#167: The Key To Real Happiness For Men

Today’s Man Alive podcast conversation is with Dr. John Schinnerer, who spent the past 20 years distilling the best research-based tools and methods to help clients overcome anxiety and anger and move towards a contented and purposeful life. Dr. John was one of three experts to consult with Pixar on the Academy Award-winning movie, Inside Out. He is a nationally recognized speaker and an award-winning author with a top-rated blog and over 200 radio appearances.

For many men, stress, relationship conflict, parenting, disappointments in sex and intimacy, can all get in the way of consistent happiness. In this episode, Dr. John sits down with Shana James to talk about how to spend more time feeling happy, relaxed, and at ease.

In today’s episode, Dr. John and Shana discuss:

What happiness actually is and how to have more of it
How to escape “man box culture” and its painful limitations
Realistic optimism – what it is and why it allows you to be happier
How to tune into more positive emotions so you can feel better for longer
Men who bring their emotions to the workplace and are respected for it

Connect with Dr. John

Website: https://guidetoself.com/

Connect with Shana James

Website: shanajamescoaching.com/3ways

Curious about what you’d need to become a better leader and lover? Take the quiz

For Women: Modern dating doesn’t have to be a nightmare for women

Listen to the podcast here:

Show notes:

The Key To Real Happiness For Men – John Schinnerer

Even men at the top of their game find themselves wanting more from life, whether it’s more meaning unshakable confidence, a bigger impact, more money, deeper love, hotter sex life or a powerful legacy. Find out how good your life can be in this episode. Also, as I’ve supported men in their love and work lives for a couple of 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 like 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.

—

I am excited to be here with Dr. John Schinnerer. Welcome. Thank you for being here.

Thanks so much for having me, Shana.

I’m excited to talk about happiness. Happiness has been one of the things in my own life that I’ve struggled to understand over the years. What is happiness actually and how do I get happier? Is it okay to be happier? Is happy what I’m going for? Is it deep and meaningful? I’m excited to tap into your expertise and your wisdom over the years of your research and working with happiness.

I saw the question of what is happiness and I thought that’s a big question. There are a lot of components that we can break down and look at. There are about several years of study now that have gone on.

Let me give you a quick intro. Dr. John is a UC Berkeley Trained Coach with a PhD in Educational Psychology. He has spent the past years distilling the best of research-based tools and methods to help clients overcome anxiety and anger, and move toward a happy, contented and purposeful life. He was one of the three experts to consult with Pixar on the Academy Award-winning movie, Inside Out, which I love that movie, I’m so happy to hear that you were a part of that. He’s also a nationally recognized speaker and an award-winning author. He wrote the Guide to Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Emotion and Thought. You’ve been on stage with lieutenants, governors, Olympic medalists and professors. You have a blog on positive psychology called The Shrunken Mind, which has been named one of the Top Positive Psychology blogs. You’ve been doing this work for a long time. You have over 200 radio shows on positive psychology. There’s so much here. Thank you for all of the work and dedication that you’ve put into this topic.

If I had a choice, I would have done it another way, but I don’t have a choice. It’s just what I had to do.

Tell us a little bit about why is this topic important to you?

Part of my personal makeup is depression and anxiety. When I started out my career in psychology, I remember I was a school psychologist and I was seeing students in a high school and it was in a rough area of town. They would come in and tell me their stories. Their stories were filled with anger, fear, guilt, shame, sadness, and rightfully so because they were dealing with heavy stuff. This was when I was 26. I had no idea that emotions were so contagious at that time. You can pick them up from other people, and so silly me, I started picking up their emotions and it ended with me getting depressed. When you get depressed, inflammation in the body goes up. Any old injuries that you have tend to come back. I remember thinking this is ridiculous like, “Here I am a psych trained at Cal and I can’t manage my own emotions. If I can’t do that, how can I teach them?” I made a conscious decision at that point to find the best tools to manage the darker side of the mind and the heart, depression, anxiety, guilt, shame, that kind of thing. It wasn’t the whole equation, but at least I had good tools to teach to clients.

