Why do men wear different masks that hold them back?

Why do men cause a lot of resentment and anger and conflict in relationships with business, friends, family, intimate partners?

Why do we do this as men? Not all men, but why in general do some men do this?

And I realize that a lot of this conditioning over time from your parents saying like, don't cry, don't be a crybaby, be a man, be this.

Your coaches, be a man, get back up, don't show pain from the confusion of relationships where women want a bad guy.

And the bad guys are rewarded in high school to then they want a sensitive person, but then they want you to be strong.

They want you to show you, so it's like constantly conflicting.

And I think, yes, we all have our own responsibilities to be the best person we can be in, but when society, culture, family, friends, girlfriends, teammates are starting to have this pressure constantly to feel accepted, we need to be a certain way.

To fit in, we have to fit in with what they want us to be, not who we truly are.

That's Lewis Hous, this week on The Retro Podcast.

The Retro Podcast.

Hey, everybody, how you guys doing? What's happening? How are you? This is your friendly neighborhood podcast host, Rich Roll. Welcome or welcome back to my podcast, the show where I do my best to have in depth meaningful conversations that matter with some of the brightest, most pioneering minds in health fit.

Nutrition, athletics, medicine, social entrepreneurship, entertainment, and so much more.

I want to talk about a word that gets tossed around pretty cavalierly these days. Authenticity. It's a weird one, right?

It's a great word, but it's also been so co-opted and commodified that even using it now kind of feels a little bit hacky. And that's kind of a bummer because what that word authenticity represents is actually beautiful. It's a beautiful sentiment.

I suppose there are a variety of interpretations and definitions, but to me, it means living honestly with integrity, aligning your actions with your words. It means the courage and the self confidence to be open, to be vulnerable, to live, breathe, and move in alignment with your truest, highest self.

And it's what I aspire to. It's something I do my best to inject into my work. And it's a consistent theme of this podcast. And yet it's undeniable that we all wear masks of some form or another, even the most well intentioned among us myself, of course, included project a version of ourselves on the world, not the raw truth, but in edited facsimile custom tailored to suit.

The expectations of our social environment, case in point, this is probably take four of this introduction. Why didn't I just put out take one? Well, because I felt like it wasn't good enough. It didn't reflect the quality of the words that I wanted to express to you guys. So I guess I'm wearing a mask right now. But in any event, in other words, we show the world an impression of ourselves what we want the world to see.

And on some level, I suppose this is or it could be characterized as dishonest, but it's also just human. We all do it to a degree, one form or another. We do it because we're afraid, because we're insecure, because honesty and vulnerability are terrifying.

And we think we're doing the right thing upholding that social contract by embodying what it means to be masculine or feminine, but these notions are false. They're misguided and they're often dangerous, disconnecting us from our potential, the best version of ourselves.

And as counterintuitive as it may sound, the more that we can summon the courage to remove these masks, masks that you know we've been wearing for so long and so persistently that we're not even consciously aware of them and shed them in exchange for being open, for being raw, honest, for being vulnerable, for being who we really are as scary as that sounds.

I think the more integrated, the more whole, secure, confident and dare I say authentic, we ultimately become and with that comes a sense of being fully integrated, a fully integrated human being, of being whole, a sense of being at peace with yourself empowered.

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