International Men’s Day – 19 November 2024 | Yollab Central

Host: Welcome all viewers, listeners and my audience to another episode of what's the Day Life. Today we'll be talking about a different kind of issue and the day that's celebrating. We are celebrating today is International Men's Day. This is celebrated annually on the 19th of November. And I'm joined today. With me, Jason Lange is here. He's a men's issue specialist and coach. And before we dive into the day itself, let's. I'll give Jason an opportunity to talk about what he's been doing for a while and how he helps men around the world to solve their issues. And then we'll talk about the day itself.

Jason Lange: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for having me, first off. And, yeah, I'm a men's guide and men's group facilitator, and I've been involved in the men's work world for almost two decades now, myself, first starting on my own personal journey of growth and transformation and then culminating, you know, about seven years ago when I started also offering support to other men. And in particular, I am very passionate about men getting into what I call men's groups. So these supportive small group units that can really transform the quality of a man's life in terms of how connected he feels, how nourished he feels, how able to handle the stresses and challenges of life he's able to, whether that's relationships or career or health or whatever that might be. And in a lot of ways, that all just mirrors my own journey of really learning to build up a trusted group of men around me that have supported me through some huge challenges in my life and allowed me to kind of get to this place of thriving that I'm at now. So I work with all kinds of men. Huge range of men, young men, old men, single men, married men, everything in between. And, you know, there's just some often common issues that a lot of guys experience these days, in particular, you know, being isolated, feeling alone, being really stressed out, having different addictions or compulsions, and sometimes not being clear about how to thrive in their work or in their relationships or just getting totally stuck in their heads from just the bombardment of information and stuff we get today. So I really help men navigate all of that.

Host: So, yeah, you've picked out few keywords that I will be talking about throughout the episode itself. So let's start with the most basic one. So what International Men's Day is about talking about men's health issues, mental issues, and how men are also important in creating society and building the world that as we are in talking about a little context to give everybody what it's been about across history. So the issue for having an equivalent to International Women's Day has been rising since the 60s. Journalists have been writing about it. There were articles that were written during the Soviet era about how the dichotomy of not having an equivalent to the International Women's Day was not equal in the whole sense of having gender equality. Then in 1992, a man named Thomas Auster brought out the issue and he was able to rally the whole point for a Couple of Years, 1992, 93, 94. After which it fizzled out, kind of. He could not get so many people together. And then it was only the Maltese association of Men's Rights who were able to continue with the whole thing. But then another man came around, so he started it in 1999, and then since then, it's been from November 19th onwards, and throughout the world, it's been celebrated like that. This specific year itself, in 2024, the theme that they're going along with is positive male role models. So I think we'll start our discussion with that specific topic, how positive male role models are very important for not just men. But having a male role model in life itself for everybody is so much important. Who's been your best positive male role model? Let's start with that and then we'll get along. How? Yeah.

Jason Lange: Yeah. So I got really lucky in that in my mid-20s, I was in one of the very few kind of areas that men's work was really taking off in the early to mid 2000s. And all of the great men I've been exposed to in my life have come through men's groups and men's work. And so there's been a couple of key mentors that really guided me through and particularly guided me into my body in a way I had never been before, to help me make contact with myself and my emotions. And they were able to do that because they had done that themselves, quite frankly. So there's a couple of different coaches and teachers and authors that I've worked with over the years that have all kind of supported me in these different ways. And I think what's most important is they've given me that embodied experience of what a positive vision of masculinity could be. And so this is what I. One of the many reasons I'm such a big fan of men's groups is because when we actually physically get our bodies around other men, in particularly other men who have done their inner work Done their work to create peace and health and thriving in their body and their nervous systems. We can feel it. And so, as I like to say, you know, masculinity is this transmission and healthy, positive masculinity is actually quite relaxed. So I had these experiences in my twenties of going and sitting around circles. And I remember there was one mentor, my mentor Robert, that I was like, maybe 26, I think, and he was probably in his late 50s, 60s at the time. And we. He was doing some work with us. And I remember thinking in my head, wow, that's what I want to be when I grow up.

Host: Right.

