The Difference Between Waiting and Resting

All right. And welcome back. So on this episode, I want to explore a pretty subtle but very important distinction for us men to understand when it comes to effectively leading in the world.

And I want to kind of first paint a picture of this by walking you through, through one of the areas I see it most strongly manifest. And so a lot of the work I do with men is around dating and relationships, right. How can we as men create the most thriving, satisfying, connected partnerships and marriages as we really long for in that work? I tend to work with a lot of so called nice guys.

I'm a nice guy myself, been doing that work to transcend that for many years now. But one thing about nice guys that I've talked about, right, is they tend to have a lot of heart space, a lot of energy here in their hearts. They're very connected, they're very attuned, and they really prioritize creating safety for others, not wanting to make anyone else feel uncomfortable. And that will often show up in how nice guys approach their intimate relationships. Right. And so one pattern I see over and over and often actually fell prey to myself when I was a single man and sometimes even now in my relationship, in my marriage, is that nice guys will often wait.

So they will wait for someone else to take the initiative. And when it comes to dating and relationship, that means often the woman or man they're pursuing, they will be waiting for some kind of sign or permission before sharing their truth or taking action. Now, again, the idea behind this is good. They don't want to dominate or take over someone else's experience or coerce anyone.

Right? That's a very positive intention. The problem is that tends to often really mess up polarity. So the, the interaction between lead and follow, which is a key part in intimate relationships. Right. And oftentimes men I work with, they are wanting to learn to better take the lead, to initiate in a lot of ways in their relationship. And so the problem comes in when they notice they're having an experience or a desire, but then they're waiting, they're waiting for the woman or the friend or the man they're with to kind of take the initiative, to move things in the conversation deeper, to move the physical intimacy deeper or whatever that might be.

And So a pattern I have seen as highlighted here in just in the kind of dating and connection realm, but really that manifests everywhere is nice guys tend to wait. They wait for someone else to be the initiator, to kind of kick start so many different things in life. And the problem with that is it often makes nice guys feel left behind because then they're not getting what they want. And oftentimes people around them don't even know what they want because they're not sharing it, they're not bringing it forward, so to speak.

So I want to contrast this kind of nervous system tendency to wait, which means we're really waiting for something on the outside to give us permission to act. I want to contrast that with. With this much deeper idea that anyone that's connecting deeply to their masculine can really take on whether you're a man or a woman.

And that's the difference between waiting and resting as consciousness. Right? This is a phrase I got from my teacher. Sounds maybe a little esoteric, but it really just means being deeply present in the moment, connected to our bodies, connected to our hearts, aware of our thoughts, tuned into the environment around us, tuned into the people around us in waiting to notice something.

When we rest as consciousness, in this stillness as men, often something will arise in our awareness that will then pull us. Right. It'll actually be like a little ping of, ooh, something just happened there. I want to pay attention to that. Resting as consciousness is very different in a lot of ways than waiting. Because what it often shows up as is noticing an impulse inside ourselves.

And when we notice that impulse, we trust it and we act in accordance with it. So we allow the impulse to drive our behavior. So what do I mean by all this? Right, so part of, again, why this came up is I was working with one of the men in one of my programs recently, and again, this is just such a clear cut example of it. So I kind of want to point to it there that he was having.

He was on a date and it was going well, and he got physically close to his partner. He was sitting next to her, and he could feel in his body that he wanted them to connect. He wanted his leg and her leg to touch. What ended up happening was he kind of got close and then he just waited. He was waiting for her to make that connection. Lo and behold, it didn't happen in that particular instance.

So that waiting contrasted with what I'm talking about here is resting is when we can get to the point of trusting and resting in our consciousness. Another way that might go is sitting there noticing, feeling the connection. Suddenly there's an impulse inside ourselves as men. I want to be closer to her. I want to touch her. Right. I want to create that connection in intimacy between us and get a sense, is she open to reciprocating that?

How would that feel for her? How would that feel for me? Now, there's a couple different ways that could go. You could notice that impulse. He could voice that impulse and actually check it out. Like, hey, I'd love to get closer to you. Would you be open to some cuddling? Or he might actually just. Yeah, move his leg and initiate contact there and see what comes back. Now, nice guys will often say, well, I don't want to be too forward. I don't want to be too aggressive. I don't know where she's at. And again, the impulse behind that is beautiful.

Right. We don't want to be the macho jerk who just steamrolls women. And there's a middle ground there where we can still take the lead, take the initiative, and be connected to notice in attune to what's the response? Maybe I move my leg closer, we make contact, she pulls it away. Okay, I just got some really important information there that I'm probably not going to push that forward at the moment.

I may open up the conversation around that at some point. I may just stay connected to her and see how things unfold. But I'm not going to press past that because she clearly gave me feedback with her body. For all of that to work, though, the main thing for us nice guys is to learn to trust our impulses. And to do that, we have to be grounded in our bodies and in our experiences and in this place of kind of open awareness.

This is what I mean by resting as consciousness. It's noticing that we're noticing, Right? It's right now I'm aware, and I'm going to identify with the part of myself that is aware. And when I'm identified with that, just what comes up, Literally what comes up in my attention, what grabs my awareness when we're resting as consciousness leadership really means I'm going to wait until something grabs my attention, until there's an impulse, so to speak, that often comes from with inside myself or noticing something in the environment.

