The Reclaimed Man · Episode 4

What Actually Makes A Man

Should a man still open the door for a woman? Should he still pay the bill? Thirty years ago most men answered without thinking. Now most men freeze — caught between two cartoons: the testosterone-fuelled hard man, and the softened, apologetic one. Nobody told them there was a third option.

Ten months ago I had to find that third man for real. My cancer feeds on testosterone, and the treatment — the oncologists called it chemical castration — took away the thing I’d quietly built my whole identity on. Marriage, fatherhood, business: I believed all three were about to be taken from me, because I believed testosterone wasn’t just fuel. I believed it was who I was.

This episode is what I found underneath. The crossing every man makes eventually — from warrior to king — and the seven checkpoints I now hold myself to daily: emotional capacity, accountability, courage, physical presence, leadership, humility, presence. Not commandments. Not add-ons. Seven things I believe are already in you, waiting to be uncovered.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

OPEN

Let me ask you something.

Should a man still open the door for a woman?

Should he still pay the bill?

If he sees a woman he’s interested in, is he allowed to walk up and ask her out — or has that become something to be afraid of?

What’s his role in his marriage? In his family? In his community? Is it any different to hers?

Thirty years ago most men would have answered those questions without thinking twice. Now? Most men freeze. Not because they don’t have an instinct about the answer — but because they’re terrified of getting it wrong. Terrified of being called something. Toxic. Patriarchal. Problematic.

Here’s what’s happened. We had a real problem — genuine toxic masculinity, genuine abuse of power, real damage done in the name of being a man. That was real, and it needed to change.

But instead of separating the immature version of masculinity from the mature version, we started chipping away at masculinity itself. All of it. Every edge. Until a lot of men don’t know what’s left.

Richard Reeves — a researcher at the Brookings Institution — makes a point I think about a lot. The term “toxic masculinity” barely registered in public conversation a decade ago. Then it exploded, and it got applied to almost anything a man does that someone doesn’t like. His argument is that most of what gets labelled toxic masculinity isn’t masculinity being the problem — it’s immature masculinity. Boorish. Unsophisticated. Not fully developed.

We’ve pathologized normal masculine behaviour. And boys and men are genuinely struggling as a result.

I want to be fair about how we got here, because this isn’t a story about anyone acting in bad faith. There was a real period — not that long ago — where men, broadly, behaved badly. Where women didn’t have the rights, the safety, or the respect they were owed. That needed correcting. And I want to be clear — it’s not finished. Violence against women is still happening at levels that should be unacceptable to every man listening to this. That work isn’t done, and it doesn’t get to be waved away.

But somewhere in the correction, we overcorrected. Instead of saying “here’s the immature version of masculinity, and here’s the mature version — let’s move men from one to the other,” we softened the whole picture. We feminised what a man was allowed to be. And from forty thousand feet, here’s the challenge that’s left men with. A false choice between two cartoons. On one side, the muscular, testosterone-fuelled dude — the gym bro, the Navy SEAL type, all hard edges, hustle and bench press. On the other, the sensitive new-age guy — agreeable, blunted, every edge sanded off, apologetic for existing as a man at all.

And that first cartoon is being sold harder than ever. It used to be a normal part of ageing that a man lost a little strength, a little muscle — that was just the deal. Now? Getting on testosterone replacement is becoming as normal as going grey. It’s just expected — a man is supposed to top himself up, hold the line against age itself. That’s what’s being sold to him through Instagram, through YouTube, through every feed he opens. And it’s confusing for men. Softer, or more jacked than your father ever was — pick a cartoon.

Nobody ever told him there was a third option. A man who isn’t chasing dominance and isn’t erasing himself either. A man who still carries the essence of what it means to be a man — strength, presence, protection, direction — but expresses all of it through character instead of control.

That third man is who this episode is about.

WHERE I LAND

So let me tell you where I land. Because I’m not interested in sitting on the fence here.

I open the door for Lauren. Every time. I like paying the bill when we go out — that doesn’t mean she never does, she often does — but I like doing it. I’d encourage my son to do the same. I call that chivalry, and I’m not embarrassed by the word.

And here’s the part that doesn’t get said enough — Lauren likes it when I do those things. She likes that I open the door. She likes that I pay the bill. She likes it when I order the food, when I make the call on the plan — when I’m assertive enough to just make a decision. That works for us. I’m not saying it has to work for you. I’m saying two people are allowed to find what works for them without anyone apologising for it.