Jason Lange: And. Right. This thing we often kind of think about when we're kids, but. And it wasn't about his occupation. It wasn't about how much money he was making. It was about how I was experiencing his presence in the room. He was deep, he was grounded. He was relaxed. He was still powerful. He was feeling deeply. He wasn't a dick. He wasn't contracted. He wasn't trying to control people. And so just by being around him, I suddenly had a map of, wow, that's. That's where I want to go. So how did you get there? Right. And that's when I started working with him and learning what he had done on his path to get to that place in his body. And that's a man who just completely changed the trajectory of my life.

Host: But then, okay, you had the great opportunity, right? There's one opportunity that people have. I mean, not all people, but a positive role model in the family itself. How important is that? And how can it turn your life around if the male role model that you ought to be looking to in the family is not what he should be?

Jason Lange: For you, this is a huge problem. I think it's a big root of a lot of the men I work with and that get attracted to the work I'm doing is they never had that. They never had a safe, grounded, positive, masculine role model around them. You know, best case, their father maybe was just absent. You know, just wasn't around a lot or worked a lot, so just wasn't very present. Worst case, sometimes fathers are quite volatile. Emotionally abusive, physically abusive. You know, I've seen the whole gamut. And when we don't have that positive role model, we're not sure what to grow into. And that causes a lot of challenges for us men. And I think it's why we're seeing this tidal wave now of what I call men's work in men's groups. And this idea that by Spending time around healthy men, we can start to kind of reformat ourselves in these ways when, if we didn't get it in the household. The other thing I'll note that's really important is that when it comes to, like, masculine role models in particular, I, I, it's off. Can't think of it off the top of my head here. But there was actually a really great research study that was done that, that showed that all it really takes is a couple interventions. Meaning, like, it's great if you have someone around and present in the daily aspects of your life, but they've shown that literally the trajectory of a young boy's life can be changed by just a couple of interventions by a loving uncle, father, coach, teacher, somebody that just steps in and really gets real with the kid and supports them and says, hey, you know, I see what you're doing. I want to help you. Here's. Here's some advice or whatever that might be. And that can completely change, you know, change so much. And I think that's one of the many challenges is just a lot of those structures have started to fall apart, right? There's. In the men's work world, there's been a lot of Talk since the 90s that one of the challenges is boys are mostly raised by women these days because fathers are often away at work. It's, you know, changing. But traditionally, the schooling system mostly had female teachers, so boys were just mostly being raised by women and didn't have a lot of exposure to healthy, grounded, mature, masculine. And that catches up with us. And then in that vacuum, when we don't have those role models, our lives can go astray or we'll start to be attracted to some, some of the maybe less healthy versions of that masculinity that are really kind of jumping up in our culture these days.

Host: So it really resonates, right? Because I've been lucky to have such positive role models as my father, as my uncle, and other elder males that have been in my family all across. I mean, and the male group, the man group that you've been talking about, one is having the right mixture, right? You have to have peers, and then you have to have people that you can look up to and probably someone you want to coach or mentor yourself or see grow. So how do you decide? Okay. And probably coming across such a man could be a thing, right? You might be able to find one, but not always, right? So how does someone like me, I mean, I'm still 28, under 30. How do I go across and look for the right person that I can look up to. I mean, obviously, I have my father and my uncles who I can look up to, but then somebody who's just going around. Host: Yeah, right.

Jason Lange: They don't have to have the exact same life story as you, but oftentimes there's some overlap. Right. What I found in my journey, and many of the men who work with me, the people will often trust the Most to guide us are the ones who've had some shared life experiences with us. And so, you know, I, one of the things I help a lot of guys with is dating and relationships and it was not something that came easy to me. I struggled for many, many years in that. So guys that struggle with that really like working with me because I know what that pain is like. It's a little different. Right. They're not going to necessarily be as attracted to work with someone who has just, you know, had no problems dating from 15 on and was in relationships their whole life. That's, it's not quite the same shared experience. So you want to find someone who has a little bit of shared experience with you, who's embodying some of the qualities you want. And the last thing I'll just share is somebody who's doing the work themselves. Right. You want to find a teacher or a coach who's kind of walking their walk, so to speak, and actually is involved in their own growth as well, because that's the thing that really makes them the most trustable.