Now again, you're like, well, how's that different for. From waiting as you introd on the episode? Well, the difference between resting and waiting is that permission piece. Where is the permission coming from when we're waiting? We're awaiting permission or Approval from the outside. When we're resting, we're noticing the impulse inside ourselves and then we are trusting ourselves to move forward with that and not to move forward in a steamrolling way where, wow, this is true for me now, so no matter what, I'm going to follow this and go towards it.

That can cause a lot of harm. That's not what I'm talking about here. But it's about trusting in following your impulse, bringing it forward into the world, and then using the feedback of that interaction, that action, to adjust accordingly. This really is the body based, presence based leadership that, that I work so deeply with men around. It's not always about just having a master plan we've thought out ahead of time up in our heads.

It's much more about being connected to our bodies and resting as this consciousness, as this awareness, and using the tool of our body, of our hearts as an input, as an antenna to collect data, to help us direct ourselves toward what we want so important here. And oftentimes as we start to trust ourselves, to trust these impulses in our body, it does not mean we always get what we want.

But it takes us from a place of passivity to a place of action. And the masculine part of all of us tends to feel more nourished and happy with itself in a sense, when we're connected to our capacity to take action and move towards the things we want. Talked about this before. This is one definition of power I now like to use. It's the capacity to move towards things we want and even beyond that, the to support others in moving towards what they want.

It requires action, not just waiting. So as men, one of the most important things we can do to cultivate our leadership capacity is to get better at resting as consciousness, right? To relax into that alert place of just noticing what's arising in our experience. And that has to include our inner world, our inner experience, the sensations of our body, the emotions that run through us, what's happening in our environment and what's happening with the people we're interacting with.

Getting those clear signals can often take a lot of work for us guys, because we're so stuck up in our heads, ruminating, keeping all of our attention on our thoughts of how to do it right, or what do I need to do in this moment to get approval? Or does she like me? Does she not like me right? We can go there way too much. And then with our bodies, our bodies are often so closed down and gripped in, holding so much tension, whether that's physical tension and stress or emotional tension and stress.

Because as I've talked a lot about on this podcast, most of us men are never given the toolkit for how to be in our bodies and express and feel our emotions. So to become an effective leader that can rest in consciousness and have a direct connection to their awareness and what's arising in it in the moment, we have to be able to be relaxed and open and grounded. So it can take some work for us to even get to the point where we can just be very present in the moment.

Just here, noticing, not wandering in our head, not avoiding feeling something, not over ruminating as to is this the right thing for me to do or not, but instead just noticing, wow, something arose in my awareness and some part of my consciousness, my aware body, mind is attracted to that. And that in itself can be enough reason to take some kind of action, right?

The fact that I noticed this, that my awareness noticed whatever it is, this impulse in me to be close that, the way my partner smiled, whatever that is, that's important and we want to trust that and move towards it. Again, just to highlight here, this is one of the more subtle things I've, I've talked about on this podcast. But there's a huge difference between waiting for something on the outside to give us permission and resting in our awareness to notice what arises in it.

Particularly the impulses inside of us. So many of us nice guys have disconnected from those impulses because we've been taught not to trust them because they're bad or toxic, or because our family of origin, oftentimes the way we were raised, conditioned us to survive by not trusting those. Something I've talked about in other episodes about nice guy tendency and the move between attachment and authenticity and how really the core of a nice guy is I disconnect from self to keep alive the connection to the other.

Part of what I'm talking about here is we gotta reignite that connection to self and be aware of everything that's happening inside of us and around us and with the people that we're interacting with. And when we rest as that awareness, if we just still enough, eventually something will move and grab our attention. And whatever it is that grabs our attention is often the basis for our next action.

And then we just have to trust, take action on it and move towards it in some way. And again then when we take that action, the environment, the person, whatever will give us feedback that we then sensitively attune to and adjust to make our next action right. You know, it strikes me as I'm sharing this. One of the many activities a lot of men like is fishing.

What are you doing as fishing? We rest as awareness until something grabs our attention, and then there's the excitement of taking action on it. Now, whether you like fishing or not, that's just one kind of picture I want to paint for you of what it means to just rest in that stillness until something tugs at our awareness. And for us nice guys, the edge there is. That's. That tug often comes from within. I'm wanting this, or I'm noticing this, or I want to ask this, but I can't say that, or, wow, I'd really like to just guide her through the door with the small of my.

At the smaller her back with my hand, but I don't know. Is it too soon? I don't know. And then we start to ruminate. What I'm advocating for here is that as you rest, it's not about waiting, it's about noticing and then taking action based on that noticing. That is completely different from waiting for permission from the outside. Because if you do that, you can end up waiting days, months, or decades to be able to start to be able to create the life you want.

And other people often won't be able to support you in it or won't even know what it is you actually want because you haven't brought it forward. So, in short, we want to do the work, to move from just waiting for permission to take action to noticing the impulses inside of us and where our attention goes, and then trusting that if we move towards whatever grabbed our attention and stay attuned, which means dial in sensitively to.

And what feedback do I get? That's going to be a profound type of leadership you can bring into your life, to your work, to your family, and absolutely to your intimate relationships. All right, well, until next time you're interested in working with me around dating relationships or your masculine presence in the world, just go to evolutionary men. Apply.