Fast forward about 2005, I started getting into positive psychology, which is the short answer, is the scientific study of happiness and wellbeing. This was like the clouds parting, the rays of sunshine pouring through. I was like, “This is manna from heaven.” I had tools for both sides of the equation, tools to turn up the volume on the positive, and tools to turn down the volume on the negative. It was tremendously meaningful for me because I could now manage depression, anxiety, anger, and now I became more content, relaxed, quick to smile, quick to laugh, didn’t take things so seriously.

Sometimes when you turn down the dial on depression, anger and anxiety, it doesn’t necessarily lead to joy, lightness or happiness. I agree that those are learned experiences as well.

If you think of it with a football analogy, you can have a great defense and a great offense, or you could have one’s bad, one’s good. Traditional psychology would go at, “How are you broken and how do we fix that?” If you look at it as two buckets of emotions, one’s positive, one’s negative, it means that your bucket of negative emotions is empty or near empty, but it doesn’t mean that your bucket of positive emotions is full. They could both be at zero, which is not. In the field of psychology, if we got you to that point of being in one of both buckets, that’s where we would clap our hands, “My work here is done. I’m good. You’re on your own. See you later.” That’s a successful case, but I don’t think that was the end of the story. Taking someone from minus 5 to 0 isn’t as good as taking someone from minus 5 to plus 5. That’s where the positive psych came in.

Learn to be realistically optimistic.

I know in my own experience, I’m doing something called Positive Intelligence Coaching and working with those pieces and in my spiritual practice, I work with those pieces as well. I love these different doorways into those more contented, joyful experiences. What I also love is that you are a man trained in psychology, and that you can speak about this reality that you’ve gone through depression and anxiety, that it’s a normal experience, so men reading don’t have to feel wrong or bad for having those experiences.

It’s quite common actually, especially more now than ever. I think the percentages are quite high in terms of people in general across the world experiencing depression and/or anxiety and men in particular.

Suicidality is way up especially for men. When we were talking about happiness before talking about your own experience, you talked about being more contented and more relaxed. I am curious about this overlap between we don’t have to get into all of what is happiness exactly. How do you think about happiness or how do you think about where you’re helping men get to?

The framework for me is happiness rests on four pillars. There’s the relationship to yourself, relationship to others, relationship to something larger than yourself, it could be a higher power, a purpose or a cause, and then relationship to work. Relationship to self is typically where I start because men, by virtue of how we’re socialized as young boys or teenagers, tend to be cut off from ourselves. We’re cut off from 2/3 of the emotional spectrum. We’re not very aware of most of our thoughts unless it’s that inner critic screaming at us. That’s the first step is to become more emotionally literate, more emotionally aware, more aware of those self-defeating thoughts, the automatic negative thoughts, and then we can look at relationships. Where is your relationship at with your romantic partner? Where is your relationship at with other male friends? Where is your relationship at with coworkers and how are those working for you? Children? Parenting?

Research shows that we need to believe in something bigger than ourselves in order to be happy. It could be a higher power. It could be a cause like fighting cancer or ending poverty. The other one which is interesting to me is work. I’ve worked with a lot of men that are “successful.” In other words, they’ve climbed the ladder and made a ton of money. By those definitions, they’re very successful, but the work doesn’t have any meaning for them. There’s a Harry’s Masculinity study in 2018, and it found that the number one predictor of a happy and contented man is meaningful work. It’s so powerful, it’s three times as powerful as the second on the list. The second on the list was physical and mental health, which is pretty amazing because men are rating mental health higher than physical health as important to them. That’s a huge shift that’s happening.

All of these, you describe as aspects of happiness. For someone to be happy or feel happy, these areas of their lives, would you say they’re going well or they’re finding meaning in them?

