Gathering in a community of men can be a powerful accelerator of success and well-being. Why then do so many men resist men’s groups and gatherings that go deeper than small talk? Today’s guests, Dominick Quartuccio and Bryan Stacy talk about the benefits of being part of a community of men.
Have you always had feelings of uneasiness when it comes to the idea that men need community? It’s common for men to think, “No way am I going to ‘open up’ about my struggles or secrets,” when faced with the prospect of joining a community for men.
Today’s Man Alive podcast guests, Dominick Quartuccio and Bryan Stacy, are the Founders of The Great Man Within podcast and community. Each has their own story of resisting men’s groups, and later finding incredible support, strength, and freedom when joining communities of men. Men need community for reasons far greater than you could’ve imagined!
In this conversation, we talked about:
- The sense of emptiness men often feel despite being successful
- Why taking the lone-wolf path is less effective than joining men’s communities
- The power of seeing another man express emotions and realizing you’re not the only one who feels that way
- Why men resist joining men’s communities
- The role of competition in both men’s success AND unhappiness
Connect with Shana James
Website: shanajamescoaching.com/3ways
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Listen to the podcast here:
Why Men Need Community With Dominick Quartuccio and Bryan Stacy
I’ve supported men in their love and work lives for years now, many men ask for the right words to say to be more successful, attractive and desirable. I found it’s not so simple as giving scripts or lines because every man is different. Giving words or scripts would be giving a tall, thin man, a shorter, wider man’s pants, or vice versa. The words have to make sense for you and your personality and there’s so much happening beneath the surface that people are responding to. If you’re interested in how to become a better lover and leader in your unique way, go to ShanaJamesCoaching.com/Quiz or you can text ALIVE to 44144. It only takes a couple of minutes and you’ll start to get an idea of how you can be both more respected and desired. After you fill it out, we can schedule a time to review your quiz and talk about your specific challenges and desires. Enjoy this episode of Man Alive.
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I’m excited to be here with two amazing men, Dominick Quartuccio and Bryan Stacy. Thank you, guys, for being here.
Thanks for having us, Shana. You were on our show, so it’s great to be back on yours.
I love doing this together.
Amazing men that landed.
I’m so glad because it’s true. There are many things I appreciate about you, guys. I could name a long list but off the top of my head, one of the things that I appreciate about both of you is your willingness to be honest and vulnerable. You’re outside any idea or story that masculinity is about being tough, being hard, or having it all together. Thank you for being some of the men who are going first and are showing the true colors of what it’s like to be a real human being and a human man.
Thank you. Neither of us wanted to go first. We were very adamant against going first but then there were some life situations, Bry, that we both faced that thrust us into that spotlight.
Shana, even when I heard you say that, it’s not about being tough or being this or that. It’s like, “No. I like that too.” I still want to be right and tough but I also know when I’m only that the results that I get and the type of dollar life that I can live. As Dominick said, we didn’t know we were getting into this. We had no idea when we started that thing.
What were some of those life situations for each of you that brought you to where you are now? Dominick, you’re smiling.
I’m looking at Bryan. You go first.
Let’s call them existential questions that I started to ask myself is when I felt my left nut and it had a bulge in it. I held off from going to the doctor from talking to anybody about it for about three months. The bulge got bigger. The pain got more. I didn’t want to go in. I didn’t want to face it. I figured it would go away. This is at the age of 30. When I went in, I was diagnosed with both testicular cancer and chlamydia at the same time then I needed that push in life.
If we’re not listening, the knocks get louder.
Dominick likes to tell us that we usually get life lessons in the form of a feather. It tickles us at first. Most of us don’t pay attention to that. It doesn’t change us. If that doesn’t work, we get 2×4 across the face. Sometimes, we feel it and sometimes rebel against it even but then, the Mack truck comes.
I was going to say, there’s something bigger than a 2×4.
It’s hard to ignore getting flattened by a Mack truck. That was my Mac truck moment. I started asking myself like, “Am I going to live? Can I ever have kids? Do I want kids? Can I still perform sexually? What am I going to do?” I’m a single guy with one nut now. How am I going to explain this to anybody that I’m with? That led me down to a whole path of these questions.
