The Nine Capacities of Evolutionary Men

All right, and welcome back. So, on today's episode, I want to outline something I've never laid out in one place before. But first, I'm going to start with a scene. Picture two men, same age, same job, basically the same income. But one of them walks into a room, and you feel him before he says a word. Something in the room shifts. People relax a little. They arrive and get more present in the room. His partner softens when he comes home, and his kids settle when they're around him. Then another guy, he's more invisible. He's at the same dinner parties, the same meetings, and nobody quite remembers he was there. Or worse, they feel unsettled when he's around. And his partner, when they look at him across the room, there's often this, like, flicker of disappointment they're trying to hide. And he feels it. He just has no idea what to do about it. Now, the difference between those two men, in my experience, comes down to one thing. What's actually developed in them and what isn't. So forget confidence, forget income, forget looks. There are specific capacities that were built up in that first man and that weren't in the second. And most men have never been handed a map of what those capacities even are. So that's what today is the map. I've been doing men's work since 2007, and I've been running programs since about 2018. Men's groups, retreats, deep coaching, shadow work, and well over 100 episodes of this show. And over all of those years of sitting with men, I've started seeing the same thing over and over again. A man would come in and he'd have real strengths, things that were already well developed in him. But then there'd be these other places, these gaps, where a whole capacity or capacities just never came online, usually because nobody ever showed him they existed. And what I noticed is that the gaps were not random. The same nine things kept showing up. So eventually I mapped them nine capacities that, when they're developed in a man, change everything about how he moves through the world. His relationships, his work, his sense of himself. And I want to be really clear about what this is and what this isn't. Right? This is a map of what a man has, what's developed in him. It's a map of capacities. And the key thing is every man listening to this has all nine of them already, every single one. The question is, which ones are strong in you and which ones are still needing to be developed? There's also no hierarchy here. I'm going to walk through these in a particular order, and the order roughly moves from the body up toward clarity. But a man whose strength is at the start of that arc is in no way behind a man whose strength is at the end. They just have developed different capacities and they have different edges. I've literally met men of enormous depth who couldn't feel their own body, and yet there's also men who have incredible instinct, but who've never really looked underneath all of their patterns into how their mind works. So nobody's ahead and nobody's behind. So by the end of this episode, though, you're going to have the full map, all nine. And honestly, you're probably going to know which one is your edge before I'm even done, because something in your body is going to wince when I hit one of the ones you need to work on. And that's worth paying attention to. I'm going to take them one at a time, what each capacity actually is, what it feels like when it's online, and what it's costing you when it's not. And then at the end, I'm going to even tell you about a tenth one, the one that isn't even on this list, that actually might matter most of all, because it's the bedrock underneath all of them. But here we go. Capacity. Number one, vitality. And right away, I want to clear something up. Because when most guys hear vitality, they think energy. The guy who's always training, always moving, always has gas in the tank. And the truth is, energy is part of it. But energy is just the readout. The actual capacity is the connection to your own body. Your body knows things your mind hasn't even caught up to yet. Vitality is about that knowing. It's the fire in your system that tells you something's off before anyone says a word. It's the strength to set a boundary without flinching. Here's how you know when it's offline. You often don't know. You're furious until you snap at your kids over nothing. The anger was actually in your body for days, right? You just weren't home to feel it. Or you can't feel a no in your gut anymore, so you say yes to everything, and then you resent everybody. Or your body told you the job was wrong, the deal was wrong, the relationship was wrong, and you overrode it. And six months later, you paid for it. And here's the part I really want you to get. The man with low vitality is not empty. The signal from his body is still being sent. He just can't hear it. And the reason this matters so much is that numbness is expensive. Suppressing what your body is saying takes constant effort. It's like holding a beach ball underwater all day, every day. Over time, you don't even notice you're doing it, but it's burning fuel and energy that entire time. I've seen this right in guys who are in incredible shape. A man that can run marathons, do cold plunges and crush it at the gym, and yet he still gets completely blindsided when his wife says she's done. He's got huge energy, but almost no vitality. His body