And I’ll plant a flag on one more thing, because I think it’s one of the biggest disservices we’ve ever sold to men and women both — and I think it’s come at a greater cost to women. The idea that you can have it all. As we’ve worked to equalise things between men and women — work that mattered — somewhere along the way “equal” became “everything.” The dream career, and the dream marriage, and the dream motherhood, all at once, at full volume. It’s coming at a huge cost. And here’s what doesn’t get said — men aren’t asking for that. We don’t want it all, and we’re not asking the women in our lives to be everything at once either.

And beyond that? I’m not interested in litigating every role in every marriage and every family — that’s for two people to work out between them. What I want to do instead is tell you what I think a man should actually be about.

CHEMICAL CASTRATION

So if masculinity isn’t dominance, and it isn’t disappearing into the wallpaper either — what is it?

That’s the question I had to answer for real. Not in theory. In my body.

Let’s go back almost ten months.

I remember a video call with my naturopath, Eddie. A guy who specialises in the oncology world, who has walked a lot of men through what I was about to go through.

He looked at me and said: “Your cancer feeds on testosterone. So what they’re going to want to do is crash your testosterone levels.” Then he said the words that really landed the blow. “In essence, what they’re going to want to do is chemically castrate you.”

Chemical castration. That phrase came up again and again with the oncologists too — clinical, cold, completely lacking in sensitivity to what it actually means to hear those words as a man. It’s still hard for me to say out loud.

That was the moment the weight of it hit me.

In the days after, I started imagining what my life would look like. And the story I told myself was brutal.

I looked at my marriage. I knew — from everything I was reading — that men on this treatment lose the ability to perform sexually in the way they once did. Intimacy with Lauren had always meant so much to me. I pictured that gone.

I looked at fatherhood. I’ve always seen myself as a physical dad — wrestling with Sonny, rough-and-tumble play with Mackenzie, coaching Edison through sport, being the dad who gets in there and plays hard. I pictured myself becoming some flaccid version of a father, unable to show up the way I always had.

I looked at my business. I’d built a story in my head — without even realising I’d built it — that testosterone was the fuel behind my drive, my hustle, my ability to grow something and sustain it.

Marriage. Fatherhood. Business. Three pillars I’d built my identity on. And I believed all three were about to be taken from me.

What I was really discovering, in that moment, was that I hadn’t just believed testosterone was a fuel that helped me be a man.

I believed it was who I was.

And think about the world I was carrying that belief around in. Men my age are supplementing with testosterone everywhere you look — topping it up, optimising it, chasing the muscle, the drive, the youth. That’s become part of the expectation of a man now: don’t age, fight it. So while men everywhere were adding testosterone by choice, mine was being taken away by prescription. This wasn’t a lifestyle decision. It wasn’t an opportunity. And that’s exactly what forced the exploration — because when the option of being the testosterone-fuelled man is taken off the table completely, you have to find out what’s actually underneath.

BEYOND TESTOSTERONE

I want you to understand how heavily this weighed on me, because it wasn’t a passing dark thought. It sat on me, really fucking heavily, for weeks. And it had me seriously contemplating saying no to treatment altogether. That’s how locked into testosterone my identity was — some part of me had genuinely decided that a life without it wasn’t a life worth living. That was the actual conversation going on inside my head.

It wasn’t until I was doing some work with a woman named Kathy — she does intuitive healing — that things started to turn around. She asked me a question I couldn’t get out of my head:

Who are you, beyond testosterone? What does it actually mean to be a man?

She pointed me toward Byron Katie’s work — a simple practice of turning a belief over and asking: is it true?

Is it true that I can’t be a father without testosterone? What’s the evidence? There wasn’t any. Is it true I can’t be a husband? Same answer. Is it true I can’t build something? Same answer again.

Every time I turned the belief over, it didn’t hold up. I realised I’d been telling myself a story — a story that was robbing me of power, and quietly training my nervous system to expect the very collapse I was afraid of.

That’s when I wrote a mantra. I read it every day. Part of it says:

“My masculinity is not defined by hormones — it’s defined by presence, integrity, love, and courage.”

“I am not waiting for life to return to me. I am living it now — fully, consciously, and with grace.”

In essence, the conclusion I came to was this: I am more than my biology.

I want to be honest with you about something, though. This wasn’t one clean turning point. It still isn’t. There are parts of losing my testosterone I genuinely still miss. Just the other day I was chasing Sonny around the playground and I was stunned by how fast I ran out of gas. That still gets me.

This is something I practice. Daily. Surrender, again and again. Being kind to myself, again and again. I’m not over it. I may never fully be over it. And I’m okay with that — because it no longer has the power over me it used to.

THE SEVEN — FROM WARRIOR TO KING

So if it’s not testosterone — what actually makes a man?