There’s that traditional wheel exercise of if you look at 6 or 8 different areas in life, where are you? Where would you like to be? Where do others see you? Looking at where is the wheel most broken and start there. I think that most of the men I speak with it’s their romantic relationship, whether romantic partner, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, depending on sexuality.

That part is more broken?

Yeah, that seems to be the one that I’ve noticed. That’s the pattern that I see that a lot of the men are successful, but the relationship at home is fractured. It’s fascinating to me because a lot of men that I work with start with this really good value. We talked about values. The value that they have is provide for the family, “I’m the provider.” That’s a great value, but the problem that I see is over 10, 20, 30 years, that value gets morphed and cancerous. The very value that we set out to do has overtaken us for whatever reason, ego, status, money, power. We’re spending more and more time at work and neglecting those that we love the most at home. We’re giving everything that we have to this company, yet our wife has grown increasingly bitter and resentful. Our teenage children, at that point, are pissed off and indignant. You’ve got to have a balance in these different areas of life because any one of them can take you down. The negative emotions are louder than the positive emotions, they’re going to make the most noise and they’re going to weigh you down.

You’re talking about that, I’m thinking there’s something to being happier, being content, when everything is working. There’s also a sense of finding that contentment even before you get to the goal or the accomplishment. How do you work differently with those with men?

It’s interesting you bring that up because there’s some seminal research in positive psychology that looks at what comes first, success or happiness? When I was younger, the story that we were forced-fed when we’re growing up is success comes first. You work your ass off, you get good grades, you go to the best college, you get a good job. You make more money, you get promoted, you make more money, and then you’ll be happy. It’s really rare to find causality in these research studies because it’s hard to prove. This was based on a meta-analysis, a study of studies showing that in fact, happiness comes first which increases your chances of success. It makes sense if you think about it, who do you like to hang out with? We generally like to hang out with someone that’s optimistic, upbeat, positive and supportive. Those people tend to have more relationships, which means they’ve got more information flowing to them. They’ve got more chances of hearing about the job opening. If they don’t want it, they can pass it on. If they do want it, they can take advantage of it.

That makes so much sense to me. It’s easy to imagine, “I will be happy once I get this thing or once I achieve this thing.” I think that’s part of the problem, “With that caretaker provider role, I should be happy because this is the task I have taken on or given myself in my life.” Many men come to me saying, “There’s a deadness. I feel dead inside, even though on paper, my life looks exactly like I thought was a success.”

MA 167 | Key To Real Happiness — Guide to Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Emotion and Thought

I was told that if you get this picture of life, if you reach this point, then you’ll be happy, then you’ll be satisfied. Part of the problem is that we’re crappy emotional forecasters that we don’t know how we’re going to feel in the future, given a set of circumstances.

When I was younger, I used to think I could do that. I could emotionally forecast and I could, in some ways I could feel out into the future, but life has gotten so much more complex as we get older. I can’t do that anymore.

One of the things that frustrate me is that going back to that story that we are fed, it’s the American dream or this is the path you’re supposed to follow. I think the implication is that if you follow this path, you’ll be happy. It’s not true and it’s not our fault. It’s that we’re not taught the skills to be happier.

Speaking of that, you were saying before that the negative emotions are much louder and more apparent, and the joy and happiness are quieter and more subtle. How do you help men tune into and have more of those positive emotions?

There’s a number of exercises but ultimately, I love the idea that positive emotions whisper to us or they’re quiet. If you want to be happier, we’ve got to get more emotionally literate. We have to get more emotionally aware, which means we have to get our attention out of our head, which is where we’ve been rewarded for being our whole lives. We have to get our attention into our body, so that you can recognize when you do have a positive emotion. Some of the tell signs are expansiveness in the chest or warmth in the body or for pride, the chin comes up slightly from any of them, the shoulders pull back, think of like a heart-opening in yoga. There’s something to that.

Those can be so easily missed because they are more subtle.

