If there is one thing I wish my male clients would understand, it’s the following.
Strength, even the stereotypical, archetypal masculine kind, does not come from suppressing your needs and emotions or being critical of yourself for having them.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not particularly interested in new modern narratives and ideologies around masculinity. I was born and raised in Greece, in a traditional setup.
So when a male client tells me “I need to prove I’m not weak.” or “I need to success so that I can provide” or“I need to be strong for my current (or future) family.”….I get it.
The problem starts when male high achievers begin to believe that strength means being completely unbothered by things.
In their heads, the ideal high-achieving man wakes up every morning overflowing with ambition. He rarely has dilemmas, rarely feels insecure, definitely doesn’t procrastinate on decisions. And if he has emotional needs, they better be perfectly rational and justified.
Except this person doesn’t exist. It’s either a Disney character or what others let you believe about themselves (probably because they have the same challenges).
The actual person sitting in front of me feels stuff. A lot of stuff.
But instead of simply recognising those feelings, he passes them through the lens of logic.
Does this emotion make sense?
Is it justified?
Should I be feeling this?
So when it doesn’t pass the test, it gets rejected as weakness that needs to be fixed.
That same attitude then shows up everywhere, from business, work, relationships to decisions.
He constantly compares himself either with an idealised version of himself or with his heroes. And in that comparison, every hesitation, emotional need or difficult day counts against him.
So many of these men eventually come to me with a very specific request:
Help me fix myself.
Help me stop procrastinating.
Help me make decisions.
Help me become more disciplined.
Help me reach my goals.
Help me stop feeling like this.
These are completely legitimate requests. And yes, I can help. Just usually not in the way they expect.
A lot of them expect hacks, frameworks and techniques.
But hacks and frameworks don’t work particularly well when you’re comparing yourself with this archetypal Disney character.
You will always lose that comparison because you’re competing against someone who isn’t real.
So here are a few things I wish more of my male clients knew they were allowed to feel:
Sometimes you want the people around you to tell you that you’re doing a good job and that they’re proud of you. Because, if we’re being honest, part of the reason you’re killing yourself working this hard is that you want their admiration and approval.
Sometimes you wake up wanting a hug. Your needs can be embarrassingly basic. Baby-level basic. There is still a kid inside you, and that kid still has kid needs.
Sometimes saying, “I feel insecure about this. I don’t really have the words to explain it. It seems irrational, but I know I feel it” is incredibly cathartic. You don’t always need to build a legal case for why an emotion deserves to exist.
Sometimes you feel completely lost. And sometimes that isn’t even a bad day. It might be your state for months. You might genuinely not know why you’re doing all this, whether any of it makes sense or whether it’s taking you where you actually want to go.
Sometimes you’re anxious for reasons you cannot explain. Those reasons might completely fail your logic test. That doesn’t make the anxiety imaginary.
Sometimes you want to run away, disappear and hide from everything. Sometimes you want permission to be weak as fuck because shit is scary and you genuinely have no fucking clue what you’re doing.
And this is the part many of my clients initially misunderstand. Accepting these “awkward” or “weak” emotions is power.
By accepting them, I don’t mean letting them run wild and dominate your behaviour. If every emotion dictates what you do, then yes, you have a different problem.
I mean recognising them as legitimate information. The same way you recognise hunger.
You don’t sit there saying “Why am I hungry? This is pathetic. A stronger person wouldn’t need food.”
You eat because your body is telling you something, and if you continuously ignore it, eventually your performance suffers.
Emotional needs aren’t that different.
And a lot of the men I work with genuinely don’t have words for these experiences. Nobody taught them how to talk about them. Many grew up watching fathers who themselves never expressed vulnerability or allowed anybody to see it.
So when I say this is strength, I don’t mean it philosophically.
I mean it in an extremely practical, rational way.
If you want to win the game of success, you cannot spend half your energy fighting yourself.
The more you deny these parts of yourself, the more you try to extort performance out of yourself, and the more you hate yourself for not fitting the image in your head, the stronger these things tend to become.
And eventually they start influencing the exact things you care about, your decisions, your relationships, your work, your ability to take risks, your ability to think clearly.
You don’t become stronger by pretending nothing affects you but when you can look at what affects you, call it what it is, and still decide what you’re going to do about it.
Because at the end of the day a tired mind makes poor decisions.