I went studying. And as I dug into what it actually means to be a man, I noticed something that changed how I saw my whole situation. There’s a natural progression a man is meant to move through at my age anyway — a crossing from warrior to king. And it tends to happen naturally, over time, as a man’s testosterone starts to fall.

In the first half of life, a man is building — a career, a body, a name for himself, a container to hold his life in. That’s warrior energy. Forward, driven, proving. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s necessary. I lived a lot of my own life in it. And it runs on testosterone.

But the second half of life asks something different of a man. It asks him to move from warrior into king. The warrior conquers. The king governs — himself first, then whatever he’s responsible for. The warrior needs to win. The king needs to be worth following. That’s not a demotion. It’s a maturing. And it’s not automatic — plenty of men stay warriors their whole lives and wonder why the second half feels so empty.

And that’s when I saw what was actually being presented to me. Not just a loss — an opportunity, and one I had to take. Because staying in the warrior mentality wasn’t available to me anymore. The fuel for it was gone. Where most men get to make that crossing slowly, over decades, mine arrived overnight. There was one way forward: step into king.

So I started looking at what that version of a man actually is — the king, the mature masculine, that third man I talked about at the start, the one who carries strength and presence and direction but expresses it through character instead of control. And I asked myself: what would I need to hold myself accountable to, to become him?

What I put together is this checklist. Seven characteristics. Not the only seven that could exist. Not exclusively male qualities either — women need these too. And this isn’t me standing on a mountain telling other men how to live. These are the checkpoints I hold myself accountable to, daily — who I want to be, what I want to step into. I’m sharing them because I don’t think I’m the only man trying to make that crossing.

1. EMOTIONAL CAPACITY

So here’s the first checkpoint on my list: emotional capacity.

I touched on this back in episode two — most men just don’t have the emotional range to articulate what’s actually going on inside them. There’s a term researchers use for it — normative male alexithymia. It sounds clinical, but it just means this: many men are raised in a way that leaves them unable to identify or express what they’re feeling, not because something is wrong with them, but because it was trained out of them. The research is clear about the mechanism — it’s not that men don’t feel. It’s suppression. Boys are taught early that showing fear, sadness, or grief is weakness, so they learn to push it down, and the pushing down becomes the pattern.

Here’s what that costs. Men who suppress this way have alexithymia at close to double the rate of women, and it’s linked to depression, anxiety, and — this is the part that matters for what we’re talking about — real difficulty with intimacy. It shows up as a man who seems distant even when something is actually breaking him open inside.

I want to tell you about a moment where I didn’t do that. Not long ago my PSA levels spiked. PSA is my major cancer marker — and a spike like that likely meant more metastases, my cancer progressing. I had to go back in for a PET scan and a bone scan. Sitting with the oncologist, I went straight into overwhelm.

I walked out to my car, and my mate Tony called, completely by chance, right at that moment. For twenty minutes on that call, I let myself feel it. Fear. Anger. Real fear about what was coming. Real anger about the situation I was in.

I cried. I yelled. I punched the steering wheel while I was driving.

In the past, I wouldn’t have let myself feel either of those. I would have gone straight to positive — “I’ve got this, everything’s going to be okay.” I’d have hunted for the silver lining, reminded myself of my body’s ability to heal — and skipped right past what was actually there, waiting to come through me in that moment. And the anger especially — I wouldn’t have known what to do with it. But this time, I let it move. And what struck me in the days after was how quickly I came back to myself. Back to “alright, here’s what I need to do next.”

The fear passed. The anger passed. And I wasn’t paralysed by any of it.

I want to be really clear about what I’m not saying here. I’m not saying a man needs to share every feeling with every person he crosses paths with. I’m not saying he needs to be in tears every time something emotional plays out on the television. That’s not emotional capacity — that’s just leaking everywhere, and it serves nobody.

What it actually takes is discernment. Time and space. Set and setting, as they say. If some stranger had walked up to me in that car park and asked how I was doing, I wouldn’t have gone into fits of rage and fear right there on the footpath. That wouldn’t have been appropriate, and some part of me always knows the difference. I was in a safe place, with someone I trusted, and I knew how to process it there.

And there are two avenues here, not one. There’s processing it yourself — knowing how to sit with a feeling, let it move, work it through on your own, without needing an audience for it. And there’s having a small, trusted tribe — other men, other kings, who you can actually go to and be fully real with. Tony was that for me in that moment. But I want to say this honestly — if Tony hadn’t called right then, I still would have ranted, raged, punched that wheel, and moved through it on my own. He happened to be there. Maybe by coincidence. Maybe by something more than that. Either way, both avenues matter — the solitary one and the tribe. A man needs both.