was sending the signal for two years. The tension in his chest, the flat sex life, the dread on Sunday nights. Yet he couldn't hear any of it because all that training was actually being used to manage his body and feelings, not to listen to it. The workout itself can be numbing. I know that one firsthand. So when this capacity, vitality comes back online and notice my language there, it comes back. You don't build vitality so much as you get it back. The energy you were spending on not feeling gets released back to you. The aliveness itself was never gone. It was being spent on the suppression. Vitality is what returns when you start treating your body like it has something to say. It's your oldest source of intelligence and your most honest one. Capacity number two, devotion. Devotion is what happens when you stop keeping one foot out the door with your people, with your commitments, with your work in the world. It's the man who keeps his word when it's inconvenient. The man who stays loyal through the season when loyalty actually costs him something. You know what this feels like in your body? The alarm goes off in the morning. Everything inside of you just wants to stay down, hit snooze. And something deeper than motivation still swings your legs over the edge, your feet hit the cold floor, and you're moving before your mind can talk you out of it. That's devotion. But here's the key. I really want to separate devotion from discipline here, because from the outside, they look almost identical. Both guys get up at 5. But discipline, at least the way most men run it, is shame driven. It's about moving away from something, moving away from being the lazy guy, moving away from the gut in the mirror, away from some version of yourself. You can't stay. And here's the deal. Shame will get you out of bed, no question. But it burns dirty, right? You can white knuckle a long Time on that fuel. But your body knows the difference the entire time. Devotion, however, is love driven. It's about moving towards something, toward the man you're becoming, toward the people in your life, toward the life you're building. Same cold floor, same 5am, but completely different energy. And underneath it is the quiet understanding that the life you want gets built in the mornings. Nobody sees. And so I'll give you the live version of this for my own life, right? I'm a bit of an older father and at some point it really landed in me. If I want to be here for my kids as they grow up and maybe have kids themselves and be on the floor playing with their kids, this body, it's gotta last. When that landed, everything changed for me. Around training and eating well. For years, that stuff ran on the shame. Fuel. Looking good, keeping up, managing the mirror. How do other people experience me? And it was always on and off, right? It was always a negotiation. I'd sway in and out, the willpower would evaporate. But now it's easy. And I want to be precise about what got easy, right? Because the workouts, they're still hard. The deciding got easy. There's no negotiation at 5am anymore because none of it is for the mirror. It's not about moving away from something. I'm doing it to be alive for them decades from now, still here, still strong, still on the floor with the grandkids. That's the thing about devotion. It's a kind of service. You give yourself to something beyond you and then the effort stops being a fight. Same gym as the marathoner from earlier, but. But completely different. Fuel source and motivation. When devotion is an underdeveloped growth edge. Here's what it looks like. Every commitment has an escape hatch. You're in the relationship, but you're also kind of scanning for an exit. You're in the job, but you've always got a story about how this is just temporary and the cost is that nothing ever truly compounds, right? The deep stuff, the stuff that actually feeds us as men, it only grows in ground you stay in. So the guy who keeps one foot out the door his whole life suddenly wakes up at 50 with a string of two year chapters and nothing that's actually hid. The man with devotion online gives himself to something that won't necessarily pay him back on his timeline. And that's exactly why it pays him back in a currency nothing else can. So those first two, vitality and devotion, they live close to the ground. Your body, your commitments. And the next three Are about how you meet the world. So, number three, curiosity. I've said on this show before, one of the highest states of consciousness you can get into is just curiosity. And it's almost always the first thing that goes when you're collapsing or defending or protecting. Curiosity just leaves the building. You can feel it in your body when curiosity is here. The jaw unclenches, the chest opens, there's a leaning forward that has nothing to do with urgency, but everything to do with interest. And when it leaves, the body closes first. Shoulders come up, breathing gets shallow, and suddenly you're defending a position instead of exploring one. Most men are stuck inside their own experience, their own frame, their own agenda. And look, I get why real curiosity is receptive. It's the willingness to not know, to let something unfamiliar in without immediately categorizing it that takes more nerve than most guys realize. Because genuine curiosity requires letting go of certainty. And certainty is what most of us use to feel safe. Where this one