing in the world.
CONFIDENCE VERSUS ARROGANCE
Pride is a good thing. It’s important that we take pride in what we do and remain confident in our abilities, but there’s a huge difference between confidence and pride.
So what is the difference between confidence and arrogance? The answer is simple: confidence is earned; arrogance is not.
As easy as it is to take pride to an unhealthy level, it is just as easy to take humility to an unhealthy level. A humble man is not someone who can be pushed around, stepped on, and manipulated to do the will of others. A humble man is one who knows his shortcomings and is consciously working on improving them. It is absolutely possible to be both humble and confident. After all, for all your shortcomings, you also possess many strengths. A humble man is fully capable of recognizing both.
I, for example, thrive behind a microphone and a camera. That’s not arrogance. It’s confidence. The right to acknowledge the skill of communicating via video and audio is not something I take lightly or take for granted. In fact, for the longest time, I struggled with both. Only through continual effort have I earned the right to succeed with this particular skill set. And just because I recognize that I am a decent communicator when it comes to speaking, does not mean I don’t recognize that I have room to improve.