Host: So. Right, yeah, it's h. You have to have that connect with the person that you want to work with. What does the peer group have to be? I mean, I was about to go into the self help and therapy kind of thing, but let's talk about the peer group. Right? We've talked about mentors and coaches, but then as a group there's a lot of hey. And talk about sitting once a week with your mates once a week just to babble around or just sit and talk and rant. But then how useful is that? Can it be made more productive by having a specific type of discussion or is there something that you talk about?

Jason Lange: Yeah, totally. So the interesting thing about men's groups is it's kind of a term like meditation. You can, somebody can say, hey, I meditate. And you're like, well, what kind? Right. There's lots of ways to meditate and there's lots of variations in types of men's groups. But the, the most kind of primal or core thing I, I, I share about them is how most men learn to relate to each other is through what we call triangulation. So it's me and you, and we build connection with each other by having our attention on this third thing, a sports game, an activity. We're talking about something, we're fixing something. So we bond by literally looking or talking about some other thing. And there's a time and place for that and it could be super fun and it can be great. It's not necessarily the most nourishing type of connection though, because there are many men I work with who have plenty of those kind of surface level relationships, but then are actually kind of dying inside and are in pain and are lonely and don't know how to talk about it to kind of cross that threshold. So a men's group, what it's really about is turning the attention onto each other. Okay, what is going on for you in your life right now? What hurts, what's hard, what's challenging? What are you trying to move towards? What's in the way? Right. So we start to go deeper with each other. In a good men's group, in my experience, what it'll actually do is the members of the group can help guide us deeper into our felt body experience. So we actually get to feel what's happening in our lives. Maybe that's grief or sadness, maybe that's anger, frustration, maybe that's some kind of fear. But the group itself, by putting their attention on us, helps us go deeper into ourselves, which, lo and behold, often helps us get clear about what we're feeling, what we're wanting, what we're needing in life. And then they can help us kind of troubleshoot to how to get there. Right, what's your plan? Right. So instead of just complaining about your job for three years, what are you going to do about it? Do you need to talk to your boss to set some new boundaries? Do you need to start applying to some new jobs? Like, what's in the way of that? In a good group will often then end up doing two particular things. It'll support us as men when we're struggling, when we're down, when we're knocked off center, when we're stressed. And it will challenge us and hold us accountable to call us forward into our deepest vision of our lives. And good men will call us out. Right? Call us forward, as we say, in terms like, hey, you've been complaining about your relationship for two years now. Like, are you in or out? What are you going to do? Because it's painful to see you this stuck. So a good group will kind of call you on that and actually bring you forth. And so there's a social connection often to men's groups. There's an accountability piece, there's a brotherhood piece, there's a support piece. All of these things kind of weave together. And then there's deep trust built over time. Because as we get to know each other, we get to know our blind spots, our shadows Our vulnerabilities and our deepest wants. Right. And we can remind each other what we're here to do and what we're really wanting.

Host: Friends play a very important role in that being critical and supportive at the same time. So having friends who you can relate to, not just on a surface level, but at least at some point underneath that, they get under your skin. At some point, they have to be getting under your skin. If they don't, then there's a problem. Right. How do you look at therapy? Obviously there's the men's group thing and the men's work that that's being done. But then we talk also have to talk about mental health issues. Right. For men. So how far does this group work, work? And then when should a person, a man, seek therapy? Where do you.