costs you is everywhere. But you'll often feel it the most in your relationships. The moment your partner brings something to you and your body closes before they've even finished their second sentence, then you're no longer in the conversation. You're in a courtroom, right? You're building your case while they're talking. And I've caught this in myself more times than I want to admit that moment of leaving the conversation to go build my case and lawyer up. I've talked about it. And your partner can feel it when you've left, right? Every couple knows that moment. The men I watch grow the fastest. And I mean this across hundreds of guys now are the ones who can say, I don't know, and actually mean it as an opening and not a cop out. That's the capacity staying open when everything in your wiring wants to close and be right. Number four, rigor. So with this one, you know when something's not right, not because you thought about it, but because your body, again, told you. Vitality connecting here. There's a tension inside your hands, right? A tightness behind your eyes, Something that won't let you walk away from whatever you're working on. There's a standard in you that doesn't negotiate. That's rigor. Most men confuse effort with quality. They work hard, but they're not meticulous. Ship it, check the box, move on. Rigor is the capacity to stay with something past good enough and take it over all the way to where it actually meets the standard in your head and in your heart. And it's worth putting rigor right next to devotion for a second, right? Because they're cousins and guys will often mix them up. Devotion is about what you give yourself to. And its verb, right, is stay. Rigor is about the work itself. And its verb, its action, is do it right. Devotion keeps you in the room. But rigor sets the standard for what leaves the room and goes out into the world. Now, I want to make another distinction here because guys hear this and they think perfectionism. But perfectionism is fear wearing a mask. Perfectionism is about you, about not being exposed, not being judged. Rigor is about love of the craft itself. When something is right, you can feel it settle in your chest. When it's not, there's a. There's a pull, there's a tension you can't talk yourself out of. And a man with rigor doesn't try to. He just goes back and he fixes it. He. He makes it better. I learned this one in a film edit room, right? Earlier in my life. I was a filmmaker. And editing is where rigor got deeply built into me, hunting for the perfect cut, the perfect take of a line, going over the same footage over and over again until the edits themselves would disappear and all that would be left is the story. Now, nobody watching knows the hours I toiled in that dark room, but they can feel it when they watch the film. Nobody necessarily sees the care, but again, they can feel it. And here's the deeper place. That kind of meticulousness does something to your consciousness, right? The Buddhist teacher Jogam Trunka had a word for this drala. And it's the aliveness that shows up when you give your complete attention to the details of the thing. Care for something that precisely, and it wakes you up. That outer world and your inner world start to mirror each other. The craft works on you while you work on it. And this shows up way beyond work, right? It's the man who rehearses the hard conversation, often in men's group until it's clear who prepares, who finishes where. This is the edge. There's a trail of 80% of finished things behind you when this is the thing you're still developing. I know, I've had this so much. The business idea, the garage, the apology you gave that was almost an apology. It's the half assed version of these things. And the cost is trust. People can feel the difference between a man who puts in the hours and a man who does the work, right? Rigor makes you trustworthy in ways that enthusiasm never can. Capacity number five. Initiative. There's a difference between life happening to you and you happening to life. That's the whole capacity right there. Initiative is the moment you stop waiting for permission for the right conditions, for somebody to tell you it's okay for someone else to go first. You notice what needs to happen, and you step in not because anyone asked, but because you saw it, and now it's yours to do. There's a moment right before you move when you're in this where everything gets quiet, the noise drops out, and something in your gut says, go. Most men have felt that at least a few times in their lives. The question is, what do you do with it? Because here's what I see constantly. A lot of men drift for years, and from the outside, it looks fine, right? They're busy, they're productive, they're even successful. But when you sit with that man and you really get underneath of it, none of it was chosen. It was all inherited. It all happened to him. It was. It was expected, or it was just the path of least resistance. It was the courier. His dad approved of the city. His wife picked the kind of life that assembled itself around him while he wasn't looking. And there's a specific flavor of deadness that comes with that, right? Everything's fine and nothing is his. So let me give you the other side of that from my own life, right? When I was 26, I moved across the country for a dream job at an organization full of people I deeply admire. In less than a year in, dynamics were