They don’t last very long. Think of them lasting 1 to 5 seconds. They’re short and yet, if you can catch them, you can learn to savor them and extend them over time. You asked what is happiness? One of the possible answers to that question is stringing together these brief moments of positive emotions. You start with curiosity, then that rolls into interest, and that rolls into relaxation, awe and pride. The more time we spend in that positive emotional space, the happier we’re necessarily going to be. To me, happiness is primarily an emotional experience but I think there are other pieces to it like meaning.

Meaning feels like a really big one here.

Meaning is a big deal because if you have a meaningful job, let’s say, we’re not going to have good days daily. There’s always going to be a struggle in our life, that’s a guarantee. We’re going to feel pain. If you’ve got meaning, it can help you withstand the pain until you do get back to more positive emotions.

I think about that in relationships too, and parenting and all of it. I used to have a fantasy that if I was a parent or if I was in a romantic relationship, the happily ever after. I remember driving in my car once when my kid was 3 or 4 and listening to this fairy tale and the end said, “They lived happily ever after.” He said to me, “Mom, happily ever after is not real, is it?” I was like, “Where did you hear that?” “My dad told me.” I was like, “Okay, right.” We got to talk about it. Happily ever after is not real. There’s never a time where we’re going to be happy all the time.

I went through a contentious divorce in 2010 roughly. You had mentioned in a prior conversation that’s a rough time. I was depressed for several months and yet I went to work every day. My work buoyed me through this crisis in my personal life. Even if my personal life was in shambles, which it was at the moment at that time, I still had work. I found it meaningful and purposeful.

It doesn’t all rely on that one aspect of your life or whether you have a love that’s working or not. The ups and downs of life, we were talking earlier about how there was an attack on the Capitol in our democracy. I woke up feeling like, “We won Georgia.” I felt lighter. By a couple of hours later, those heavier feeling set in and they did. They stuck around for longer.

Good, bad or indifferent, there’s always a story.

It makes me think of the Buddhist concept of two darts. The first dart is pain, the second dart is suffering. Pain is inevitable in life. We’re going to experience painful things, breakup, death, insurrection, but the second dart of suffering is one that you have some control over. It’s about how long you dwell on these terrible or crappy or traumatic experiences in your life.

What stories do you tell yourself about them and how do you continue to live in them or live into them as opposed to move on or digest them?

I heard that the CEO of Twilio, this guy is aware. I’m impressed with some of the stuff he does in his company. He sent out an email that was about a page long that said to every one of his employees, “I’m having a hard time concentrating. I don’t know about you, but I’m watching the news. I want to say if you guys are having a hard time concentrating too, that’s okay. Here’s a list of resources that if you’re struggling with this, we’re happy to provide for.” That to me is impressive.

It goes back to the fear that many men have said, “I don’t know if I can bring my emotions to work, or if I admit that I’m having a hard time focusing, then everything’s going to go to crap or I’m going to lose my job or something like that.” To see that there is a lot more humanity coming into the workplace and that people respect that.

To your point, it does the flip of that in the sense of it draws people to you. It connects you. It gives you more loyalty from your employees. It makes them want to work harder for you because you are showing up as a human.

If that was my boss, I would feel so much more loyalty and wanting to do well and wanting to stay part of that team, as opposed to wanting to leave or not caring.

“This is the man I want to work for.”

On the thread of the negative emotions being heavier, lasting longer, the positive being a little more subtle, you talk about reducing learned helplessness and increasing realistic optimism. Can you help us understand?