We get life lessons in the form of a feather. It tickles us at first, but most of us don't pay attention to that. Share on XDid you guys know each other back then?
Not at that time. Bryan’s story is very similar to mine in the sense that he started talking about these questions and this vulnerable time of his life. He started to notice that other men were interested in having these deeper kinds of conversations which was a shock to all parties involved. The quick and dirty behind my story is I lived this default path of my own life where I graduated college. I did what I was supposed to do. I grabbed the job in the financial services arena to make money and build a life of security.
I followed that journey. I was well-respected. I was making good money and I had leadership opportunities but in my private life, I was holding it together with sex addiction. When I got exposed by breaking the heart of the only woman I’d ever was able to open up enough to fall in love with at the age of 35. My public life and my secret life came crashing down into one. That set me on this deep path of inner work. “How did I get here? How did I stray so far from the man I thought I was?” I went on the surface no one knew and would have ever expected.
After years of doing that in our work, I started to change. People are like, “What’s going on with you? You seem freer, lighter and more confident.” When I spoke out publicly about it in these open forums in New York City and Bryan started speaking publicly with me, we noticed how many other guys have been craving to open up about these less spoken or secretive parts of their lives that they can’t go anywhere else and get any semblance of an adult conversation about.
Having worked with men, I’m not one. I love hearing your perspectives and what happens for you in the rooms of men. The men who’ve come to me in the past years, there’s so much of that. On the surface, nobody would know that something was going on, there was unhappiness, addiction or struggle, and yet, so much isolation as a result because it’s not often talked about. A lot of men aren’t out there being like, “This is what’s going on with me because of the stigma around it.”
Shana, one thing I’ll add to that is, if there’s a man who’s reading right now who’s like, “I don’t have testicular cancer. I don’t have a sex addiction. I don’t have chlamydia. I’m doing fine.” Let me bring you into the conversation. There are many guys out there who are starting to come to the realization that they’re feeling restless in the life that they’ve created for themselves. They have a lot of things on paper.
They thought they wanted a good job, good income and social status family. On a deeper level, they know that they’ve got more in the tank, they’re not lit up by their lives the way that they want to, they can’t quite get at it, and they don’t know where to go. That is also the most common form of a man who finds us. There’s nowhere else that those guys know how to turn to get real good guidance around, “How do I find a sense of purpose, meaning and fire in my life?”
I often see those men making themselves wrong like, “What’s wrong with me that I have all these things and yet I’m still not happy? There must be something I’m doing wrong as opposed to the system is broken.”
We find guys at the top or sometimes, the bottom. When they’re at the apex, “Why should we be feeling better?” As Dominick said, I did all the things. “Why don’t I feel better? I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know where to turn to. We’re at the bottom.” That’s where Dominick and I found ourselves at the bottom questioning like, “What am I doing here? Something is way off. My secrets aren’t serving me anymore.”
From this place, you’ve brought the great men within community and you have a podcast. I imagine and having been in the men’s space for a while, not all men are that excited about joining community and being part of a group. I’m curious, as men are on the way and/or as they’re resisting you, what are they saying? Why don’t they want that?
This is one of my favorite things to talk about because many guys follow the same exact path. When it comes to this personal development and this inner work journey, we talk about inner work. It’s taking your focus off of all the external accolades and starting to ask deeper questions around, “What do I want from this life? What’s my purpose here? What’s the legacy I want to leave behind? What do I want to feel on a daily basis?” When you guys start to wake up to that entire new world, they tend to follow the same path.
They do it on their own as a lone wolf. They start to read the books, listen to the podcast, and attend a workshop here or there but it’s this individual isolated journey. That can go on for years. That’s how I went about the first five years of my journey. Guys are lone wolfing it. Bryan and I always talk about personal development on your own. It’s slow, it’s shallow, and it’s incomplete. It takes a long time to do it on your own. I talked to a guy, he’s a CFO of a reputable company that everybody knows about. He’s like, “I wake up in the morning every day and I have diarrhea about the anxiety that I have to face the day but I rely on that to keep me going. I’ve known about this for ten years. I’ve got a therapist that I go to and have this one-off experience. For ten years, we’ve been talking about the same thing.”
