In this episode, Josh Hatcher talks about the myth of masculine and feminine energies.
Men do not have a feminine side.
Creativity, nurturing, are not feminine qualities. They are human qualities. And men express them in a masculine way, as women express them in a feminine way.
Culture tries to view gender as fluid. But it is not.
Men are men. Women are women.
Understanding that it’s not wrong for a man to be more sensitive and gentle, or for a man to be more tough or aggressive is important.
Sensitivity and gentleness can be very masculine, and can be expressed by a man in a masculine way. We do not need to ascribe these kinds of qualities only to femininity.
Today’s guest is an LA County firefighter who previously served as an Army Ranger, with multiple deployments into Iraq and Afghanistan.
You can imagine that he’s “seen some stuff.”
But Nole Lilly’s personal traumas were even deeper, and he found himself in a dark place…
Nole currently lives in the mountains of Southern California, with his wife Heather and their 3 children. Nole and Heather have been married for 18 years. He has worked as a fireman with L.A. County Fire for the past 12 years. Prior to that, he served as a United States Army Ranger, deploying multiple times into Iraq and Afghanistan. Nole and Heather have experienced the death of two of their sons and their journey through that loss has shaped much of the people they have become today. Nole has also dealt with post-traumatic stress related to the loss of his sons and his time serving as a Ranger. As a fireman, Nole has continued to live and work in a world where exposure to trauma can be a very regular occurrence. From this experience, Nole felt called to start a podcast where he could share his experiences with others who are working through difficult times in life and also share the struggles and triumphs of other men that he admires.
Your purpose is really simple. It’s WHY you exist. WHY are you here?
Purpose doesn’t change
It was there before you were born, and it sticks with you for your whole life. Many people get focused on their purpose as a specific thing. Then, when something goes wrong, their identity and purpose are questioned in a moment of crisis.
Developing a personal mission statement
Putting your mission into words is a powerful act. It sets your intention. In conjunction with your purpose and your vision, it’s the equivalent of getting in the car and plugging in GPS Coordinates. How powerful would your life by if you had that kind of clarity in your destination?
Vision
Vision is where you are headed. It’s a goal, with a plan, centered around your purpose and your mission.
Your vision answers the question, “If I continue working toward my mission according to my purpose, where will I be in five to ten years?”
Values
We all have values. Even the unscrupulous among us have values.
To value something is to give it worth. There are things that either knowingly or un-knowingly have worth in our lives. They guide our decision-making. They affect our personal relationships. If we take the time to identify the core of those values, we can recognize them not just as gut-checks or feelings, but rather as guiding principles.
Josh Hatcher – Mission – Vision – Values
Purpose: To live a life of love and service to God, my family, and my community.
Mission: To use my talents and abilities to enrich and lead in the lives my family, my friends, my community, and all of those in my expanding circle of influence.
Vision: I will live as an ambassador of Christ and lead my family, while I find meaning and value in my work, while building passive income streams, and mentoring and encouraging men and women.
Because the world needs men to lead in their families and communities, and because so many men have struggled to understand their value, Manlihood exists to help men become better men.
Mission:
The Manlihood Mission is to Educate, Equip, and Entertain Men in an Engaging Way.
Vision:
The Manlihood vision is to create resources to educate and equip men, to foster a thriving community of men, where bonds of brotherhood and accountability form. We seek to help men be better fathers, husbands, leaders, friends. We want to build through Manlihood a financially sustainable architecture that can support itself, but also to incubate ideas and opportunities from within the Manlihood community that support our purpose and mission.
Values:
Men matter.
Family matters.
Integrity and Honor matter.
Personal Responsibility matters. (If it is to be, it’s up to me.)
Men thrive and grow in community and brotherhood with each other.
Truth is everywhere. Wisdom knows how to pick it out.
Men should value and respect women. (People should respect people.)
Perseverance, Self-control and Self-discipline are sacred and essential.
Words are powerful, and how we use them matters.
Leadership is steeped in influence and responsibility. (Everyone is a leader, and everyone should embrace and nurture that role.)
Helping men level up in their careers and their roles at home.
Nick Matiash is a husband, father, author, and leader of the Evolved Man; an initiative committed to helping men pair hard work with heart work in life and relationships.
Nick’s mission is to awaken men to be the most authentic version of themselves, and to truly understand the power of their emotions, healing and harnessing them, rather than stuffing them or being ruled by them.