Learned helplessness is an idea that came out of Martin Seligman back in the ‘60s, where he was working with dogs. He found that if he shocked dogs and didn’t give them a way out, and then later shock the dogs where they had a way out, they wouldn’t even try to get out. They wouldn’t even try to escape the shocks. We don’t do those experiments anymore because they’re not humane. I’ve had a number of depressed men that come in, and they feel like those dogs to me in the sense that, and you’ve probably seen this too, where you say something like, “How about if we try this tool or let’s try that tool or let’s think about it this way?” The response from a depressed person is, “It won’t work for me. No, I tried that, not that one either.” They’re not even willing to try something to get them out of their pain and misery. The extension of that is they also believe that nothing will help. There’s the placebo effect. There’s also the nocebo effect. The placebo effect is if I believe something’s going to help me, it’s likely to help me. Nocebo is if I don’t believe something’s going to help me, it’s not going to help me. I shared that with a depressed client and he was like, “That must be why Advil has never worked for me,” and we started laughing.

Nocebo is powerful, just because we don’t believe something is going to work, actually it doesn’t mean it won’t work.

It has changed how I work with clients because one of the first steps that I do with clients now is I’ve got a mindset talk that I give. I think I offer it for free on one of my sites, but it’s about a 30, 40-minute talk on the power of mindsets using five different areas. It’s weight loss, pain management, aging which was mind-blowing, intelligence, and there’s one other. It shows you how powerful your mind is and how powerful the mindsets that we choose or maybe aren’t aware of are. The cool thing about mindset is it’s a decision that you can change in an instant. An example, “People are jerks or people are out to get me or people can’t be trusted,” versus, “People are generally good.” That completely changes how you interact with the world.

“The jury’s out until I experience this person,” rather than, “I’ve got a story about how all people are. I’m going to see who this unique person is.”

I’d love to give the example to clients. Imagine going through your day with the mindset of people can’t be trusted. Think of the littlest interaction like at the supermarket and at the coffee store, every interaction then becomes nothing. You’re not trying to engage with them. You just get your change and you tip, you get out of there. Versus if you have a mindset of people are generally good, then every one of those interactions is exactly the opposite where you’re trying to have some little conversation, maybe try and get them to smile. If you do get them to smile, you both smile. You both walk away with a small win because that’s a small, positive, emotional boost. Add that up, let’s say you have ten interactions a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for 10 years, there’s a cumulative effect.

As I hear you say that, there’s that relearning. Maybe people weren’t to be trusted when you were younger, but that doesn’t mean all people can be trusted. We tend to overlay what our familial patterns were.

One of the big mistakes we make is we over-generalize. Let’s say we get betrayed by a girlfriend. She cheats on me, “No woman can be trusted. All women are witches.” That’s a big mistake that we make. It’s a cognitive error.

It has a huge impact. Your life gets seen through that lens and people feel it. You could say the same words as another man who believes that people are to be trusted, and people will respond to you in a different way. I think it’s especially obvious with women in relationships where we can feel if you think we’re witches or if you think there’s something wrong with us. Sometimes you don’t even have to say a word about it.

I had a guy come in and I think he was just out of a divorce, so he was starting to date again. I asked him what his core belief about women are. He said, “I don’t trust them. I think that all women are witches.” It’s just like, “How is that working for you in the dating world?” My guess is it’s not working very well, and it wasn’t.

That has to be worked with. I’ve stood in for men to yell or release with me like as a woman stand-in. It doesn’t have to be with me as a woman or it could be with you as a man, but if you don’t have somewhere where you can say the things that originally hurt you, then we do hold on to them. What about realistic optimism? How do you define that?

Realistic optimism again, Martin Seligman, but it’s learning to be realistically optimistic. It’s interesting to me because I’ve talked to a lot of patients or clients, when you start talking about pessimism and optimism and they say, “I’m not pessimistic. I’m realistic.” I don’t challenge them because they’re right. There are studies that show that pessimistic people see objective reality a little bit more accurately than optimists. Optimists tend to be a little bit rosy-eyed or pollyannaish. It comes at a cost, and the cost for pessimism or realism is greater misery. You have a choice and the choice is you can see its reality a little bit more accurately, which comes with greater misery, or you can train yourself to be more realistically optimistic. The realistic part is it pays to be optimistic in most situations unless it’s life-threatening. If you’re going to get back surgery, you probably don’t want to be optimistic, “Let’s do research on the surgeon.” If your friend wants to drive home and he’s drunk, probably not best to be optimistic. If it’s life or death, be careful, be cautious, but most of what we deal with are not life and death situations.