After the therapy session is over, he’s on his own. Many guys are left to their own devices. I’ll say one more thing and Bryan, you can jump in here around why you see guys don’t join the community. It’s amazing how many men distrust communities of other men. Even if it’s conscious or deeply subconscious, I’ve always had communities of men. My group of friends from five years old, I’m still friends with them. Fraternity in college. I spent fifteen years in the financial services space, the same group of people.
I was around groups of men all the time. In many of those places, we were competing with one another. There were very specific forms of what it meant to be a man, what was masculine, and what was tough or not. The only place where I found that all of me could be accepted was when I went to Twelve Steps sex addiction anonymous program, where I was surrounded by a group of men who weren’t competing with me who wanted to hear my worst stories so they could support me. These hidden parts of my insecurities, inner world, and secret lives were now on the table. These guys like me, I had no concept of what that could feel like. I don’t think guys even understand what’s available.
A lot of men don’t understand how that could even feel good. On the other side, I’m hearing that relief or freedom. You don’t have anything to prove anymore. You’re not trying to hold up a mask or a facade. That’s exhausting. Bryan, what have you found other reasons why men are resistant or not wanting to join in community?
Most of us men don’t know we have those problems. If you think about the groups that Dominick discussed before, our sports groups and workgroups where competition is involved in some way, shape or form, it also comes with something else. It comes with a very clear purpose. I know why I’m going to the basketball campus. It’s to get better at basketball and win basketball games. There’s something to get better at. It’s very clear. Whereas if I decided to go to a men’s group, what the hell is exactly the point of that? In 2017, Dominick held his first retreat.
At that time, I was a friend of a friend of Dominick’s. He sends this email out. He’s like, “Come to my men’s retreat.” I asked him what that meant. He said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s a thing.” All I thought about is guys in a circle talking about stuff. I don’t know if they’re naked and doing weird sexual crap. I don’t want to go to that. I felt bad for Dominick because he had left his corporate career and he decided to be a coach. I decided to support a friend of a friend and go. I’ve got to tell you, on day one, not sold. It was not like, “This is what men’s group is. This is what community is.” He also said that there was going to be no women because it was a men’s group and there was no booze which in the groups I attended, that was the whole point of getting together. One of those two things. It’s no booze, it’s guys that I don’t know. What do you talk at dinner night? How are your kids? Where are you from?
What was it about day one that you were not enjoying?
One of the first things Dominick had us do was circle up chairs. I said in my head, “Here we go. Here comes the circle of chairs.” Everybody was talking about why they were there. I was dreading it coming to me because all I was going to say is, “I don’t know. I know Dominick. He’s a good guy.” Other guys were saying things like, “I’ve made good in business. I’ve sold a few businesses and every time I get to the top, I’m not happy. That’s why I’m here.”
In my head, I’m like, “What are you talking about? Why you are here is because you were too successful.” The next guy says, “I have this beautiful family, my wife and my two kids. My wife and I aren’t intimate anymore. I don’t know how to get that spark back.” In my head, single guy, “Go have sex with your wife. What’s wrong with you? Why are you here?” It wasn’t until day 2, day 3 where I started to have breakthroughs of my own. I’m like, “I didn’t know that all of these things, the entire circle, each one of those guys had a part of my story and my situation inside them.” I couldn’t see them on my own.
What helped you see that? How did Dominick and the other men who were there get in or make that shift for you?
At that point, I had no emotional literacy, so I couldn’t say what I said. I would never even admit that I was sad. That was the no-no in my family. I could never admit jealousy. That was not okay. There was a weakness, even the deadly sin. What each of these guys gave me and it was truly a gift is their vulnerability. It made it okay for me to feel whatever I was feeling. What I was able to express on that last day is the open and honest thoughts that I was killing each one of them silently in my head for their things they were being vulnerable about.
That’s powerful to say. Killing each of these men inside your head but also killing yourself before your vulnerability could even make it to the surface.