playing out in that organization that did not sit right in my body. And in the middle of a big meeting one day, the leader said, this is a good time. If anyone doesn't feel in alignment with where we're going to leave. And it was one of those moments of lightning clarity. Everything got quiet inside me, and the knowing was just there. I stood up in front of everybody, said, it's been an honor, bowed, and I walked out. And then I'm standing in the middle of a city with no ride home, thinking, what? What did I just do? I just moved my whole life here for this. Now, you could say that moment was about integrity. And to an extent, it was. The knowing was integrity. But knowing alone changes nothing. Initiative is the capacity that got me out of the chair. While the whole room watched, I went first. And here's the detail I love. After I walked out, a few other people stood up and eventually walked out, too. They'd been sitting with the same knowing. Some of them just needed someone to Move first. Initiative is what it looks like when a man starts authoring his own life. Going first, leading when it's uncomfortable or vulnerable, taking responsibility for what he notices instead of assuming someone else will handle it. And again, I want to be precise here, because initiative moves from a settled place, inside place that says, this is mine to do and I'm not waiting. That's where it starts. Recklessness and panic feel completely differently in the body. This is quieter than both. And so initiative there rounds out the middle of the map, Right? We have curiosity, rigor, and initiative in the middle, how you meet the world. Everything so far has been about you. And these next two are where it turns. Relational capacity number six is a huge one for me. Presence. If you've been around this show, you know, really, it's the heart of so much of my work. Presence is where your attention actually is right now, not where you think it should be. It's not the email you need to send, not the fight you had last Tuesday. It's right here in this room, in this body, in this moment. And it's as simple as a breath and as hard as a lifetime of practice. I've been at this over 15 years and I still lose presence every single day. Most of us guys live from our heads. Our awareness is small. It's self referential. It loops on the same handful of thoughts. Presence is what happens when that sphere of awareness starts to grow, grows down into the heart, you, into the gut, into the body, and then out into the room and into the people around you. And here's why this one changes everything relationally. When a man is truly present, other people feel it before he says a word. Like the example. His partner relaxes, his kids settle. The whole room shifts. And he's not doing anything. He's actually just being here. Think about the men in your life you most want to be around. I would bet money these are the guys who, when you're actually with them, they're actually with you. They're not necessarily the smartest guy you know, or even the most successful. They're just the ones who are actually there. When presence is your growth edge, you're the man who's home but not home. Your body's at the dinner table, and yet you're somewhere else entirely. And your family eats dinner with a ghost. And the brutal part is, you can't fake presents. Kids especially, they read it instantly. It's the foundation. Everything relational gets built on. Which brings me to number seven here. Empathy. So let me start with what most of Us do. Instead of empathy, right? Someone we love is in pain and we try to fix it. We solve, we argue, we explain them out of their feelings. We strategize, right? Our partner's upset within, and within 90 seconds, we're offering solutions. And somehow that makes them even more upset. Every guy listening has probably lived that one at least once. Empathy is staying with someone in their pain instead of pulling them out of it so that you can feel better about the situation. It's the man who can sit across from his partner or his kid and just say, yeah, I feel that I'm here. And the moment another human being feels genuinely felt by you, something often shifts in their nervous system that no amount of advice could ever touch. They can let go because someone is actually there with them. Most of us were never taught this. I sure wasn't. I grew up in a house, right, where feelings were not exactly the family language. And I had to learn this capacity from scratch as a grown man, awkwardly in men's groups, in relationships, often getting it wrong over and over. And in that learning, I ran into the thing nobody tells you again. Here it is. To feel another person, you have to be willing to feel yourself first. Your own grief, your own tenderness, your own fear. The capacity to be with someone else's pain is directly proportional to your willingness to be with your own. That's why this one sits right after presence. They're twins. Empathy is the fruit of presence. Once you can actually be here fully, you can turn that awareness toward another person. And when you do it, something happens that no fixing ever could. They feel held. And honestly, so do you. Okay, now the last two, these go underneath everything. They pierce under. And this is where the work gets quieter and sometimes deeper. Capacity number eight is depth. And this is the territory I've probably spent more of my life in than any other. This is the shadow work