Every Man Should Be in a Men’s Group

Every man should be in a men's group. This is the mission and purpose of Evolutionary Men to get every man into a men's group.

I've spent over 20 years in the world of personal growth and development, and I've tried a lot of modalities and practices of everything I've done. Being part of a men's group has been, hands down, the most impactful thing on my life. So much so, I truly believe every man should be part of a group in some capacity or another. Now, first you might be asking, what is a men's group? Quite simply, it's a group of men that gather together with the explicit intention of supporting and challenging each other to be the most vital, expressed, and powerful versions of themselves they can be.

There are many different styles of men's groups, but all, in essence, boil down to that idea. Life is short, and men's groups can help us make the most of it. The benefits of being part of a group are countless, but let me just quickly share five of the most important reasons. Offhand, I think every man should be in a group right now. Loneliness is dangerous. Tons of research is pouring out that shows how social isolation and a lack of connection can be devastating to our health.

In fact, this epidemic may increase your chance of dying by as much as 30%. Isolation rewires our brains, keeping us in a state of chronic stress. It's also theorized that social isolation, that is lack of connection, is one of the root causes of a lot of major addictions. So much of modern society is conspiring against us in this regard. With more and more people working remotely, living alone, and communicating over email and text message, many of the cultural institutions that provided our social glue and fabric have been fading away, made even more extreme here in the United States.

With our strong bent towards private spaces over public ones, joining a men's group is a powerful tonic to social isolation. Sitting in circle with other men gives us community connection and can go a long way to lowering our stress levels in person. Face to face contact is more important now than ever. Personally, I also love the fact that men's group is just super efficient. I'm in a couple different groups, but one of my main ones is a group that meets here in Los Angeles.

And we've been meeting every other Monday for over seven years, and there's eight of us in that group. And as a father and an entrepreneur, I can say hands down, it would be very hard for me to see all seven of those other men every month without the container of men's group. But because we have this intentional space we come into, I get to catch up with some of my favorite people, and in four hours a month, it's pretty, pretty amazing. So it's highly efficient way to get that connection as well.

Number two, the masculine grows through challenge and feedback. Whatever you want to call these energies, feminine and masculine, yin and yang, being and doing, communion and agency, consciousness and light. We all have two of the most primal energies of the universe active inside of us. For many, though not all of us, men, we tend to orient from having more masculine energy in our systems. Now, the masculine part of all of us grows most quickly and powerfully through challenge and feedback.

This is a truth that is crystal clear in sporting culture, where coaches, our teammates, and rival teams constantly provide the information and push for us to get better. Improving at anything in life is easier when we have trusted people alongside us offering what they see in service of our transformation. We can often be totally blind to pieces of our behavior and ways of being in the world, which is where fellowship becomes so important. Other men can point out to us what we aren't seeing ourselves and call us on our bullshit from a deep, deep place of service and love.

And on top of that, it provides us a safe place to practice growing. What do I mean by that? Well, men's group is an amazing place where we get to practice all the different things we teach here at Evolutionary Men about what it means to lead with vulnerability, what it means to get in our bodies, what it means to be present in the moment, what. What it means to communicate concisely and sharply. Men's group is a place where other guys can actually help us dial that in and give us feedback about how they're experiencing us in the moment.

Being part of the fellowship of a group gives us a sacred foundation to live more boldly in intimate relationship. We're less afraid of rejection on all levels. Those same men, just like we mentioned in the challenge and feedback part, can also give us a clear reflection of what they actually see in our relationship. There's one thing I've seen men are really good at. It's normalizing and tolerating where we can make the most extreme or unhealthy situations just kind of normal.

We get used to them. And sometimes we have no idea or we've totally disconnected from how fucked up the situations in our lives are. Particularly when it comes to intimate partnerships. Other men, again, can often name and see things much faster than us and help us recalibrate to realize, wow, that's not actually okay, or this is totally unhealthy what I've been part of. Again, men are going to help us when we have solid and trusted men in our lives.

Your intimate relationships will benefit. The final part of relationships that this will impact is what we call sexual polarity. Polarity is the practice of difference. And one of the things that can happen, particularly in long term relationship, is we lose a lot of our differences and we get a lot of sameness. So a lot of the fire and spark and chemistry of relationship disappears over time. Now, men's group is awesome because it can actually help you generate more polarity in your relationship.

The fourth biggest reason to join a men's group is you're going to accomplish more in life. Men's groups create a powerful container for support and accountability around the things that we most want to accomplish in life. It's so easy for us guys to try and lone wolf it, Keeping everything close to the chest, trying to figure out everything by ourselves, not showing any weakness or vulnerability, and even holding in our greatest dreams and visions. The second we get into a men's group, we can start sharing those with those trusted men in our lives.