Bryan, let me jump in on that because one of the reasons why that happens is because most guys are walking into situations where they feel unsafe. They would never say this. If you walk into a group of other men and you instantly do this calculation of, “Who’s the alpha dog? Who’s the threat? Who are the people that I’m either stronger or more capable than?” You do this assessment so quickly. Whenever a man talks, you’re assessing him in terms of comparing yourself to him. That’s a big part of what Bryan is talking about. It’s like, “Do I respect him? Is he weak? Is he someone I can listen to or learn from?”
Guys don’t recognize that they create so much separation between themselves, other men, other people, and other humans in general with that unconscious pattern. It took Bryan three days. No one else was competing with him but he was. I did that for three months in my Twelve Step program before my sponsor shook the crap out of me and was like, “These guys are here because they want to help you. You’re competing with men who aren’t competing with you.” It’s deeply ingrained with us that we don’t know what we’re doing.
Competition is what keeps coming out. Competition from such a young age, it seems like men, even more so than women or other genders, there’s a way of competition. It’s at the root or the heart of me. Knowing who I am, being good enough, or something like that.
I don’t want to go too far with competition because there is a place for competition.
We’re not saying throw it out in its own place. Say more about that.
I’m going to use basketball because I used that analogy. When you step between the lines, there are rules that we have to play by. That’s what makes the sport. That’s what makes it beautiful. Unfortunately, we don’t abide by those lines most of the times in our life and we’re competing everywhere. It’s incessant in every single thing we do with our family and our best friends. That’s why we can’t get as close to other guys because there’s always that little element of competition and what people don’t know, even with your best friend.
The big lie is that competition makes us move forward. In some cases, within the basketball lines, within the boundaries, that’s true but in life, it’s not. That’s where cooperation kicks in. That’s where we can start to get ahead. When I start to focus my energies and my attention away from the competition every single time, every single where, and into cooperation, I make friends. I get ahead and I have a lot more fun in the process.
One of the things we’ve learned from men in same-sex relationships is they say that competition exists between them in relationships because it permeates all these different areas. Bryan hit the nail on the head. I love competition. I love sports. It’s in those lines where it’s appropriate but in life, playing a zero-sum game because that’s what a competition is. There’s a winner or a loser. If you build your entire life around zero-sum games, it’s a very disappointing way to live.
I’ve been seeing that in my kid. He doesn’t want to do something if he’s not as good as someone else. We were playing Frisbee. It’s any of these things. When I imagine a future where he’s not risking because he’s got to be better than everyone, there are not many places where any one of us is better than everybody else. It’s such a thin line to walk. I’m curious for you guys, as you’ve made that shift from competition to cooperation, what’s happened for you and what have you seen happened for other men?
Personal development is an inner work journey. Share on XWhat you said is even bigger than you could possibly imagine. We would talk about how men who aren’t doing this inner work thing or aren’t doing this work, oftentimes, only play the games that they know they can win. I was on the phone with a woman who is a client of mine and has a twenty-year-old son who was a valedictorian in high school, get straight A’s, and everything. He has already shrunk to a mini prison cell because his only identity is around A’s and perfection. He will not even take on anything that he feels he can look foolish or silly at. We start to lop off the things that could bring the most aliveness to our lives. A sense of mystery, spontaneity, unpredictability, and men whittle their lives down to what they can look good at because we’re afraid of criticism or afraid of failing.
This is where Bryan and I get the guys who are 45, 50 years old, ridiculously accomplished and can’t feel anything on the inside. I’ll never forget. I talk about in a TEDx Talk that I did. I was at a men’s retreat. It was called The ManKind Project. I highly recommend them. They’re amazing. They’ve been around for decades. I met a 50-year-old dude who was in amazing shape, looked awesome and dressed well. He talked about these seven-figure businesses that he ran, wife, and kids. I’m like, “Why are you here? It seems you’ve got everything figured out.” “I’m here because I don’t feel like I can experience joy anymore. I’m dead on the inside,” were basically his words. I was like, “How do you end up here?” Through doing this work, Bryan and I have met many guys who on the inside are feeling like they’ve been sucked into that vortex of not being able to feel their lives anymore.
