Welcome to the BetterMen Bulletin
Life is busy and time is precious. This monthly bulletin saves you time and effort by providing you with a range of resources relating to all things men and mindset.
Don’t just read the quotes. Instead, take a moment to consider them and hold them up against your life.
This month’s quote theme is: Modern-day masculinity.
Being a successful, modern-day man is a difficult and often, complex task. From my work, I feel men of our generation find themselves at a crossroads. The blueprint passed down from men of previous generations no longer serves ours. Being strong, silent, self-sufficient, stoical; the financial provider, isn’t enough. Men of our generation want more from life. They want to live with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose, they want to feel fulfilled, content and connected. In most men, of middle age, there’s an innate tension. It sits between how they are living their lives and how they wish they were really living their lives.
Consider how you are living your own life by bringing attention to the quotes below:
Sit down, take a minute, read, reflect or journal on the prompts presented.
This month’s prompt theme is: Self-worth.
Think about it, self-worth, self-esteem, self-acceptance, self-respect, self-confidence, self-belief, and so on, are all self-generated. How we think and feel about ourselves matters! We form our opinion of ourselves based primarily on two things. The messaging we received in childhood and adolescence and by evaluating our performance against activities and things we value: our appearance, our career success, our material possessions, and our life achievements. Low self-worth is debilitating and leads men to live small, stagnant lives whilst paradoxically, men with high self-worth live freely and truly experience the richness of life…
Complete the prompts below:
I. If I believed in myself more I would…
II. The things I am most grateful for in life are…
III. The things other people see in me that I don’t see in myself include…
This month’s BetterMen video is: Men, Fear & Leadership
Covid changed the landscape of leadership. WFH, quiet quitting, and the challenges around recruiting and retaining talent are all accentuated. Now, more than ever, leaders need to lead. When asked, ‘What would you say is the most critical role of a leader during challenging times? My response was, ‘Leaders need to manage their own fear and the fears of those they lead’. I expand and explain more about this concept in this month’s BetterMen video.
If you haven’t yet subscribed to the BetterMen YouTube channel, please do so.
This month’s podcast recommendation is: Modern Wisdom.
Abby Davisson is an author, social innovation leader and career development expert whose research focuses on decision-making in money management and romance. There are universal decisions we all need to make: what job to take, where to live, whether to get married or divorced or have kids etc. Having a prescriptive formula for this might seem impossible, but Abby helped run the most popular course at highly acclaimed, Stanford University, on exactly this topic. Take a listen, and access some ‘modern wisdom.’
Recommended by LinkedIn
This month’s recommendation was my most recent holiday read. Titled, The Comfort Crisis
It truly is a great book. In many ways, we're more comfortable than ever before. But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, under-challenged lives actually be the leading cause of many of our most urgent physical and mental health issues? In this gripping investigation, award-winning journalist Michael Easter seeks out off-the-grid visionaries, disruptive genius researchers, and mind-body conditioning trailblazers who are unlocking the life-enhancing secrets of a counterintuitive solution: discomfort.
This month’s TED Talk is: How to stay calm when you know you'll be stressed. This is a short but highly useful talk, expertly delivered by Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin. We all know we’re not at our best when we’re stressed. Our brain has evolved over millennia to release cortisol in stressful situations. Whilst this inhibits our rational, logical thinking, it can potentially help us survive by triggering our fight/flight response. In this talk, Levitin, suggests a better way to be prepared for stress, one that might enable us to avoid making critical mistakes in stressful situations - the pre-mortem.
Each year, even during Covid, we’ve managed to leave our home, the Brecon Beacons, and explore other mountainous areas. We’ve visited Snowdonia, twice, the Yorkshire Dales, The Swiss/French Alps and most recently, the Lake District.
I can honestly state that 3 days hiking in the Lakes with 15 other men was a thoroughly enriching experience. The conversation ranged from light-hearted and humorous, right through to deeply connecting and meaningful. Unless you’ve experienced a Men & Mountains, you’ll perhaps doubt the validity of my statement, but I stand by it, you won’t find a better bunch of men, anywhere.
Across our 3 days, we summited Green Gable, Great Gable, Scafell Pike, Black Crag & Great End, St Sunday Crag, Fairfield and Blencathra. We walked over 25 miles, ascended over 11,000 ft of elevation, ate around 50 pork pies and Scotch eggs, and drank (well) over 100 pints of craft beer/Guinness.
Here’s a short video capturing our experience in the Lakes:
Our next walk in Wales is on Sunday 28 May, join us, lace up your boots and come along.
I trust you’ve found this month’s BetterMen Bulletin useful.
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Don’t forget, the next BetterMen Bulletin will be arriving in your inbox on the first Tuesday in Jun.
Yours in becoming better,
Dan Stanley
07834456488 - work
dan@better-men.uk
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1yGreat News letter Dan Stanley 👏
VP of Engineering and Product Design
1yExcited to give this a read and almost finished the book. Not made the circle transition yet but I’ll get onto that. My body needs a rest 😂 Hoping to do a walk soon.