A speaker argues that men's emotional suppression damages marriages, productivity, and leadership. He introduces the Inside Out Method: work on your internal emotional state before trying to fix external problems. Acknowledging feelings and speaking them clearly makes you more composed, confident, and effective.
You don't understand your wife because you don't understand yourself. It's that simple. You're not tuned into her emotions because you're not tuned into yours. You think that understanding your emotions makes you less of a man or somehow makes you weak, when in fact it's one of the most healthy, most strong things you could ever do, which makes you a better leader, a better entrepreneur. It makes you more successful. It makes better relationships, allows you to network with more people. Allows you to be healthier, allows you to understand your mind-body connection. Understanding your emotions and being able to express them in a healthy way is called being empowered. There's nothing mature about burying how you're feeling and pretending that things aren't affecting you and being insincere, being inauthentic, and suppressing your emotions. A lot of you guys are so depressed, you wonder why you're depressed. The opposite of depression isn't happiness. The opposite of depression is expression. There's so many things that you've buried over the years. You've stockpiled all these memories, all these resentments. You've held on to so much stuff that you can't let it go. You got a backpack full of cinder blocks, bro, and you're carrying around the weight of the world on your shoulders. How could you be productive in that state? And if you've noticed, a lot of your efficiency, a lot of your productivity has gone out the window. Why? Why? Because holding on to all this emotional resentment and turmoil and hostility and anger and rage inside of you is making you unhealthy. You're not truly happy. You just walk around with a chip on your shoulder expecting everything and everyone to change how you feel and making them responsible, blaming the external environment for why you feel the way you do. And you expect that the external environment is going to change and you're going to feel better? That's why in the Inside Out Method, what do I teach about working on the inside? First, and then the outside follows. It's not about fixing the issues in your marriage. It's about fixing the man that shows up to the issues in your marriage. Let me say that again: fixing the man that shows up to the issues in your marriage. A man that can handle conflict, a man that carries himself well. He has integrity. He treats his wife with respect and dignity, and it communicates from a place of Just assertiveness, strength, staying composed, confident. He's not thrown off by the external. He's not thrown off by what people say. He's not thrown off by what happens outside of him. And he doesn't try to fix interior problems with exterior solutions. He understands that he makes him feel. He doesn't say, you make me feel. He says, I feel this way. I am the common denominator in my emotional world. But see, that can never happen if you're in denial about how you feel. If you see emotions as a weakness, you were, you were, you were sold a lie that you bought into. You bought into a lie. That you weren't supposed to be emotional. But here's the irony in this. You talk this way, but yet you're one of the most least emotionally regulated people on the planet. And anybody would watch you and see how emotional you really are because you don't understand how to control the emotions. So you express them in an unhealthy way to the people around you instead of regulating your emotions. Learning how to put them into language that people can understand and relate to. See, you're just reactive. You just project, you deflect, you externalize everything because nobody ever taught you how to look within yourself.