And that alone starts to bring that goal or dream into a reality. The more others know about something we want to do, the more likely it is it'll happen. Other men can check in with us, asking what progress we've made on what's most important to us, and if nothing happened, they can help us get clear on why and then support us through moving through those challenges, whatever they are. Personally, I've had many moments in my life where to be totally transparent.

Even though I declared this goal or project to be amongst the most important things in the world to me, the only reason I often made meaningful next action steps was because I had committed to them in group and knew that I'd have to check in about my progress at our next meeting. That little bit of accountability of not wanting to walk in the room and be like, hey, I didn't do anything again, was enough to get me over that initial resistance of moving that project forward. Not only that, men will help you collaborate, right?

They can help you solve problems or get ideas or connect to the network. There's that powerful group feature where instead of having to do everything alone, suddenly it's like I have this whole brotherhood behind me that I can invoke their network and their wisdom to help me move towards the life I really want to live. So in short, joining a men's group will allow you to accomplish more in your life. I guarantee it. And finally, number five, masculinity is a transmission. So here's the deal.

For most of human existence across the globe, men gathering together and heading off, away from their families, tribes and village, was part of the human experience. The entire hero's journey that we're all so familiar with these days is in many ways just an evolution in a refinement of the idea of the hunt. Men, the masculine, must go into the world to find themselves while being guided by other men along the way these hunts and other rites of passage have nearly completely disappeared from our culture, fracturing a chain of being for men in a way that's never happened before.

Author Robert Bly, who wrote the great book Iron John, has written powerfully on this crisis and of being largely impacted by our transition into an industrial economy. We spend less time in the company of other men. In generations past, we'd spend our days with our fathers, grandfathers, brothers, uncles, witnessing firsthand how men move through the world. How do they talk, how do they negotiate? What do they do when they're angry?

How do they handle their stresses in life? That was all seen firsthand in the modern world. Fathers spend most of their days working outside of the home. So many boys are raised without the daily contact of adult male authority figures. It's not an overstatement to say that we learn how to be good men by spending time around other good men. That's what I mean by masculinity is a transmission that goes man to man. You can read all you want about healthy masculine in books and in learning about different philosophies, but it only enters your system when you're in its presence in the world.

Joining a men's group is a powerful way to reconnect us to our tradition of going away and being with other men to get this transmission. Whereas these going away journeys were previously mostly in the external world, modern men's groups allow us to use structure and ritual to go on interior journeys together. Even if we're just meeting in someone's garage, we're leaving our normal world, entering the sacred space of men's group with other men, to discover who we are and what we want and where we're going.

The more time we spend with other good men, the more we become good men. So those five reasons are just a few of the different benefits of joining a men's group, really. I've been in them for a long time, and the longer I'm in men's group, the better my life gets. Having solid men in my life I can call in crisis or when I need support, has been an absolute game changer for the most important moments of my life. And here's the deal.

Joining a group isn't going to just be beneficial for you. It's going to be beneficial for your lover, for your kids, for your family, for your co workers, for everyone you come into contact with. I've seen it over and over. Men get into a group of trusted and powerful men, they get more present in their bodies, in their life, and they show up more fully in the world. And that's something we desperately need right now.

Now, I'm not one of those guys who's going to shit all over men or masculinity and call it all toxic. I don't believe that. I believe the problem is when the masculine is disconnected from its heart, when it's disconnected from feeling, when it's disconnected from feeling the impact it has in the world, that's the problem. That's what's pathological, not the masculine itself. When men get into men's group, I see their hearts come back online.

And I firmly believe one of the biggest medicines we could bring to our culture, to our planet right now, would be getting every man in a men's group. When men are in men's group, when they're being held accountable, when, when they're getting their connection needs met, so much changes. All of the awful examples we have of how destructive the masculine can be when it's disconnected from its heart would not be possible for men in men's group.

So this is my challenge to you. It's time for you to get into a group. There is no reason to suffer through the challenges of life alone. It is so much easier to deal with all the stress in life when we have a men's group. I can share this firsthand. It's gotten me through some of the most difficult moments in my life. Transitions in relationship, crises in health, in my family, switching jobs, not having a clear path forward to how to get to victory in life.

My men's groups have held me every step of the way and help me create the most important and powerful things I've done in my life. So it's time, it's time to get every man in a men's group here at Evolutionary Men right now, you can join one of our two virtual drop in groups a month. You can join these from anywhere. They're virtual. You can also get involved in our intensive men's group coaching program that focuses on dating and relationships.

If you really want to kick that into the next gear and develop some lifelong relationships with other men. Later this year, I'll be releasing a men's group starter kit which teaches you how to start your own group in your local community. And we'll also have some deep dive men's groups being launched online. So if you don't know anyone in your local area yet, you'll be able to dive into a community of us men and really take things to the next level. So this is it. Need your help Every man should be in a men's group.

Let's get started.