Here’s the real payoff of all of this, though, and I want you to actually hear it. The more a man knows how to process what he feels, the less he fears the feeling itself. And once a man is no longer afraid of his own emotions, something happens to him that I can only call a superpower. He’s not scared of humiliation anymore. He’s not scared of rejection. He’s not scared of failure. Not because those things stop happening — they don’t — but because he knows, in his bones, that he can take them on board, carry them on broad shoulders, process them, and move through them.

This is the thing that makes a man moving into kingdom unstoppable. Not that nothing can touch him. That everything can touch him, and he’s still standing. I can feel whatever fucking needs to be felt. That’s not weakness. That is the real strength — the ability to feel it, process it, take the lesson it’s carrying, and keep moving.

That’s emotional capacity. Not being unshaken. Being willing to shake, and trusting that you’ll land. The research backs up what I felt in that car — the men who suppress pay for it in their bodies and their relationships. The men who let it move through, don’t.

2. ACCOUNTABILITY

The second checkpoint I hold myself to: accountability.

Remember what we said about the king earlier — the king governs. Himself first, then whatever he’s responsible for. And to govern really means to be accountable.

Accountability, at its core, is predictability. And predictability builds trust.

But accountability doesn’t start with your wife. It doesn’t start with your kids. It starts with you. A man who has never kept a promise to himself — who says he’ll be up at five and rolls over, who says he’ll have the hard conversation and finds a reason to put it off again — has no foundation to build the bigger promises on. You can’t leap from never following through to suddenly being a man of your word to your family. That’s not how trust gets built, in yourself or with anyone else. It starts small. The five-minute walk you said you’d take. The phone call you said you’d make. Keep the small promise to yourself, and you start to become a man whose word is worth something — to you first, then to everyone else.

This connects straight back to episode three, where we talked about soul worth. Following through on what you say you’re going to do isn’t just a discipline. It’s an act of self-love. It’s you saying, underneath it all, that you are worthy of the results that come from keeping your word — that in the eyes of your maker you are already fully loveable, fully worthy, and that worth includes being cared for the way a kept promise cares for you. A man who doesn’t believe he’s worth it will quietly sabotage his own follow-through, every time. Accountability to yourself is really just worthiness, made visible in your actions.

John Gottman has spent more than forty years studying what makes marriages last, and one of his findings should stop every man reading this in his tracks — in his longitudinal research, 58% of men in low-trust marriages had died over the twenty-year study period — compared with roughly 20% of men in high-trust marriages. Nearly three times the death rate. And the mechanism is chronic stress: a marriage you can’t trust keeps a man’s body permanently braced, and the body pays for that vigilance, year after year. Trust isn’t just an emotional nicety. For men, it’s tied to whether you’re alive in twenty years.

And Gottman’s research is clear about where trust actually comes from. It isn’t built in the big romantic gestures. It’s built or destroyed in the small, unremarkable moments — the ones where you either turn toward the people who need you, or turn away. Every time you say you’ll do something and you do it, that’s a deposit. Every time you say it and don’t, that’s a withdrawal, and the account remembers.

I’ve watched the damage a father does to his kids when he says he’s going to show up and doesn’t. I’ve watched what it does to a wife when a husband’s word stops meaning anything. It might genuinely be easier for the partner or the child if they simply knew he wasn’t coming — the unpredictability is often worse than the absence.

If a man can’t be trusted to do what he says, he can’t be trusted, full stop. And if he can’t be trusted, it’s very hard for a woman to be intimate with him. It’s very hard for his children to be vulnerable with him, to actually let him lead them.

Here’s something worth being honest about — why do so many men struggle with this in the first place? I think it links straight back to what we just talked about. Following through, especially when it’s hard, brings emotions to the surface. Frustration. Resentment. The anger of doing something you don’t feel like doing. A man who hasn’t built the capacity to sit with those uncomfortable feelings will avoid the very commitments that would trigger them. That’s often what’s actually underneath a broken promise — not laziness, but an unwillingness to feel what keeping the promise is going to stir up. Emotional capacity and accountability aren’t two separate pillars. One makes the other possible.

And you don’t have to build this alone. This is exactly where a brotherhood matters — other men who know what you’ve committed to, who you’re willing to be answerable to. Not to police you. To stand with you. A tribe of other kings who ask you the hard question and expect the honest answer.

And let me be clear about something before we move on. Does this mean I do everything I say I’m going to do, all of the time? Absolutely not. There are times I don’t follow through — and I catch myself on it, precisely because accountability sits on my checklist as a standard. If I didn’t hold that standard, a lot more would slip through. I have bad days, just like you have bad days. But because the standard is there, it catches me far more often than it misses. The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is progress.