Most men live lives of mediocrity. This is a call to something more.
Nick believes that as men can work through the barriers that they have set up in their hearts and minds, they’ll be better husbands, fathers, leaders, and be able to be better in their careers too.
We’re often held back by our deepest insecurities, and those insecurities often come from a very real place that we may have to fight to reclaim.
Nick also talks about the role of a husband and father as a leader, as a lover, and how to do that, we have to make the time in our life to take better care of our own mental and emotional health.
Men don’t like to think about their mental health or their emotions.
But it’s incredibly important for us to be able to lead from a position of strength and wholeness, not a position of brokenness and trauma and burnout.
Book Description: You wanted to be an astronaut, a doctor, or even the President of the United States.
When you were a kid your mind ran wild with imagination, daydreaming about all that you would accomplish and how amazing life would be. But at some point, the large life that you felt destined to live simply shrunk. It’s been minimized by experiences that have left you jaded, limitations that you’ve perceived, and people around you telling you to, “be realistic.”
The sky that you once thought to be the limit has been replaced by a painfully claustrophobic ceiling.
There’s more life to be lived, and there’s a part of you that knows it.
Whether it be in life, love, health or business…you feel like you’re missing something. Like you overslept on the day they were handing out all the rules to success and fulfillment and missed your chance to grab a copy. You feel trapped by a life that you didn’t sign up for, and crave the wide open space of possibility and potential that a younger you once knew.
This book is the guide that will open your world back up and allow you to truly live life on your terms. In these pages you will find:
• The unseen patterns of your mind that have caused you to run in place for years.
• The foolproof methods to bring those patterns into the light and have your way with them.
• A way to navigate your life with awareness once you’ve uncovered the obstacles that previously stood in your way.
You weren’t given a pulse and a heartbeat to waste on a life that you merely exist in. You are here to smile big, laugh loud, and love hard. You are here to make a lot of money with your natural set of gifts. You are here to create something that you are left in awe of.
This book is the pathway to all of that.
This book is the key that will unlock your mind to what’s possible.This book is for people who accidentally stumbled into a mediocre life—and are ready to move past it.
As men, we often think of strength, and courage, and honor – which are certainly qualities that go with manhood – but when we think about how our manhood relates to the fairer sex – there are things they notice that they see as manly that we may not!
In that list, several things were answered multiple times
Communication
Kindness
Honesty
Humility
The idea of Masculine and Feminine Energies is a misnomer
I believe that men and women share many qualities. Women can nurture, and men can nurture. But women do it in a feminine way, and men do it in a masculine way. Men are strong, and women are strong – but we are strong in ways that are unique to who we are. A strong woman is not masculine, she’s feminine. A gentle man is not femnine, he’s masculine. We need to stop ascribing energies to genders.
Life is hard sometimes. We face obstacles in our path that stop our progress, hold us back, even harm us sometimes. What if those obstacles were NOT the enemy that we thought they were? What if overcoming those hardships was actually the very point of it all?
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
– Marcus Aurelius
We need to view hardship as an opportunity.
“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”
– Napoleon Hill
Sometimes, we know the reason for our adversity.
The question of WHY is always running through our heads and hearts when things get hard. It’s okay to look for that. Sometimes, the answer is that we are foolish. Our own stupid choices may have caused our hardship. Sometimes, the hardship may be the result of injustice, or someone else’s bad decisions. The answer to WHY can be helpful sometimes for us to avoiding the same hardship in the future.
For example, if I eat Taco Bell at 9PM and get the runs at midnight, i can curse the adversity of the runs, or I can learn from the situation.
Sometimes we do not know the reason for our adversity.
There are times that despite our best efforts to decode or understand, the hardship before us is impossible to decipher. We look for someone to blame or hold accountable, or a way that we can avoid similar hardships in the future, but answers elude us.
It’s in these moments that we have to remember that the purpose of our suffering or the purpose of our obstacle may not be an intentionally, cosmic or divinely ordained moment, but rather a natural progression in life. Hardship will always come. That’s the way of it.
We often look at life as a force that throws things at us… we blame life, or God, or the Devil, or “the system” or whatever malevolent entity we chose. Maybe our perspective is jaded. Maybe it’s not that bad things are handed to us to hurt us. Maybe the truth of life is that SOME challenges come our way so that we can be strengthened as we overcome them?
