This is how to lead a relationship as a man

All right, welcome. I'm Connor Beaton and today we're going to talk about the three things that you can do right now to lead more effectively in your relationship as a man. Before we dive into that, just a quick reminder, if you haven't already done so yet, hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to get notifications about when I drop new videos on how you can be a better self led man in the world. All right, so leadership, what does it mean? How do we lead in a relationship? Why is it important? Before I dive into the three things that you can tackle and you can start to take action on, I just want to say a few things about leadership. Number one, the definition of leadership is a process of social influence, of influencing one person or a group of people towards a common goal or task or vision. So for you as a man, within your relationship, the influence that you have is incredibly important. Now, for most men, they're not aware of the influence that they have in their relationship over their partner, much like they might want to ignore or reject the influence that their partner has over them. So that's probably for a different video. But what I really wanted to drive home here before we dive into the three points is that leadership for you, leadership in a relationship is about direction. It's about taking ownership over your actions, your decisions, your choices, and where those actions, decisions and choices are leading. You are leading the relationship and are leading your partner emotionally, sexually, financially, spiritually, in all avenues and areas of the relational dynamic. So with that said, with the foundation of how I'm defining leadership, let's dive into the three points. So rule number one is how are you leading yourself first? So your relationship is going to be a mirror in some ways of your leadership. But, but the most important aspect is how are you leading yourself in your life? Do you have healthy routines? Do you have a structure that you abide by? Are you disciplined? Are you doing the things that you ultimately want? Are you able to make healthy decisions, good decisions for yourself, for your finances, for your health, for your wellbeing, for your career, for your business? Right? How are you actually allowing yourself to be influenced by yourself? Another thing that you can look at is are you honoring your commitments and practices? This will be a good indicator of how you're influencing and leading and creating direction within yourself as a man. Now, the main thing that I want you to know is that when you as a man do not feel like you're leading yourself effectively, when we're not keeping our word as men, when we're not maintaining our commitments and our practices. When you are not able to make healthy, strong decisions for yourself and create direction. What most men do, unfortunately, is they begin to try and control their partner. So they begin to look at their wife, their girlfriend, their spouse, their whatever it is, boyfriend, husband, et cetera, and they begin to try and control that other person. They begin to judge their actions and criticize them and try to try and make decisions for them and force them into a kind of coherence of what they believe should be happening. So this isn't leadership, right? This is dictatorship. This is an authoritarian standpoint that a lot of men fall into the trap of. And it's almost like the more out of control that you feel as a man, the more that you feel the need to control your partner. And this can be very detrimental. It can erode the trust within the relationship. And. And ultimately it doesn't feel like leadership, it feels like control. So you might hear your partner start saying, I feel like you're always trying to control me. Or, you know, I feel like you make all the decisions for me in my life. Or she won't be saying things like that. But what you'll feel is that you're responsible for her happiness, for her sense of being okay, that you're responsible for her, well, being as a human being. And so when that happens, it means that you have taken control of that individual's life rather than leading the relationship itself. Simply put, the last thing I'll say is she can't trust you unless you can lead you. She won't surrender, won't soften, won't be open to your guidance, to you in many different ways. If you can't lead you, if you aren't willing and able to step into a position of being responsible, of being, of making decisions for yourself and creating direction for yourself. So that brings me to point number two. Direction is leadership. Where are you going? Who are you going with? When are you doing it? What does it look like? Making the decisions for where the relationship is going, setting the pace and setting the tone are two very important things. And so one of the things that I want to do is just define those two entities. So setting the pace of means being clear and transparent and knowing for yourself at the speed at which you are comfortable with the relationship going, right. Not allowing yourself to be pressured into moving in together or to solidifying certain things in the relationship, or to moving into being engaged or marriage or having kids before you know that it's unequivocally a yes for you. Before you have moved into a place that you as a man have made a solitary sovereign decision that you want to move in that direction and that you're maybe not ready to move in that direction because sometimes readiness isn't necessarily available, right? Not every man is ready to have kids, but he's wanting, he's willing and he's committed to it. So knowing that you are wanting, willing and committed to something and then being clear about communicating that, right? Being able to say, you know, in a year I want to start having to try kit for having kids, or you know, in a year I want us to work towards moving in together. So giving that kind of direction, setting the pace, and then on the other side, setting the tone. What is acceptable? What will you tolerate, what will you not tolerate, both within yourself and within the relationship? So in modern online culture this is called boundaries. But I think in many ways it's about how you as a man hold the frame of the relationship. It's how you build structure within the relationship. And that tone is really almost like the relational culture, right? So if you've ever been in a work environment, talk a lot about culture, that's just the sort of feeling and the essence of the dynamic within a group. But here the tone within your relationship is set around what do you value as a man, as a couple, what does the relationship value? What commitments does the relationship value? Right? So, for example, maybe part of the tone of your relationship is that verbal character assaults in arguments and conflict are not welcome, right? So it's just a non negotiable. It's just like when that happens, we pause, we pause the conflict, we don't engage with that and we reconvene when both of us have sort of cooled down or when one of you needs to sort of take a moment to pause. So those types of things, setting that structure within your relational dynamic around what you'll do tolerate, what you won't tolerate, and what you really want the relationship to look like, right? You as a man should have a vision for your relationship because that vision, that goal of what the relationship looks like is the direction that you are going to be taking the relationship. So far, too many men get into a relationship and the vision and the goal of the relationship, the direction of the relationship is heading, becomes the woman's responsibility, or the man just starts to acquiesce