It is common for men to feel under-resourced and ill equipped when dealing with their emotions and in communicating with others, especially within their primary relationships (significant others and children). Because of this, men tend to shut down by placating, dismissing or even overpowering others’ emotions through contempt. These approaches create distance and resentment in relationships.
Repositioning focuses on encouraging and guiding men to be responsible leaders of self and within their relationships. Emotional mastery and effective communication are two powerful skills impactful to establishing and maintaining balanced leadership and healthy relationships.
An effective way to practice balanced and effective leadership, especially when working through challenging situations, whether it be a problem you are facing on your own, or within a relationship, is to refer to the four Es:
Embrace
Engage
Encourage
Elevate
Embrace
Challenging situations and relationships will almost always trigger feelings of resistance. As soon as you perceive that a situation should be different than it is, you are not accepting what it actually is, and that is resistance. Resistance is helpful when combined with the desire to make corrections and improvement, but if left as simply thinking things or people should be different, it can manifest into feelings of resentment, frustration and anger.
Embracing any situation for exactly what it is means simply accepting what it currently is. This dissolves resistance and allows for clarity, curiosity and the desire to understand. Once you embrace the actual conditions, you can make the decision to accept things or people fully, or create solutions for improvement. Embrace creates acceptance, truth and reality.
Engage
To engage with life, especially within challenging situations, is truly a skill, and one that is worth mastering. Most of us have learned an array of coping skills we employ during conflict or when met with a challenge: dismissal, denial, avoidance, blame. Many men shut down or become overly aggressive when dealing with challenging situations. Learning to stay engaged means making the choice to remain present and meaningfully connected in the face of whatever is happening.
Encourage
The word encourage comes from the French word encoragier. Made up of the words en- meaning to make or put in, and corage meaning heart, encoraiger means to make strong, or hearten. The definition of courage is “to instill confidence and hope”. Men are natural providers and protectors. What better way to protect and provide than by authentically and lovingly instilling confidence and hope in those you love? Encouraging is about steadying and infusing your own heart and those of others by remaining open and trusting rather than feeling discouraged or discouraging others by shutting down, becoming defensive or dismissive or even overpowering others’ emotions with your own.
Elevate
Challenging situations are some of the most powerful opportunities to learn, improve and grow. Making the choice to glean wisdom from every challenge allows you to elevate your personal human experience and alchemize difficulties into useful wisdom, to create connection, deeper meaning, better understanding and an overall more valuable and meaningful life.
Let’s apply the four Es to a hypothetical, but common situation:
Your wife, partner or significant other accuses you of not paying enough attention to her:
Embrace the situation. Your initial desire may be to defend yourself or to explain how busy you are. This is resistance. Quiet the resistance by not reacting and instead embrace the situation by accepting her truth exactly as she stated it. You can say:
“I hear what you are saying.” (mitigating the desire to defend or explain)
Engage with your wife/SO and her current reality. You may have your own reality that contradicts hers, but if you can mindfully meet in a collaborative truth by listening with the intention to create understanding, together you can likely arrive at an actual truth that makes sense to both of you. You can say,
“Tell me more about why you feel this way.”
Encourage yourself to keep your heart open by acknowledging her feelings without dismissing, walking away, discounting her truth or shutting down. Encourage her by instilling hope and confidence:
“I didn’t know that you were feeling this way and I am glad you shared this with me
because now I can be more attentive to your needs and the needs of our relationship.”
Elevate your leadership and the quality of your relationship by choosing to take advantage of every situation as an opportunity to connect deeply and refine your masculinity through emotional maturity and meaningful communication.
In running through this brief dialogue, you will provide leadership in understanding, emotional safety and the creation of intimacy.
You can apply and practice the Four Es in just about any situation: sitting in traffic, during a tough round of golf or with a challenging coworker. The more you put it into practice with less significant issues, the more you will be prepared to refer to this process in the face of greater challenges.
Life is precious and is not something to simply try to get through. Making the choice to engage deeply and meaningfully with all aspects of life and in your relationships cultivates greater purpose, presence and connection. The Four Es are a simple method to cultivate a grounded and impactful way of engaging with life and those you love.
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