capacity. Depth is the willingness to be intimate with every part of ourselves, not just the parts we're proud of. It's the rage, right? You've been sitting on, the grief you haven't touched, the shame you've been managing since you were 12. The parts of you that don't match the image you've built. Let me sharpen that. Because depth gets confused with its look, like all the time. Guys hear depth and they picture the intense guy, the brooding guy, the guy who feels everything at full volume. Feeling a lot is one thing. Looking underneath what you feel is another thing entirely. And again, I've known men who feel enormous amounts and have never once looked Underneath any of it, depth is a completeness. Question, how much of yourself are you actually in relationship with? Because most men are walking around, pieces of themselves locked in the trunk, frozen in time from moments they couldn't handle when they were young, most likely. And here's the thing. Here's the thing about those frozen parts, right? They don't just stay in the trunk. They run the show from the shadows. They drive your reactions, your patterns, your relationships. All the things you keep doing you swore you'd stop doing. Remember that beach ball from Vitality? This is the same mechanic. It's often just older water. Holding all of that down is costing you energy every single day. And it's been costing you most likely since childhood. I've been doing my own shadow work for a long time now, and I can tell you the work is exactly what it sounds like. Turning towards the parts of yourself you've abandoned and saying, yeah, you're mine too. I see you. Very simple to say, but some of the hardest work a man can ever do. But the payoff is enormous. Because when a man does this work, he stops being dangerous in ways he can't see, right? The guy who's never looked at his rage is the guy whose rage leaks out sideways at his family. The guy who's never touched his shame is the guy who collapses or explodes the moment anything brushes against it. When you do the work, you start becoming trustworthy in ways that change everything. Your partner can feel it. Your kids can feel it. The men in your life can feel it. That's depth, okay? Capacity number nine. Discernment. Discernment is the capacity to see what's actually happening. Depth is about our capacity to be with it. Discernment is. Can we see larger than it. It's not the story you're telling yourself about it. Not the fear, not the hope. It's what's actually there. Most men are swimming inside their patterns without knowing it, reacting from the same place over and over and calling it instinct, when really it's just old wiring. Hunter. Repeat. Discernment is what happens when you've done enough work to finally see the water you've been swimming in. You start to notice the pattern while it's running. Not three days later, you can feel it in your body, right? The moment the old programming kicks in, rather than jumping away from it, you can see it for me, right? Sometimes something in my face goes flat. My chest will tighten. And I know that whatever I'm about to say next, it's not coming from the clearest part of me. I've talked about my freeze pattern on the show many times before and the flatness, right, that ran my face before for years, frankly, before I could catch it in real time. A man with discernment catches that. He catches his triggers. He catches his responses. He doesn't confuse his reactivity for truth. And this is a big one for the smart guys listening. He doesn't confuse cynicism for clarity on it. There are a lot of intelligent men who think they see through everything, and really they're just defended. Seeing through everything and seeing clearly are two very different things. The man with real discernment keeps his heart open and his eyes clear, both at the same time. And discernment is also the capacity to know what matters most. The part of you that can feel in any given moment what's actually important and what's just noise. It's why I've taught, right, feel death daily for years, all the way back to one of the earliest episodes of this show. Death is the ultimate perspective, and perspective is discernment's whole job. When you stay connected to the fact that this all ends, the false priorities burn away. They burn off fast. And what's left is actually what matters most. That's discernment doing its deepest work. And I'll tell you where this one comes from, because it's not where guys usually look. It doesn't come from reading more books or listening to more podcasts, including this one. It comes from turning toward your own experience, being with it in that depth, being willing to make mistakes and sitting with the consequences, then being honest about what you find. Discernment is the kind of sight that only honesty earns, which is why it sits at the end of the ark, so to speak. It's built out of everything that came before it. So picture this. That's the nine. And let me give them to you one more time, because then we can get the whole. Each one is a man you can picture. Vitality, the man who's physically here, connected to his body. Devotion, the man who keeps his word moving towards something loving. Curiosity, the man who stays hungry to learn receptive rigor. The man who holds the line on quality initiative, the man who moves first presence, the man who can be here without agenda. Empathy, the man who feels what's in the room. Depth, the