“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
James Baldwin
Most men think the hard part is stopping. It isn’t. Stopping is loud, it has a date on it, and people notice. What comes after is quiet, and quiet is where men get lost. I know men who haven’t had a drink in years and are still the man who needed one. I’ve been that man.
Here’s how I’ve come to think about it.
If you’ve ever done work on a house, you know some walls hold the roof up and some don’t. They look the same from the hallway. Same paint, same trim, same light switch. The only way to find out which one you’re looking at is to take it out and see what moves.
A behavior works the same way. The drinking, the scrolling, the second job you didn’t need, the woman who isn’t your wife, the twelve hours a day you tell everybody is ambition. Every one of those is holding something up. You don’t know what until it’s gone. And most men never find out, because the day they take the wall out the roof doesn’t come down, so they decide the job’s finished and move on. Something else took the load. It always does. You just haven’t met it yet.
That’s the season I’m in. I picked up another coaching client this week, the cohort starts at the end of September, and I’m spending my days sitting across from men listening for the same thing every time.
Here’s what happened this week that drove that idea home for me.
The men I sat with are separated by decades. Different money, different problems, different parts of the country. And I’m hearing the same sentence out of all of them, dressed differently every time.
I can’t have that conversation.
I can’t put my money into that.
I can’t tell her the truth about this.
Not one of them is lazy. They’re performing at a level most men never reach, and every one of them is stopped at the same door, and thinks the door is the problem.
One of them runs a team. He’s got people under him who aren’t doing what they said they’d do, and he won’t say a word about it. Not because he’s soft. Because it feels risky to him. Somebody might push back. Somebody might turn around and tell him he’s wrong.
I asked where that comes from and it took four minutes. He grew up in a house where he was always doing something wrong. Not for anything he actually did. For existing in the wrong direction that day.
So he became a man who is careful. Who checks. Who’ll do the work of three men rather than have one conversation where somebody could tell him he got it wrong. And he calls that being a good leader.
Neither of those men has a behavior problem. They have behavior. One avoids a conversation, one avoids a risk, and if you took those behaviors away tomorrow and handed them nothing else, they’d be back inside a week in a different jacket.
That’s the part nobody tells you. Putting the thing down is the down payment. It is not the purchase. You can quit the drink, quit the app, quit the job, quit the woman, and keep the entire system that made you want it, and that system will go find something else to hold the roof up. It’ll pick something you haven’t learned to be ashamed of yet, and you’ll call it discipline.
You’re not being asked to become a man who doesn’t have the behavior. You’re being asked to become a man who knows what the behavior is doing for him.
This week’s lesson: stopping is the down payment, and most men spend the rest of their lives proud of the down payment.