It pays to train yourself to be more optimistic. It’s relatively easy in that there are three dimensions to learn or look out for realistic optimism. There’s personal, pervasive and permanent. Personal, “Should I take this personally? How personally should I take this?” Pervasive, “Does this apply to this one area in my life or does it apply to all areas of my life?” Permanent, “Is this temporary or permanent?” Let’s say you get an A on a test in school, in college. If something positive happens to an optimist, they’ll take that personally, “This is a result of my effort, my hard work, my intelligence.” They’ll make it permanent, “I always do well on tests.” They’ll make it pervasive, “This applies across all areas of my life because I do well.” That one took a little bit of work for me because at first it felt a little maybe arrogant. My mom was very concerned about me not being arrogant, so there’s a little bit of training that went in there.

When you were practicing it, you’re saying to apply the pervasive piece across the rest of your life?

The personal piece was the hardest one for me. My tendency was to give credit to others or to externalize the blame for the good stuff, which is not what you want to do. If an optimist gets a bad grade, let’s say they fail the test, then the exact opposite. You don’t take it personally, it’s temporary and it’s not pervasive. It’s just for this one area of life. In terms of not taking it personally, it could be something like, “I wasn’t feeling well that day. The test was really difficult,” something to externalize the blame for what happened. The result from that is it tends to ease depression.

The pessimist would be more of a, “This is my fault. I am to blame and it’s going to go poorly.”

The pessimist is the exact opposite. If a pessimist gets an A on the test, they’ll think, “That was an easy test.” It’s not pervasive. It’s just for this area, “This test was easy or I just got lucky on this test, or it’s just for math. It’s not permanent because I don’t normally do well on tests, so it’s temporary.”

Masculinity has been called a negative identity because it doesn’t tell you what to be.

“It must just be a temporary thing.”

“Just for this moment in time.”

How do you help people who are pessimistic or have more of that tendency, shift to the more realistic optimism?

I’ve got a whole hour-long presentation that I’ll give on this and go into detail, and then ask them to look at some specific examples in their lives of good and bad events, and how are you interpreting them? Some people will go as far as to write them down and log them. Some people don’t need to do that, they can do it in their mind.

That’s powerful to see the interpretation. There’s the experience and the interpretation, just like you said the first start and the second dart. Something’s going to happen, we can’t control necessarily what happens, but we can control how we respond to it or how we interpret it.

One of the questions that I love is what’s the story I’m telling myself about this right now? There’s always a story. Good, bad or indifferent, there’s always a story.

In this little blip of your well of wisdom, what haven’t we covered that you feel like, “If I were to leave here without speaking to this, it would be missing?”

One of the things that I’ve been talking about a lot is man box culture, and how men are socialized as boys and teens. This is the book that I’m working on right now, how it screws us up as men damage our relationships, and I think undermines our shot at happiness. If you think back to middle school or high school, typically what happens if I’m a young boy and I show too much sadness or fear, someone somewhere around me, it could be my dad, mom, peers, friend, girlfriend, teacher, a coach, will say something like, “Don’t be a witch. Don’t be a little girl. Don’t be a p***y,” that’s classic. Pardon my language for those reading, but that’s what we get unfortunately. You get that and I don’t think we need to get it too many times. We jump back into a man box and we’re like, “I’m not sharing that again because that’s painful and embarrassing.” On the other side, if we show too much joy, love, romanticism, flamboyance, excitement, someone will say something like, “Don’t be a fag. Don’t be so gay.” Masculinity is defined by two poles. It’s a fear of homosexuality and a fear of the feminine.