Jason Lange: Yeah, so I think every man needs all of it. And so. Right. It's not the answer. A lot of guys want that. Men's groups, like I said, they can provide a communal experience, shared reality experience, a social experience that is so powerful in bonding. And we can go deeper there and therapeutic things can come up there. But sometimes things that come up are best suited to go even deeper in. In. In one on one kind of connections. And so I like to say every man at different points doesn't mean you have to do them all at once, but you might go through different seasons in life of having most of your energy in a men's group, having your energy in therapy, having your energy and coaching, which are all similar and related. They're all about growth. Right. So you can think of men's group is like your team. Like if you're on a sports team, you got a team, you got to practice with them and you work with them and you create bonds with them. And then you have a coach, right. Who's running you through drills and helping you get clear about, hey, this is where we're going this season. We want to win. We need to work on this. We're tracking these stats. You need to work on this. You need to work on this. Right. They're providing the vision and the direction therapy. Then where that comes into play, it's kind of like the, the. The physical therapist. Well, what happens if I have an injury that's actually preventing me from being in the game? So it's not a matter of building up my skill set. Right now I can't even play on the team until I heal this part of me or I learned to work with it. Right. And so a good therapist is going to help you kind of mend the past men, parts of you that are preventing you from being able to really show up and try to. To do the things you want to do in life. A coach is going to be a little bit more forward focused, helping you with strategy and vision and challenging you to do new things and practice whatnot. And then a group, right? Like, it's your team, right? You need your team who you can play with and bond with and get better at. And we need all three. And, you know, part of the huge challenge these days, both for men's groups, but particularly for therapy, is, you know, men have this stigma of, like, therapy is just for broken and there's something wrong with you. And what I say to guys is, it's like, we don't just go to the gym when our body's broken, right? We go to the gym to keep ourselves fit, to get stronger, to purposely stress our muscles. Therapy is kind of the same thing. It's just for our minds and our hearts. You can proactively go to therapy to keep yourself healthy, to keep yourself working on things that you might not hit otherwise. And I can tell you, the most successful men I know who are doing work they love in the world, being financially compensated for it in very thriving relationships, and who have just spacious, calm nervous systems, yeah, they're going to therapy. They are getting therapy to address their wounding from their childhood. Okay.

Host: I was going through your work, right? You've had. You got this term man box that you like to talk about. I was just intrigued by the terminology is a little different. Do you want to share more about it? Tell the audience about it?

Jason Lange: Yeah. So, yeah, the man box was this term that kind of. I think it started in the 90s by some guys out in the Bay Area. I think Tony Porter was maybe the first guy who really popularized it, if not came up with it. But the idea of the man box is, you know, it's a little different in different countries and different cultures around the world, but there's some definite similarities at a global level. And the man box is this idea is. It's a theoretical box, okay, that we have to fit in as men. And so as long as you're checking off the attributes of this box, you're considered a man. If you're not, you're outside the box and you're not considered a man. So the man box is the. The cultural expectations of behavior we're supposed to embody in order to be real men. And there's some fascinating stuff here, right? They, again, there's a There's a research study they did where they enter. They polled people, both men and women. They asked them these questions. What marks the transition of a girl turning into a woman? And lo and behold, both men and women, guess what? They pointed towards biology. Physicality. Their physical body shifting. Right. Their breasts developing, their body shape changing. Their menstrual cycle starting. Same question. What marks the transition of a boy to a man, to that same group? Guess what? Wasn't biology. It was his behavior. Right. Well, how does he show up in the world? What does he do? How does he take care of himself? How does he serve his community? How does he handle his family? It wasn't based on biology, which is significant because you can be a fully biologically grown man, so to speak, but still be considered a boy.

Host: Yeah, right.

Jason Lange: Oh, yeah, he's still, he's just a boy. He's not mature. And so the man box is kind of the, the all the things that mark that, well, what's the difference between this boy and man in these different cultures? What are the expectations? And just a few, like very common ones across the world. Don't cry, don't show emotions, be tough, never ask for help, be a lone wolf, work really hard, right? You can start to feel these things that we're expected to do as men. You know, another popular or not popular one, but surprisingly common one, is if sex is available to you, you should take it. And if you don't, you're not a man. Which means even if it's right, even if it's not someone you're attracted to, you should still have sex with them. Right? That's kind of the, this machismo culture that so many of us men are pushed in. And that man box ends up having a severe consequence on our mental health and frankly, our physical health. Because then men stay isolated, they work too hard. They don't know how to handle their internal emotional experience. So lo and behold, what do many men do when they can't handle feeling uncomfortable inside? They turn to things outside. Alcohol, weed, sex, food, overworking, you name it. Which might soothe us for the moment, but does not handle it long term. And so we end up just isolating and suffering even more and more and more. And then culturally. Right, yeah, most men are, are not raised in environments where it's safe to connect with other men. And in fact, they're often attacked or bullied if they get vulnerable or show any kind of emotional self. So again, we start to keep it inside. And when we become lonely as we get older and we don't know how to talk about our relationship. We don't even know how to tell our best friend that we're in the middle of a divorce or that we just got fired and this stuff catches up with us and. Right. Part of why days like this are so important. Right. The, the stats are pretty, pretty overwhelming. Like male suicide is particularly high in the world. Loneliness has been shown to be just as deadly as poking, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day or being morbidly obese. Your life, your longevity will actually go down. This is a real thing for us men when we buy into this machizo, machismo man box kind of culture. Like you will actually die sooner. So these have huge consequences for us guys.

