We put the the hero archetype in Western culture on a pedestal. So a lot of men are trying to live into this very heroic ideal of what they think it means to be a man.
– Connor Beaton
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In this episode, Connor Beaton, a leading men’s work facilitator and philosopher, joins us for an honest conversation on the expectations, pressures and limiting beliefs involved with being a man.
Connor is a New York-based coach, teacher, and speaker who helps men (and women) from all over the world walk through their darkness and grow in the realms of mental clarity and relational communication, actualizing their potential and sexual intimacy. He is the founder of ManTalks, a mens’ personal growth brand that is dedicated to creating better men. Using the ManTalks Podcast and his online men’s community, Connor influences thousands of men to do their inner work to be better fathers, husbands, and brothers to each other.
SHOW NOTES
Connor Beaton Website | Connor Beaton Instagram | ManTalks | ManTalks Podcast
Episode Transcription
Connor Beaton
We put the hero archetype in Western culture on a pedestal. So a lot of men are trying to live into this very heroic ideal of what they think it means to be a man. They need to be a savior, right? They need to be super tough. They need to save other people. They don’t need to be saved, right? The heroes never say if and so God forbid that they need help in any capacity. And so the idea there creates a very lonely and isolated perspective.
Vanessa Cornell
Welcome to The NUSHU Podcast. I’m your host, Vanessa Cornell. I invite you with love into this space to learn and grow with me. And for a brief moment of the day, come home to yourself.
Vanessa Cornell
Welcome friends, to another episode of The NUSHU Podcast. We speak a lot on this podcast about the feminine. But what about the masculine? There is no one I believe who speaks about both the dark and the light side of the masculine with as much forthright honesty, helpful clarity and heart than Connor Beaton. He is a pretty stellar example himself of the true embodiment of the divine masculine. In our conversation, we dive right in, we talk about this divine masculinity, but also toxic masculinity. We talk about taboos, rites of passage, and what Connor calls the most dangerous rule of being a man. If you’re struggling, don’t talk about it.
Vanessa Cornell
This episode will help everyone understand what feminine and masculine energy is, no matter how we identify along the lines of gender and sexuality. It applies to all of us man and women alike. a deeper understanding of this masculine can help us all to partner better understand our partner better and to show up in the world, embracing who we are fully without needing to deny any part of ourselves. I hope you tune in.
Vanessa Cornell
Today, I’m so excited because we have had men on the NUSHU Thought Leader Series but we’ve never talked specifically about men. And Connor is definitely the one to talk about that. And I’m so thrilled to have you here, Connor, thank you for being with us today.
Connor Beaton
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, I’m really looking forward to this conversation and just diving in this topic.
Vanessa Cornell
Awesome. So first, I just want to invite you, Connor to tell the listeners about your work.
Connor Beaton
The work that I do is in many ways, creating a sort of like training ground for men who are looking to work on themselves who are looking to develop a deeper sense of self leadership of autonomous sea of sovereignty, who are looking to repair, maybe their marriages, their relationships, oftentimes men that are going through transition, in some way, shape, or form. They’re transitioning careers there, maybe infidelity has happened. So it’s a lot of work in that space, whether it’s around their relationship or helping them find a sense of purpose. And the organization that I run is called ManTalks is sort of like slogan is not therapist training. And so the idea there is that we as men are often looking for these spaces where we can gain a deeper level of support. But there’s hurdles and stigmas that are around that. And so creating a space that is by men, for men, for men, to be able to have these types of conversations about maybe where they’re struggling internally, whether it’s struggling in their in the relationship where they’re struggling within their family system, and to be able to support them and provide them with the support to be able to have that dialogue in a manner that is generative in a lot of ways. It wasn’t up until recently that we as men bought into this idea that we should do things alone. We were very communal before we were very tribal before we were very connected with one another. And there was a more generational lineage of being taught certain qualities about being a man being a father being a husband within society, that were sort of passed down.