The right question about hardship is, how can this strengthen me?
We must learn to view hardship as an opportunity for growth. An opportunity for something great to happen. That’s not so hard when it’s an easier hardship. That’s really hard when it’s accompanied with great loss and pain.
But the truth is that is the human condition. We are all living in a broken world, where broken things happen. Since the beginning of time, when sin and brokenness entered the world, perfection was broken, and broken things happen. Redemption is what happens when we allow the brokenness to be overcome.
“Adversity causes some men to break; others to break records.”
– William Arthur Ward
“Hard times don’t create heroes. It is during the hard times when the “hero” within us is revealed.”
– Bob Riley
The secret to overcoming adversity is in not avoiding the hardship, but in facing it.
And in some cases, embracing it. Surely, there are some needless hardships that we can avoid by making better decisions – that in fact is the very nature of getting stronger in the face of adversity, in that we learn from the consequences of our mistakes. But for most hardship, enduring it, solving it, learning to bear it, learning to get help when we should, becoming strong – this is what we are supposed to do. If we avoid it – we never learn these things. We never grow. We never thrive. We never WIN.
For several years, physicists and scientists and philosophers have presented the idea that the concepts in the Matrix movies may not be as fictional as they would appear.
And he’s not alone. Many scholars have pondered the question, are we living in a reality, or a simulation of some kind?
In the Matrix trilogy, Morpheus addresses Keanu Reeve’s character, Neo, and offers him a choice. Take the BLUE PILL and continue to believe what you know, or take the RED PILL and you can see the truth. That Red Pill metaphor has permeated culture, with everything from conspiracy theories to the incel movement, to just a general representation of mankind accepting truth.
Are we living in a simulation?
I don’t believe that the simulation is a computer or holographic simulation – but I do believe that there is some truth behind this concept. Let’s look deeper.
Cognitive Dissonance
According to Simply Psychology.com Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.
Narrative Culture
If the last couple years have taught us anything, it’s that there are often multiple narratives, and often a prevailing narrative that we are expected to accept. Some of those narratives are perpetuated and bolstered by powerful forces.
Who owns the media?
15 billionaires and 6 corporations own and control almost all of the major media outlets in the United States.
The FBI and the CIA have declassified many of their old case files and operations. They are not all declassified, and some are heavily redacted. One thing is clear, there are things that have been done by these government agencies that raise suspicions about their motives, their intentions, and their allegiance to the Constitution of the United States, the sovereignty of other nations, and the freedoms of the American people.
If the CIA could do experiments on US citizens in the 1960s, why would we believe they stopped today? If they were influencing foreign journalists to portray a false narrative to the people in order to participate in psychological warfare, why would we assume they stopped today?
I understand that these questions are bordering on conspiracy theory. I want to make it clear that I’m not saying with concrete evidence that there is malfeasance, but judging on what was done in the past, it takes a certain degree of cognitive dissonance to believe that these actions have stopped.
Here are a couple of declassified events and programs that ought to give you pause before you trust the narrative that the media is telling you the truth, and that the government has your best interest at heart.
I want to encourage to look these up for yourself, and read the original declassified files, and then rather than just assume a conspiracy theory about them, be aware of these as historical instances that may shape our current reality.
Operation Mockingbird
Operation Northwoods
The Tuskegee Experiments
The Gulf of Tonkin
MK Ultra
What is the truth?
Part of the problem we have in our culture today is that we have muddied the entire concept of Truth. One group says one thing, and the side says another. We have very little ability to distinguish the Truth from a cleverly crafted fiction.
Is There A Higher Reality?
I spoke with Brennen Nakane recently as we recorded an interview that will air later in the season, and in our pre-interview conversation, he had some amazing thoughts on the idea of us living in a simulation that I thought were worth adding to this conversation.
What if it’s not about a “simulation” but about a higher “reality”? What if this is a temporary reality in comparison to a permanent reality? When we see “glitches” or random coincidences that seem to point to a designer, maybe they are actually pointing to a Grand Designer?
What if there IS more to this life than just the 70-90 years of sleeping, working, and complaining about random crap?
A covenant is a sacred promise. Marriage is a prime example of that. When you marry someone – you make a permanent bond that is meant to be unbreakable. A promise of fidelity. Breaking that bond has severe consequences.
Men – we have other covenants too. Some unspoken, some formal