man who goes where others won't look and feels it. And discernment, the man who sees what others miss. And when I talk about an evolutionary man, that's what I'm pointing at. A man with all Nine of these online, grounded in his body and devoted to his people and community. Curious and rigorous, moving with purpose, actually here. Able to feel the people he loves, who is intimate with his own shadow and sees things clearly. That's a direction, right? Nobody arrives there and gets a plaque. Sorry, I'm not handing them out. I'm certainly still working most of these myself every week. But a man moving in that direction, developing these capacities, like I said, you can feel it the moment he walks into the room. That's that first guy from the scene I opened with. Now, before I close, I do have to tell you though, about a tenth one, right? This one's a little different because this one wraps around and is a part of all of the others. Because here's something I've seen that breaks my heart. A man can have all nine of these capacities developed, every single one, and still be completely alone. Strong, devoted, present deep yet isolated. No men who actually know him. Nobody to call when his life starts falling apart. I've lived a version of that years of my life, and so have many of the men I work with, and they arrive exactly there. So the 10th capacity, just kind of a meta capacity, is belonging. And I mean that in the fullest sense. Brotherhood, tribe, community. Yes, and also the living world itself. The fabric of nature, Mother Earth, the web. You are actually woven into the felt sense of being part of something larger than yourself, with the people around you and the ground under your feet. I did a whole episode on this a while back. The three ways men disconnect from self, from others, and from nature. And here's how it maps to today. The nine capacities we just walked. Those mostly heal. The first one, the disconnection from yourself. Belonging heals the other two because you are not separate from the people around you. You are not separate from the land you live on. But when you believe you are, that's exactly where the loneliness comes from. And belonging is what brings the other nine into relationship with the world. These capacities were never meant to be developed alone. And frankly, most of them can't. Truly. You can't obviously, practice empathy in isolation. Most of the time you can't see your own shadow without other men reflecting it back to you. Your partner can tell you you've got a huge thing sitting on your shoulder, and yet you'll argue with them. But nine other guys say it, and in the same night, and you're like, wow, okay, fine, let me take a look. And the nature piece. I want to say this directly because men skip it. If you're not connected to the living world. It's hard to feel like you belong to anything. When's the last time you got your hands dirty, right? Or watched a sunset without a device in your phone, planted something and kept it alive? Nature moves at a different pace than your inbox, and your nervous system knows it the moment you step into it. Some of the loneliest men I've worked with started coming back, not through a conversation, but through literally getting dirt in their fingernails. The good news about belonging is the same as the other nine. It can be cultivated. The men's group is the primary vehicle. I know. It's why I built my life around them. And there's frankly, no better accelerator, I've found, for the growth of men than getting together, particularly in nature, and doing all this work connected to yourself, connected to your brothers, connected to the land all at once. That's why I like to hold retreats out in the land. So it's a big part of why men's groups exist to cultivate belonging. And it's frankly why this whole community of evolutionary men exists. Belonging is the capacity we build together with each other and with the earth that's been holding us the whole time. So there it is again, right? If you've ever wondered why this whole thing I do is called evolutionary men and not the evolutionary man, this is why. The singular is the aspiration that man with all nine capacities online, but the plural is the path. Because. Because no man becomes an evolutionary man alone. The 10th capacity is baked into the name. We are evolutionary men. So here's where I want to leave you. As you listen today, one or two of these probably maybe stung a little. Something tightened up when I described it. That's most likely your edge in the wints. It's good information, and if you want to actually see your whole profile, I built something exactly for this. It's called the evolutionary edge assessment, and it's at Quiz Evolutionary men. It's free and fair warning. It's a real assessment, right? 45 questions and about 20 minutes of work and. And honesty. At the end, you'll get your archetype, your full profile across all nine capacities. That shows your strengths and your growth edges and what to actually do about them. And the word edge in there means three things, right? The edge you already have in the world, the strengths that are yours, the edge where you grow, and of course, the edge of your comfort zone, which is where all of this work actually happens. So go take it. Quiz Evolutionary men. Find out which of these nine are carrying you and which ones are waiting for you to develop them so you can join all of us in being evolutionary men.