Connor Beaton
Now, I’m not saying that we should go back to those things. I think that progress needs to move forward. And there’s still there’s still something lacking within our society where men are very isolated. And isolation is is arguably one of the biggest challenges that a lot of men face. So I came into this work, because I experienced that because I had the great career going I had a great relationship going. I was traveling the world I had the you know the cars and the motorcycle and the toys and all that kind of stuff. And behind the scenes. What most people didn’t know is that I was really struggling. I was unfaithful in my relationship. I was miserable in my career. On the surface, it looks wonderful. And no one really knew what was going on internally inside of me and it led me to bottoming out and destroying my relationship, and in my career, and because I was so stubborn, I ended up sleeping in the back of my car for a few weeks, because I didn’t want to tell people. And so after that I went through a journey for a few years of being fortunate enough to have a mentor in my life, who sort of took me under his wing, he was quite a bit older, he was in his, like, late 70s, early 80s. And I worked with him and learned about union psychology about positive psychology about somatic therapy. And I started to realize and have conversations with the men in my life, and realize that there was a huge disconnect between myself and them, and usually a huge disconnect between the men that that I was surrounded by. And it was sort of summarized in this conversation, where I told one of my close friends at the time what had been going on, this is what I haven’t been telling you. And this is how I’ve been struggling. And he broke down in the conversation and told me that he had tried to commit suicide a month and a half before. And I was really struck in that moment. Like, it’s still it still gets me but I was really stuck in that moment. And all I could think was, how do I know everything about you, I know what type of scotch you like to drink. I know what TV shows you like I know sports teams you like I know your favorite music, what you like to eat. But I didn’t know that you were struggling so badly with depression, that you want it to end your life. The more that I started to reveal and get honest with what I have been going through in my life, the more that I connected with the men in my life, was met with this reality that there was all of these unspoken things between us. Really important, really meaningful things that would help us belong, that would help us grow together that would help us challenge one another, that would help us hold each other accountable. There was a sort of loneliness, a quality of loneliness that was embedded into a lot of the relationships that I had with men. And I didn’t want that anymore. And so I sort of went on this journey of learning the tools in order to be able to support men who were in situations like myself, and who are in situations like my my friends, and the men that I knew. And that that led me to starting ManTalks, which is sort of turned into this whole other thing. But that’s why a little bit about like, why I do the work that I do and who I’m usually working with.
Vanessa Cornell
Thank you, Connor for sharing that. I’m struck by how similar my story is to yours, and how similar I think many stories are to yours, right? I often say I tell my story, not because it’s special, I tell my story because it’s universal. And that there are so many people who are living inside of their world feeling like, I cannot tell people what’s going on in my inner world for fear of rejection, for fear of losing love. Sometimes it takes that bottoming out, when you really boil down to what’s underneath people’s experiences are different people’s struggles are different. But what I’m struck by is how many people say, wow, I feel so connected, because our experience is so similar. I don’t feel alone, because our experience is so similar. What do you find when you sit with men?
Connor Beaton
When this is usually asked, we hear men don’t cry and sort of those types of conversations. I think that shifting quite a bit depending on where you live geographically and the household that you grew up in. But after having, you know, done this work for almost a decade, and sitting with 1000s, and 1000s of men and hearing their stories and their narratives, there’s a few things that are often missing, or the belief system that’s taught. The first one is what I call the one rule of men. And the one rule of men is very similar to the rules in Fight Club. By the way, Fight Club is a wonderful movie all about masculinity, the whole thing is just a commentary on masculinity. But the first rule of Fight Club is is you don’t talk about it. And that is a comment on the belief system that that many men are taught. So the first rule of man is you don’t talk about what it’s like to be a man, especially if you’re suffering. So you don’t talk about what it’s like to be a man who’s going through divorce, who’s struggling with depression, who’s dealing with anxiety, you don’t talk about what it’s like to be a man who maybe feels lost or out of control or alone or isolated. That’s one of the main belief systems that I think that we as men are confronted with. And again, I think that that’s shifting, but that ties into the second part, which is this ideology that you are somehow a stronger man through suppression.