It’s like, “This is what’s been expected of me.” As you said, “I did what I was meant to do or what it seemed I was meant to do. I got a good job. I made money.” As though that’s the path, success, and accomplishment but there hasn’t been any talk of what it is like. In my Facebook page, it’s funny, I named it years ago. It’s called True Success For Men or something that. The actual success rate that you could be happy, fulfilled and making a difference in the world. It’s not all about money and competition, and yet those things have their place. It seems like they take over.
When we’re so focused on success and we define that success by outcomes, we miss the entire journey. I understand it sounds like a cliche but when we go through the journey, we’re open to what is, and what’s in front of us, Dominick likes to call this finding your greatest energy. What are those activities in your life that you do that give you the greatest energy? That’s a lot of where my path started too. I literally had a Post-it Note. I started writing down what are the activities that give me the greatest energy. It was that simple and that dumb.
I love how often they don’t make sense. It’s not logical. It’s not like, “This should give me energy. This is why it could be so weird.” What were some of yours?
You mentioned one right before we got started, water. I started noticing that when I drank water continuously through the day, I had more energy. When I mean energy, I don’t mean just spiritual energy. I mean energy to create. When we’re aware of that while we’re on the journey, it allows the journey to go somewhere different than where we expected. That’s an exciting life because you already know where you’re going. That’s the only thing you can be successful at. You can only be the best Frisbee player ever and I’m only going to do that. It’s good if that’s your thing, if that’s your competition. If we’re talking about life, it’s a pretty big thing. The journey should be big and exciting as well. That’s the big misnomer. It’s like, “I have to focus 110% of my efforts on this one thing called competition, so I can get the outcome and get the success,” and then you’re dying inside.
You get these fleeting moments. Phil Jackson, the legendary coach of the Bulls and the Lakers. He’s of the greatest spiritual mentors that are out there. Clearly, one of the greatest coaches of all time. He was a basketball player before he was a coach and he won a championship with the New York Knicks. He said, “After I won, it was a day or two later where I reverted back to feeling the way I did before winning the championship.” It was this transient experience. He learned very quickly that living a life of purpose is not tied up in some outcome like winning a championship. Living a life of purpose is only in the present moment of being fully engaged in the life that I’m living, day to day, moment by moment. That goes to this point that Bryan is making around your greatest energy.
If you can become an expert in understanding the things that give you your greatest energy, other people might call that flow where you lose that sense of timeless of effort, time and space because you’re deeply ingrained in what you’re doing. Part of my story was in the corporate world when I hit my dead end and I’m like, “What am I doing here? I’m successful but I don’t feel it.” What I found was I got extraordinary energy by reading books that expanded my horizons and then taking workshops. I learned NLP and hypnosis. I had no idea. I had no master plan for how any of that stuff was going. I wanted to feel lit up. Eventually, all the dots started to connect and it was like, “I want to become a coach, a speaker and a workshop facilitator.” All of those books I read, all of those courses that I took, and all those modalities that I learned have created a unique skillset that I have that then became my life calling.
It’s the breadcrumbs of what you are trying to pay attention to. What in the moment gives you energy or lights you up versus here’s what I should do or here’s what I would do if I was trying to win the game?
That’s such a big one, “What I should do.”
How many dreams have been killed by that “should?” Bryan, we see that when we run the retreats. I remember the one that we did in Colorado. We ended up with a lot of guys who were in this transitional period in their life. They’ve said whether they’re retiring or they’ve been in a corporate job, they want to go to start their own business, they’re leaving a relationship, and there’s this transitional moment. The thing that sabotages men fast is we feel we have to have the answer.
If we know that this part of our life is coming to an end and we want to transition out, we almost force ourselves too quickly to come up with what is the next thing and we oftentimes don’t sit in the unknowing for long enough. You see these guys jump from, “I don’t know what business I want to start but I’m so scared about not starting the business. I’m going to go do something.” They dedicate the next 5, 7, to 10 years or the rest of their lives. It’s something that they don’t like and they imprison themselves in a whole other thing.