Host: So that's how it is. I mean, these stereotypical duties of men have been pushing men these days into a lot of problems. Right. And that's how it is. And that's why the day becomes important itself. A little more about the day and the, the month itself is celebrated around the world as November. Right. And then there are. I want, I just want one quick comment on this. The Internet, obviously the no Shave November movement was pretty good because it raises a very specific aspect where they try to save money from shaving and then donate it to cancer patients. But then obviously you must have heard about the no Nut November movement. What would you, what would be your take on this? I mean, I know. Should I call it absurd? Your take?

Jason Lange: Yeah, yeah. I've done this practice before. Not necessarily in November. Many men have, you know, it's an ancient practice from various lineages in the world to refrain from ejaculating essentially because it has a huge cost for us men biologically. And these days in particular, it's a way where men can start to take their power back a bit. So many men are inundated with sexual content these days. From a young age. We have easy access to pornography. There's sexual content everywhere. And you know, I've worked with many men who have maybe never gone more than a day or two in 30 or 40 years of their life without ejaculating. Like it's an actual addiction. And it's probably the most popular way for men to self soothe.

Host: Yeah.

Jason Lange: In particular, when we're feeling uncomfortable in our nervous system, what do we want to do? We want to get rid of that energy. And that's really what ejaculation does, is it ejects emotional energy for us. Women have a monthly cycle which helps them build up and in release, we don't have that as Men. So for a lot of men, ejaculation is that it's how they release some stuff. But the problem is they often do it unconsciously. And this has a hormonal impact on us. Every time we ejaculate, our prolactin goes way up, our testosterone goes way down. We become a little more lethargic, tired, not as motivated in life. And that has consequences these days, because then a lot of men, the. The very energy they need to go out and create the things they want, relationship, jobs, et cetera, they're taking from themselves by doing this, by trying to feel better in the short term. So something like, no, no, no, no, not November is an opportunity for men to say, hey, what if I ran this experiment and see what changes in my body? How different do I feel? And it can be extraordinarily confronting for a lot of men because suddenly they have a lot of vital life force and energy in their bodies that they don't know how to handle. And the other thing I've often seen with men is they start to feel more. So all the emotional content they've been avoiding starts to percolate up. And that gets really uncomfortable for guys. But if you, in a sense, take advantage of that to work that content, your life can start to change really fast. Last part I'll say with it is it's also just a reformatting of realizing that our sexual energy as men is sacred. Right? It's something often demonized these days, but it is. It's actually a generative part of life. It is how life is created. It is actually our creative life force. And so what I've seen in a lot of guys and in the times, I've refrained for long periods of times, so we get more creative. That energy has to go somewhere. We start to create, we start to build. We start to connect in ways that we might not otherwise. So it's a really worthy experiment for men to run, A, just at a biological level, to actually see how their bodies feel different at the end of that 30 days, and B, it can do all kinds of things for our inner world as well.

Host: So thanks, Jason, for sitting with me and talking about men's issues, men's health issues, and how you've been working and how men can personally work on themselves as well. So this was International Men's Day for us. Happy International Men's Day to you and everyone listening and watching this podcast. Do leave a comment. I'd love to hear from you sometime later as to how it was. And then we'll surely go forward from it and to the audience. If you like it, do leave a comment, do like subscribe and go on and go. So thank you and I'll see you on the next episode on another interesting day that is celebrated around the world. Thank you so much.