Embrace VULNERABILITY And TRANSFORM Your Life | Jen Hatmaker EP 481

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show.

0:10I firmly believe that taking charge of your mindset allows you to be in the driver's seat of your life and unlock your potential. And that's why I'm thrilled to share that my new book is out right now. It's called The Greatness Mindset. In it, you'll learn how to build a plan for greatness through powerful exercises and toolkits designed to propel your life forward. This is the book that I wish I had 20 years ago. It's everything I've learned in the last decade with the research and the science to help you unlock your mind. Make sure to go to lewishouse.com slash 2023mindset to pick up your copy of my book, The Greatest Mindset, today.

0:52I remember as a kid just feeling like all I want is people to like me and have friends. So if I'm vulnerable, people don't like me and they shame me and they outcast me because they were not comfortable with it. I'm not blaming anyone here. I think it was just our level to feel and to receive that type of emotion as kids. We weren't trained that way. At least I wasn't trained that way. It's interesting because I have five kids. They're all young adults and upper teenagers. So we're up there. I lead women. So my community is almost entirely women. And so I spent a lot of emotional energy dissecting the narratives.

1:29We were handed as little girls, helping us unravel some of these tropes that we were expected to just fall in lockstep with. But being a mom to sons, who are now 17, 18, and 23, I am dead serious. The narratives handed to boys just as destructive. Of course. Just as destructive. And I know it because I raised real human kids. Like, I watch them go to their bed and cry for three days after a breakup. I've watched them write love poems. Oh, man. I mean, they're tender. I was the biggest sap. Yeah. Tons of boys are. Of course. It's not a true thing that boys aren't. Right. But this, like... They're conditioned to be hardened.

2:11You are. And not show emotion. And you know, because you even pretended. Of course. It wasn't real for you, but you pretended. And so... I feel like I had to to survive. Totally. I believe you. It was like, you're either going to be authentic and have no friends, or you put on a mask. That's why I wrote a book called Mask of Masculinity, because a lot of boys did this to feel like you belong. Of course. Even though it's a false sense of belonging. And it takes courage to say, okay, I'm going to be alone, and maybe I find a friend or not for my high school life. And maybe a girl likes me or not or whatever, and I've got to be comfortable in my own skin alone.

2:46I feel a little hope that some of these gender stereotypes are reversing in a million ways. Like just in a million ways. For good or bad, yeah. Gender and sexual identity, of course. That looks completely different now than it did when you and I, when you weren't going even when I was in school 10 years older than you. What's acceptable, what's not acceptable. You get to be who you are now. Yeah. More or less. You get to kind of be who you are in your body. and I'm hopeful that some of this is folding in on itself. The good news is there's a lot of role models to look toward now. I'm not sure that there were that many when we were growing up.

3:25This is what I talk about all the time. I was like, I never saw an example of a man who had been sexually abused publicly talking about it. There was never someone that went on TV and was like, I was sexually abused. That's right. And here's how to deal with it. So I didn't have a model. I'm not saying it's easier for women, but I feel like for men, it was like... Zero. Zero model. And again, maybe it was there and I just wasn't able to see it, but I don't remember seeing it. And so when I opened up a 30 about it, I still was like, I feel like I'm the only one in the world. Because I just never seen it.

3:57And so it's like, unless you're seeing it consistently, it's hard for us to connect to any type of shame or vulnerability that happened to us. With sexual trauma or divorce or whatever. If you never saw anyone else get divorced, you'd be like, my life is over. That's right. And so it's challenging. This goes back to that positive contagion, because I'm sure you've seen this in your life. Having been so vulnerable as you are, shared your story with such tenderness and open-handedness, and in such a public way, I can only imagine how many men have now come to you and said... Hundreds of men have emailed me essays about them opening up.

4:36Of course they have. And it was when I started opening up like eight, seven years ago, I guess, I had this emotional hangover for months because I didn't know how to handle the essays that came in from men saying, I'm 55. I've got, you know, I've been married for 20 years. I've got three kids. My wife doesn't know. And I'm like, what am I supposed to do with this? And just receiving it and feeling it, it's like, man, for months, it took me a while to like emotionally get back to kind of baseline. whether it's men needing to talk about their traumas women talking about their traumas we all need a place where we can feel safe to talk about it yes it's not that complicated like as we look at all this pent-up rage and trauma and absolute suffering that people are walking around with turns out sharing it with people is a pretty low-hanging fruit solution it's not expensive it's not you don't go anywhere to do it it's effective immediately it helps release it's pain it's it's really the solution i think we're all looking for yeah it's just tricky because somebody has to go first it's so hard to go first the courage first the courage but then it's exciting because such a ripple effect like what you have set off in the lives of all those men you know that so many of them went back they told their wives they told their children they started to heal and they went to counseling.

5:58They did the work. Their friends started to come to them and say, me too. Thank you for saying that. I've never told anybody. The effects of that, the domino effects are really so powerful. We can all do this. This isn't just the work of influencers. This is just the work of humanity.

6:27Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

7:17Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.