I see that often with men. Oftentimes, I’m coaching someone and we’re talking about their relationship, sex life or something and I’m like, “Have you asked your partner what feels good to them?” They’re like, “No.” It’s not okay not to know because that has been deemed unmanly.
That’s a whole other truism that we’ve found in guys. We would way rather do some do it way harder and maybe even get it wrong but try it on our own than ask but no way are we asking. We’re going to do it.
Cleo Stiller wrote this book, Modern Manhood. There’s a study that shows that men will drive an extra 900 miles over the course of their lives because they won’t ask for directions.
When you think about that not only in driving but where you go in your life, the detours in your relationships, relationships lost, and opportunities lost from going in all of those directions and not asking. Not cooperating, being collaborative. It’s like, “I’ve got to do this on my own again.”
There’s something to be said to taking a detour where you’re like, “I’m down for an adventure.” Most of those 900 miles are spent pissed off.
They’re not enjoying the journey.
It seems clear that you guys are finding that men benefit from communities of men from being with other men. What can you say that helps men understand? What do they get from being with other men?
Shana, you hit that point on the head. One other barrier is the fear of being forced into something that I don’t want to do, like share my feelings. “I don’t want to be the one that has to get up there and do all that.” The one benefit that I would’ve never seen is what I considered my weaknesses. Those things that if I’m vulnerable about, people are going to like me less. They’re going to look down on me because all those guys out there competing with me, they’re going to see that vulnerable spot and they’re going to exploit it, because that’s what pure competition does.
What I didn’t realize and the benefit is that when I opened up, that’s what connected me to those other guys. That’s what made me feel very real. I first recognized that and there was only even in a one-way street but when I went through the testicular cancer process and chemotherapy, I wrote a blog called One Big Nut. That’s when guys started coming to me for the first time and say, “My right nut hurts. Can you take a look at this?” Why? I wasn’t a doctor.
I didn’t look at any nuts. It changed the relationship with even strangers. It changed the relationship with my friends. If you’re out there right now, you’re looking at your friendships, and they feel shallow, they feel like, “I can’t go deep. I don’t know people that know me, the inside deep part of me. I don’t know people like that.” It’s not other people. It’s you. It was me. That’s one of the huge benefits about being in a community where we can open up. That feels good by itself but it connects us to each other.
I’ve had the privilege of being sometimes inside men’s workshops or on a coaching team of women with a group of men. I’ve seen the power of other men sharing vulnerably, other men opening up, everybody feeling safer, and also the sense of there’s less work for me to do in a way, for a man to do or anybody but we’re speaking to men in this moment. There’s almost a way where you get to benefit from the work that other men are doing emotionally because you work through it as they’re working through it in a way. I see that exponential like one man does the work for the other 10 or 100 men in the room sometimes.
Let’s take this even a step further because this is important stuff. Everyone knows about the adage, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Who you spend your time with is ultimately who you are and who you will become. A lot of the men that find us have said that they’re the only man in their ecosystem asking these kinds of questions, who’s curious. They’re the most inspiring person. They’re the most talented person. They’re not stimulated. Who is the guy that’s going to call me forward to that next level? You have these guys who are floating around individually across the world wondering where’s that group that’s going to raise me to a higher standard.
Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich, the bible for attracting riches and abundance in your life. He interviewed 500 of the world’s most successful people of the time. It was Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, the Rockefellers, King Gillette, JP Morgan, Charles Schwab and Andrew Carnegie. Who’s who? He mined their secrets. He found out that all of them attributed the biggest part of their success to being a part of a mastermind alliance. A mastermind is a collection of people who come together for a common, definite purpose. Bryan and I run masterminds called The Great Man Mastermind to help men come together and discover their purpose.
To live the great man inside of them. What Napoleon Hill said was, “When you bring these men together, it’s not 1 plus 1 equals 2. It’s 1 plus 1 equals 1,000.” For a number of the reasons that you two have already spoken about and you’re surrounded by twenty other mirrors that help you to go deeper. Think about how many areas of expertise a group of twenty guys would have. In our group alone, we have a guy who’s a top-notch doctor, other guys who are top-notch coaches, and one guy is one of the top finance podcasters in the world.