Connor Beaton
So you build your worth and your merit and your strength as a man by suppressing the things that society has told you are sort of not savory, right that maybe might infringe on or diminish your your perceived value, your masculine value. So things like sadness and grief and feeling embarrassed or ostracized or feeling lonely, all of those things are suppressed. And then next is the concept in the belief system that you are somehow stronger as a man for having dealt with it alone. This, in many ways, has come from two things. One, the heroic ideal, an archetype that we see, that’s very pervasive in our culture, we put the hero archetype in Western culture on a pedestal. So a lot of men are trying to live into this very heroic ideal of what they think it means to be a man, they need to be a savior, right? They need to be super tough, they need to save other people, they don’t need to be saved, right? The heroes never say if and so God forbid that they need help in any capacity. And so the idea there creates a very lonely and isolated perspective. You know, if a man is going through challenges in his relationship, there is an idea that often we as men hold that is I need to sort this out on myself, I need to fix this and figure this out by myself. And I am less of a man, I’m a broken man, if I have to ask for help, guidance or direction, because I should just know this already. In there’s a lot of sort of, like very basic jokes around like men asking for directions. It’s true in some way, I find that in myself, we take pride in being able to create direction for ourselves. But again, there is merit in having a core group of people that can move us in that direction. The other belief system is that we get stuck in this competition based mentality. So a lot of men actually have very surface level relationships. Because if you listen and watch the relationship that they have with their male friends, what you’ll hear and witness is a tremendous amount of competition. They’re constantly competing with one another, regaling stories of conquests, or talking about their business or finances or what they bought. So I’m using various sort of like cliche examples. But if you listen to the nuance, there’s a lot of competition happening between men. And part of the the challenge with that, is that when we feel like we’re in competition with somebody, we withhold one thing, right, we don’t want them to know how we’re weak or vulnerable, or susceptible to defeat. So many men are needing to shift their relationships with other men from competition based, so I’m not in competition with the men in my life, to challenge based where I can challenge the men that I’m surrounded by, that I’m friends with, that I work with, and they can challenge me back. And in that way, we actually grow together, right? We bond.
Connor Beaton
Men bond through challenge, but we have sort of cut this out of male friendships, and replaced it with competition. And the last piece, and I think this is arguably one of the most important is that most men don’t have a sense of initiation, present in their life at all. And so they manifest that initiation. So initiation for a man is again, mythologically, psychologically, these are very important times that again, for hundreds and hundreds and 1000s of years, we have had some form of initiation rites that have signaled a stepping into a more mature version of masculinity, one where there’s personal responsibility, I can’t tell you how many men I work with who have become wildly successful. And internally, they’re like, I don’t feel deserving of this, I don’t feel like I shouldn’t be, who put me in charge of this, right? Like, oh, who thought this was a good idea. So there’s a very adolescent mentality, there’s a very adolescent form of behavior that’s hiding underneath the surface of a lot of men. And that’s because we lack that initiation initiation is, is meant to be something that puts us into contact with some very important archetypes, and very important experiences, that allow us to see that we have a deeper level of responsibility, not just to ourselves, but to our community, to our societies, and to the world as a whole. And so in the world at large. And so when we lack that initiation, and we miss out on it, we will do things like implode our life, and so a lot of men actively and that this is an unconscious process that usually happens, but they actively implode their life through infidelity, through addiction or health problems, so that they can hit bottom so hard that they can start to rise from it and say, I did that, right, I initiated myself, I now feel more responsible. And that was the process that I went through, I actually felt afterwards, like I had accomplished something like I had made it through something that was so monumental that I didn’t think I would ever come out the other side from, and there was this knowing and knowledge that came along with that. And the maturity that came along with that, that a lot of men are really craving. You listen to what they talk about missing in life, what they’re really describing as a more mature version of masculinity, where they feel like there’s a deep knowing that they’re leading themselves, rather than feeling completely out of control, or wild or not able to sort of say no to themselves not being able to be disciplined.