Masculinity has been called a negative identity because it doesn’t tell you what to be. It tells you what not to. If you show too much on the positive side, you jump back in the man box and you’re like, “I’m not showing that again.” What it leaves us with that we can publicly display without fear of humiliation, I would argue three things. There’s lust, “She’s hot. I do her.” There’s stress because if I say to you, Shana, “I’m so stressed,” it implies I’m busy and important. The big one is anger or some degree of anger, irritation, rage, frustration, annoyance. Most of our emotions as adults then get funneled through that anger lens. We, as men, do not have a good grasp of what we’re feeling. We think everything is anger. Stress, shame, guilt, anxiety, hurt, it’s all come out as anger. Then we get into a relationship, and 75% of the women initiate divorce in the US. It’s so much more the women saying, “I don’t want to be in this relationship anymore.” The biggest complaint I hear is, “I can’t connect with my man.” It makes complete sense given how we’re socialized. The other part that I want men to hear is, “It’s not our fault. We did not ask to be socialized like this. We just got it.” I would argue it is our responsibility to evolve beyond it.

I love that, that’s the name of your podcast, The Evolved Caveman. There’s no one to blame here. If you don’t evolve beyond it, there’s a lot of pain and suffering that happens, including like you said, divorce and lost relationships. It’s too bad in some ways when I think about how we were all raised. When we go to school and we learn about math, science, but we don’t learn about emotions, relationships and love, and the things that often do have a lot of meaning for us.

The thing that breaks my heart the most for men is that because we’re socialized in that way, and the big one is we’re not supposed to feel. If happiness is primarily an emotional experience, then how the hell do we get there if you’re not supposed to feel? The other rule is I think we’re so disconnected from ourselves emotionally that we don’t even know when we’re experiencing a positive emotion.

Which becomes painful. Especially, I’m thinking about men who have lots of success, traditional success, making money, having a certain title or status, and it’s easy to overlook for a long time, “I don’t even know if it matters if I’m happy or not. I’m doing what was set out before me, what people told me was a success.”

We get addicted to the status, the respect, the compliments, the material items that we gain from work. We confuse those things with happiness, “I have everything, how could I not be happy?”

I love the look on your face that people can’t see, “How could I not be happy?” with the scratch-up look on your face, “I actually am not.”

It’s funny. I’ve been told by clients that I have a very expressive face. My fiancé tells me I look like a cartoon character sometimes, which is funny because if I think back to like several years ago or so, I was stoic.

I was going to say what you’ve said about your path, that sounds surprising.

I’ve had to work on that and I want to be more emotionally expressive.

People near you get a sense of what’s going on inside you and get to feel close to you and connected to you.

They know damn well.

Thank you so much for this. It feels a little spoonful of everything I know you have to offer, but where can men find more of you?

The Evolved Caveman podcast is on every major platform. You can reach me at GuideToSelf.com or TheEvolvedCaveman.com. I’m on social media, which you can check out from any of those sites.

Thank you so much for being here and for being such a support for men, and for allowing your vulnerability and showing the way.

Thank you, Shana, for having me. I’ve greatly enjoyed it.

Thank you.

—

I’m glad you joined us for this episode. I hope you enjoyed our conversation and it gave you something to consider and explore in your life. If you like what you heard, I’d be so grateful for you to subscribe and write a quick review that helps men like you find us. 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 really great starting point and will guide you toward a more passionate love life, and a more inspiring and successful career.

Important Links:

About Dr. John Schinnerer

A U.C. Berkeley-trained coach with a Ph.D. in educational psychology, Dr. John Schinnerer, has distilled the very best of research-based tools and methods to help clients overcome anxiety and anger and move towards a happy, contented, and purposeful life.

Dr. John was one of three experts to consult with Pixar on the Academy Award-winning movie, Inside Out. He is a nationally recognized speaker and an award-winning author with a top-rated blog and over 200 radio show appearances.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: RSS