You’re learning from these guys over and over, you pick up the phone in a heartbeat, and get all your questions answered. That’s why men want to find community. When they do and they find their tribe, many guys are lone wolfing it when they find their tribe. Now, you have this safety net to take more risks in your life, to be more courageous, and to go after your purpose. When you see another guy giving up a twenty-year career to pursue his passion, it certainly makes that a lot more available to you. We could go on and on but those are some of the reasons.
I believe that men do need each other, that there are ways to do this work non-gendered or I see a benefit. When men come to me and we get to do some healing as a woman and a man together with some of those wounds that have been created when young, and there are places that I don’t get to or I can’t get to because there’s a dynamic that happens when men sit with other men and open with other men. I love it. We could talk about this forever but if you’re going to leave men with one last thing, each of you, about this topic, what do you want men to know?
Only one. If you would’ve asked 100, that’d be an easier question but just one.
I’ll give you one and I’m speaking to the men directly here. You have no idea or no concept of how amazing your life can be, how good it can get, how alive you can feel on a daily basis, how connected to the purpose you can feel, how closely you can trust and bond with other men, and how to feel so supported in your life. If you’ve been going out on your own, there’s no point of reference or basis of comparison. It’s truly something that you have to discover for the first time. That’s only going to happen in the community with other guys. Picture as good as it’s been for you and your life up to this point then set that as your basement. That is the floor, not the ceiling of your life. I’ll leave you with that one.
I’m going to use one that pulls from The Great Man’s mission statement, which is the purpose of a great man is to create environments in which they and others can thrive. It’s to create those environments. What most men don’t understand is the impact that they are having on others, whether they think they are or not. They can choose whether that impact is one in which people can thrive or which people shrink. I’ve seen the youngest guys in our community do something that has inspired me continually on a daily basis. These guys are starting out. I’m going to use his name, Patrick Devlin, one of the guys in our mastermind. That’s what I have in mind right now. He’s at the beginning of his journey and he’s out there, he’s open, he’s doing it, and that inspires me. We’ve been on the journey a little bit longer. We have an impact on people even if we don’t know it and we have to decide what we want that impact to be.
Men can't get as close to other men because there's always that little element of competition. Share on XThat is brilliance too. The blind spot of, “I’m going along. People aren’t being impacted.” A, there’s a choice point there that we could choose to have much more of an impact and B, people are being impacted whether you know it or not. I work with men around walking in a room and having someone be aware of them without saying a word. The impact comes before you even, before people are interacting with you. As soon as somebody is aware of you, you’re having an impact on them. Where can men find you, guys?
Shana, thank you. Our podcasts, we’d love guys to come over and listen to The Great Man Within Podcasts. We’ve got over 200 episodes now and you’ve got to listen to Shana’s. That was an awesome one. It’s been very well received. If you’re a man who’s interested in joining community, head over to TheGreatManWithin.com. We’ve got a couple of different options on joining community whether it’s virtual. Eventually, it’s going to be in-person. When we hit herd immunity with the pandemic, you’ll see some options at TheGreatManWithin.com.
Thank you guys so much for being here.
Thanks, Shana.
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I’m so glad you joined us for our episode of Man Alive. I hope you enjoyed our conversation and it gave you something to consider and explore in your life. If you like what you know, I’d be grateful for you to subscribe and write a quick review that helps men like you find us. Again, head over to ShanaJamesCoaching.com/Quiz or text the word ALIVE to 44144 to get a sense of how you can become a better lover and leader. You’ll start to see how you can be both more respected and desired in your unique and genuine way. If you don’t feel as confident or as excited about life or love as you’d like to be, this quiz is a great starting point. We’ll guide you toward a more passionate love life and a more inspiring and successful career.
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About Dominick Quartuccio and Bryan Stacy
Dominick Quartuccio and Bryan Stacy are the hosts of The Great Man Within Podcast, a show for high-performing men venturing into the deeper realms of purpose, masculinity, optimal lifestyle design and sex.
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