Vanessa Cornell
It’s so fascinating. And there’s so much to get into. And I really want to come back to that idea of initiation. Because that’s something I haven’t heard before and feels really important. But before we go to initiation, there’s something that you said that really triggered something. So I know a lot of your work is guiding men through this path, but men are in relationship, sometimes with women. And what I’ve found often is that when that sort of, I’m going to go it alone, I’m going to be really strong, I’m going to be really tough comes out, women sort of say don’t do that, be more like me. And so there’s this sort of extreme where it’s like you only have two choices. You can either be a man, or you can not be a man. And I love how you framed how competition can morph into challenge doesn’t go away. It just changes, right. And so I wonder whether you could talk about, first of all, what you’ve seen in terms of what women sort of think they want men to become, and the pressures that men feel in terms of, well, I can’t be a man, I have to be this for to be in my relationship. And that makes me less of a man. And is there a different path, right, where you can step fully into your masculinity in a way that allows you not to, I don’t want to use the word compromise, but compromise your masculinity. How can men transition into that? And how can women support men in transitioning into that rather than feeling like they have to strip away all those things in their man that feels like masculine, because they’re in some way, not allowing the relationship to flourish?
Connor Beaton
Yeah, in many ways, women do play a very important role in men’s development. I’ve said for years that for many men, women are this sort of like hold the permission card for a man to step into the work or a lot of women want to sometimes step in and define what it is that a man should be doing, or what a man should look like or sound like and, and or change him. And I think that the challenge is that I’m being conscious of what I’m about to say here. But like when a woman is in a relationship with a man, and she is able to change him on some level, she often loses respect for him, because it doesn’t come from his own internal direction. Right, we as human beings, we want one another to be autonomous to a certain level and degree, we hope that, especially when it comes to partnership, that our partner has enough sort of self respect that they can find things within themselves that they are wanting to work on that they are wanting to create direction, they are wanting to shift and grow and evolve and learn and understand. And so when we find ourselves in a dynamic where we are dictating the change that our partner should be taking on, there’s a few things that happen one, it often leads to codependency or a measurement to we become responsible for that person’s development. And three, that other person will naturally at some point either revolt against us because we are seen as the change agent, and we’ve sort of stepped into a parental role with them, or they’ll miss out on the beauty of their individuation process. And this is really, really important, right? initiation, in some ways is supposed to help us individuated from the parents from the family system from society in some ways, and to find our own individual essence and identity. So I think that that many women in relationships can certainly point men in the right direction. You know, have you listen to this podcast, if you check this out? You know, a friend of mine was reading this book, is that something you’d be interested in? And to sort of point a man in the right direction and you can say, you know, let’s listen to an episode together. I’d love to get your thoughts on this and make it collaborative, but it’s not something that he’s open to or somebody is ready for or wanting to do then it’s probably not going to happen.
Connor Beaton
Most men, they’re either looking for that rock bottom, or they are, they’re sort of like, circling around it a little bit, you know, they’re contemplating yet, they want to know what the descent feels like for them. So that might mean that sometimes, you know, we need to end relationships with a man because he’s not willing to self explore it. I know many men who have started exploring themselves because the relationship ended. And that’s hard, right? It’s very challenging. Truth is that sometimes that’s, that’s what we actually need. So, on the man side, our work in those moments is to develop a deeper quality of awareness, a deeper quality of empathy. Often, our work as men is less about trying to embody this very vulnerable entity, that’s oftentimes society is countering with this, like, we have the very macho, hyper masculine, you know, perspective, and how society counters that is that men need to be more vulnerable, right? Men just need to open up more. But a lot of men don’t have context for that. They don’t even know what that means. Right? I literally get that question. A lot of times, it’s like, my wife wants me to be more vulnerable. What does that actually even mean? What does she want from me, I tell her about my feelings, it doesn’t seem like it lands, we are being asked to learn how to lead ourselves more effectively. And young believes Carl Jung, who’s a very well known psychologist from the 20th century, he believed that a part of a man’s journey is about coming into contact with and embracing his Anima. And the Anima represented the feminine within the feminine qualities within and all that this meant, and I’m condensing something very large down into something very simple. But all that this meant was that he had to learn how to come into contact with compassion within himself, compassion for himself, kindness, right, it’s like, we don’t see that, that kindness and compassion and empathy are incredibly important attributes, especially when it comes to leading ourselves, and being able to create direction in our lives. And so that’s an important part. And the last part that I would say, is that we have vastly as men, over indexed our rational mind, like to a incredibly damaging, constricting degree. And so culture, society, other men, we have been promoted, we have been pedestal because of our capacity to rationally think to, to analyze to be logical. And so a lot of men are relying on that. But the issue is that you can’t solve emotional problems with rational thinking. You can’t solve emotional problems with rational thinking. There’s a great quote by Einstein, he says, the rational mind is a faithful servant, and the intuitive mind is a sacred gift. And we’ve created a culture that is for that has honored the servant and forgotten the gift. And so in many ways, this is what a man’s journey is all about. This is what a lot of men are going through.