what that woman wants and then he builds up resentment over years or over months and he begins to pull away from her from the relationship altogether. Lastly, what I want to say about direction is that creating direction isn't about ignoring your partner's needs and solely prioritizing your own. It's about understanding your partner well enough to. To include them and their needs and their wants in the decision in the direction. Now, that doesn't mean that you need to forfeit your own non negotiables. It doesn't mean that you need to forfeit your own boundaries or, you know, collapse on certain things. Right. And move in together or agree to get engaged or agree to progress the relationship too quickly. It means that you take into account what, what your partner might want or need. So it's also about you creating direction in terms of making decisions. Right. I remember I had a client who talked about how his partner and him would always get into arguments around what they were going to have for dinner. And it, and it became this huge problem within the relationship. This mundane decision was an indicator of something much larger in the relationship where, you know, at 3, 3:30 he'd be at work and he'd be texting her, hey, what do you want to do for dinner tonight? And she would say, I'm not really too sure. And then she would list out what they had in the fridge, or she would list out options, you know, for the nearby places that they could order from. And they would go back and forth and they would literally spend hours talking about this. And he wouldn't make a decision, and she wouldn't make a decision because she was waiting for him to take the lead to make the decision about what they were going to have for dinner. And it would turn into an argument. And it was this huge, huge problem that was indicative of the fact that he wasn't making decisions in areas where she was looking for him to make a choice to create direction within the relationship. So begin to make some of those decisions. Know that you're gonna get pushback sometimes, right? Know that in making a decision, your partner's needs will be revealed. So sometimes if you don't know what she wants or what she needs, the clear fact of you making a choice to go to the bachelor party, where you're going to go for dinner, what you're going to do on date night, all of those things will then reveal her needs and wants. Because she'll either say, this is amazing. I love this. Thank you so much for, you know, planning this for us or putting this together, or she'll say, you know, I really don't like going to these types of movies, or I really don't like these types of restaurants. So it'll Inform your decision and your direction pattern. Now, before I jump into the last point, which is maybe the most important one, feel free to leave a comment below and let me know what resonates with you, what you learned, what you liked, and maybe what you would add to this conversation. Because I always love hearing your thoughts, your feedback, and how specifically you've learned to lead in your relationship. So the final piece that I think is arguably the most important aspect of leading within your relationship is the notion of don't react, regulate and respond. Don't react, regulate and respond. Rather than reacting to external stimulus, right, Because a reaction is we get stimulus and we immediately react to it. We immediately become defensive or say something, or we don't think about it. We don't process it in any way, shape, or form. We don't metabolize what's going on. We just react to the stimulus. For a lot of men, because you're busy, because you got a lot going on, because you're. You're doing your best to balance work and life and health and fitness and finances and kids and all of the things that you have going on in your life. We move into a reactionary state so quickly, and that's often what gets us into trouble, right, Is that we don't take a moment to just pause and breathe and think or feel what it is that's actually happening, what our partner's actually saying. So Viktor Frankl, a great author and psychologist from the early 20th century who survived Auschwitz, who was in World War II, was a Jewish prisoner within Nazi camps. He had a great quote where he said, between stimulus and response, there is a pause. And it's in that pause, and this is my, my part that I'm adding to it. It's in that pause where you find your own voice, where you find your own sense of leadership, where you're able to connect to maybe the defensiveness or the, the anger or the embarrassment or whatever it is that's coming up inside of you. So reacting is not leading. Reacting is an unconscious process that often leads to reflexive, childish responses that almost never yields the result that you want. I cannot stress that enough. If you are not getting the results that you want in your life, specifically in your relationship, it is likely because you are reacting to everything that your partner says or does. How she maybe criticizes you or doesn't do what you want, or, you know, you ask for what you want, and maybe she doesn't show up in that way. And so your reactivity is a very crucial piece of information that is hijacking you from being able to produce the results that you want. So regulate and respond. Reactivity destroys the safety within relationships. Okay? Reactivity destroys the safety within relationships. And what that means is that trust is built on the notion that you're going to be able to respond in a conscious, grounded, healthy manner. And that trust is broken if you're reacting constantly from a defensive space. Getting upset, yelling, shutting down, storming out, not engaging in conversation, all of those things over time are going to erode the safety and the trust and the sanctity of your relationship. So moving into a regulated response pattern is very important. So here's what this means. It means that you notice your physical and emotional response to something, to the stimulus, right? To your partner saying, hey, you, you forgot to take the garbage out. So maybe the reactivity pattern would be, well, you know, you just don't know how much else I've done today. You know, you didn't notice that I folded the laundry, put the laundry away. Or you know, you don't know how busy I've been at work today. Or that would be the defensive reaction. The grounded response would be to breathe, take a moment to notice what you are physically feeling, right? Maybe you feel some agitation brewing up. Maybe emotionally you feel immediately angry and to breathe in the pause and to say, you know, is it true? Is it helpful? Yep, it's true. I forgot to take the garbage out. Is it helpful? Yeah, it's a great reminder. Okay, you know what? You're right. Cool, no problem, I got it. And to moved into a regulated space and then a response. So then we could say, yeah, of course. You know what? I totally forgot. Thanks for the reminder. Boom, away we go. So this pattern of being able to regulate yourself so that you're not hyper reactive, so you're not defensive, you're not shutting down, you're not storming out, you're not acting in an emotionally childish way. You're acting more in line with what the stoics talked about, right? Being able to regulate and understand what's happening in your body physically and emotionally, and then being able to think critically about about what's happening and respond from that place. Let me know if you enjoyed everything that we touched on in this conversation. Be sure to like the video. If you enjoyed it, subscribe, feel free to share it with somebody that you think will enjoy it. And don't forget to hit the bell notification so that you get notified of when new videos are out and.