Vanessa Cornell
I know that you’ve written a book, tell us a little bit about that, and your experience with you know, what if someone comes to you and is like, I don’t even know where to start.
Connor Beaton
I believe that for many of us, our work begins in pain, as men like our work begins and understanding our own pain, beginning to work with that, when we avoid those things. And we try and suppress them, they become the stone, they become the block, they become the obstacle that is in the way of us moving more towards the type of relationship we want, the type of intimacy that we crave, the type of career that we desire, the type of individual that we want to be the health that we want for ourselves our fitness, I mean, it just gets in the way of all of it because it becomes this weight that we are carrying around. We are a very Ascension based culture. We love enlightenment, we love light, love brightness, we like expanding outwards and outwards. But what we have lost out on is our ability to grow down, to grow in to expand inwards, to actually look at our pain, our suffering, our challenges, our obstacles, as something that is that is a teacher that is nourishing for us that is generative for us. And so part of our work is to start to say, what about my past because a lot of men when they come into the worst, like I don’t want to look at my past. So where do we begin, we begin in the places that we least want to go. But those parts of our life become the, the sort of soil for us to develop the newer aspects of our psyche, of our emotional body of our future. And so we start in those places. We look at the things we actively wants to avoid. And we find people and spaces and places where we can begin to work with them, talk about them, understand them. And in some ways we learn how to more effectively carry those wounds. It’s not about killing them off. You know, within ManTalks, we have something called the Alliance. And there’s like 250 men from around the world and growing every single week, we have these types of conversations about the challenging aspects of a man’s life. And it is incredible, how liberating that is, for so many men, to just be able to have the conversation and how confronting it is to just have the conversation. So that’s where it begins. I mean, if you look at our sort of core wounds, and the pain that we carry, whether we had divorce show up in our childhood, or abuse, or abandonment or neglect, or there’s addiction or family, or whatever the case may be, the main part of that is that we don’t belong. And so we’re constantly trying to heal that we’re constant trying to prove that we do belong, through our relationships, through our work and our work environment. We’re trying to find a deeper sense of belonging. And I think that in group work, a part of that is that we witnessed that, right? We give other people a sense of belonging, and we receive a deeper sense of belonging.
Vanessa Cornell
Yeah, thank you for that. And I do want to come back to initiation because I think it’s so fascinating in the context of that sense of belonging and initiation. What is a real initiation and what in our culture counts as an initiation or a successful as an initiation? And what parts of our culture don’t don’t achieve that sense of becoming a man?
Connor Beaton
Yeah, so initiation is I’m referring to it is, is some form of an encounter with death. There’s two kinds of initiation. There are rough initiations or traumatic initiations. And then there are whole initiations. Rough initiations are things that we experience that create trauma, childhood abuse, abandonment, losing a parent, witnessing divorce, getting extremely bullied at school, those types of things are a form of initiation, where it feels like you start to encounter death in some capacity, the death of your parents relationship, the death of your innocence, because you were abused, those types of pieces are a rough initiation, and they are the things that we then need to heal from. True initiation puts us in to some encounter with ego death, were a part of who we think we are starts to die away, I would say the college is more of a part of the individuation process. So it allows us to move away from the family system and allows us to create our own sort of individual sense of identity.
Vanessa Cornell
So a couple minutes left, but two more questions. So I want to get to them just quickly, one about sort of generational differences, right, so a man in his 80s, and then also any words of wisdom for women or teenage girls that have a strong masculine side and balancing it with the feminine, if you can touch on both of those quickly, that’d be great.
Connor Beaton
Being able to understand and honor the older generations perspective is important. And to be able to seek that understanding to be able to say, why is this important to you? What’s threatening about the perspective that I’m putting forward? Or this more modern take? What do you feel like you lose out on how does this perspective that we’re talking about challenge or confront your idea to sort of meet the aspect of of letting go of not changing our parents, you know, of not needing to parent our parents, and that can be very challenging, and to be able to bring compassion into those spaces, the older generation, depending on what it is and what they’re going through, and where they’re coming from, there is a sort of loving of the loneliness, loving of the isolation of beliefs. And so sometimes these belief systems come from a place of entrenching them in sort of just wanting to be left alone, and not having to sort of deal with the hard shifts that can sometimes come along with engaging them in a more in a more depth orient oriented conversation. So that’s, that’s what I would say on that front. And then what was the second one advice for?
Vanessa Cornell
For women or teenage girls who are really strong masculine side, how to balance that with the feminine side.
Connor Beaton
As men and women aim is to better understand our Anima animus our masculine or feminine and that a man’s work is to start to integrate and understand his his feminine and a woman’s work is to integrate them understand her masculine or her animals. What I would encourage you to explore is to look at what the threat of being in your feminine is. What is the threat to allowing yourself to be more in what you perceive to be feminine, and start to explore how being in your masculine is protecting you, we need to come into contact with that, because in some ways, it’s a protection mechanism. Maybe it’s protecting you from getting hurt in relationships, maybe it’s protecting you from having to be vulnerable in relationships, maybe it’s protecting you from a kind of intimacy that feels threatening, but come and come into contact first with what’s protecting you. And then find ways that feel authentic for you that are going to allow you to move into what you deem to be the feminine, what my wife does is when she would go to work, and then come back because she runs her own business. And she was very much in her masculine throughout the day. So when she would come home, she had this whole ritual to do what she called disrobing, and it was to sort of take off the role of business owner, and to move out of the mask. And it was, you know, scents and smells. And sometimes it was music and a little bit of dancing, but it was to sort of shake off the rigidity of what she considered to be masculine, and to move into a more fluid, playful, nurturing space of her feminine. And so I would just say, find that daily ritual, find that daily practice, and find what being in your masculine is protecting you from.
Vanessa Cornell
That’s beautiful. Thank you, Connor. So we are out of time. But I do want you to tell everyone about the course that you’ve done with Vienna.
Connor Beaton
Yeah, so the program is called And we really designed it to give people the foundations of what gets in the way of powerful, intimate love, and relationships. And what are some of the foundational pieces that everyone should know? Right? We’re not really taught the foundations of relationships. So it’s an online program, whether you’re single, or you’re a couple, you can go through it, it’s great for couples, I mean, we’ve had, a lot of people go through it now. And couples usually love it because they can sort of do the work on their own, and then come back together and discuss. And it’s really, really generative conversations. And so we talk about how your family system impacts your relational template. We talked about being able to set boundaries, we get into developing a deeper sense of intimacy, having those types of conversations together, and then how to turn conflict into connection. That’s, that’s usually one of the big models is how do you how do you turn conflict in a relationship into something that’s more generative, because that’s what really great couples do. It’s not that they don’t fight, it’s that they sort of argue effectively in a way that is generative and expansive for the intimacy in the relationship.
Vanessa Cornell
Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, we welcome you to stay close and discover more of our offerings. Check us out on Instagram @nushu or visit nushu.com for more.