Accountability isn’t a personality trait. It’s the foundation everything else stands on — and Gottman’s data suggests it might be the foundation of how long you live, too.

3. COURAGE

Checkpoint three: courage.

We think of courage as physical. Battle. Bravery. And there’s still a place for that — I think a man needs to know that if the moment came, he could show up physically for the people he loves.

But I want to be careful here, because physical courage doesn’t mean putting yourself in the face of violence. Needless violence is exactly that — needless. Most of the time, the most courageous thing a man can do is gather his family and walk away — even when he knows he could handle himself. Getting out of there isn’t weakness. It’s judgment.

And then there are the times when standing up is the right call — and they’re usually smaller and quieter than the movies make them. I remember a night at the theatre — we were watching Les Mis, my mother and father with me. At the end of the performance my mum leapt straight to her feet for a standing ovation, and the man behind her got aggressive. Rude. Uncomfortable for everyone around him. He was already sitting down — all he actually needed to do was hold his tongue. So I turned around and, calmly, without aggression, let him know — enough, mate. That’s all it was. No hero moment, no showdown. Just a man being told, gently and clearly, that it stops here. But even a moment that small costs something — because stepping toward conflict, on behalf of someone you love, always costs something, even when the risk is small. It doesn’t have to be dramatic to take courage.

But courage shows up in far more places than the physical — in fact, most of the courage a man’s life asks of him never looks like courage at all. Cynthia Pury, who has spent two decades researching courage at Clemson University, draws a distinction that matters here — between what she calls general courage and personal courage. General courage is the kind anyone would recognise as brave, and it tends to involve real confidence and not much fear. Personal courage is different. It’s acting despite fear, despite adversity, despite your own limitations — and it’s only courageous within the context of your own life. Nobody else may ever see it as brave. During the darkest stretch of my anxiety, personal courage looked like getting out of bed. That’s all. Nobody claps for that. But that’s Pury’s point — nobody else gets a vote. You know what it cost.

There’s moral courage too — the courage to say the hard, true thing when it would be easier to let it slide. A mate of mine recently was going through some marriage trouble, worried about what it would mean for him financially. I’d just shared some of my own test results with him — where things stood with the cancer. He looked at me and said, “Sounds like you and I are in the same boat.” We were not in the same boat. He had a difficult but survivable situation. I was fighting for my life. And everything polite in me wanted to let it slide. I didn’t. I told him plainly that we were not in the same fucking boat. That’s a small moment, but it’s exactly the kind most men dodge every single day, because correcting someone feels ruder than staying quiet. It isn’t. Staying quiet just protects your own comfort at the cost of the truth.

And here’s the part about courage nobody talks about — what happens when we go against it. Every time a man swallows the true thing, doesn’t make the call, lets the moment slide past him — it doesn’t just disappear. It gets logged. Nobody else ever sees the ledger, but he knows. And every one of those small avoidances quietly eats at his self-worth. That’s the real cost of courage. Not the dramatic moment a man fails publicly — the slow rot of the moments he dodges privately. It works exactly like the promises we talked about in accountability. Every avoided truth is a broken promise to yourself. And the account remembers.

So how does a man know when to step forward and when to walk away? This is the part that has deepened in me more than any other. There’s a voice in a man that already knows — when to go, when to stop, when to speak, when to let it be. Call it instinct. Call it conscience. For me, learning to trust that voice has become part of my relationship with my creator — a trust that the knowing inside me isn’t random, that I’m being directed. And listening to it is its own act of courage. That voice usually speaks quietly, once, and it usually asks for the harder thing. Trusting it — over your comfort, over your politeness, over your fear — takes courage too. But it’s also what directs courage. Courage without that voice is just recklessness. Courage guided by it is a man you can trust.

Here’s the thing I had to learn, and the research actually confirms it: courage doesn’t mean the absence of fear. Pury’s work shows that personal courage, specifically, requires fear to be present — it’s the acting despite it that defines the act. If you’re not scared, you don’t need courage at all. That’s why courage is on my checklist. Not because I have it — because I know exactly what it costs me when I don’t.

4. PHYSICAL PRESENCE

The fourth checkpoint: physical presence.

Now, remember what I said earlier — the crossing from warrior to king tends to arrive as a man’s testosterone naturally declines. But hear me on this: that does not mean the king goes flaccid. That’s the trap so many older men have given in to — treating the decline as permission to let the body go. The king steps back from conquering. He doesn’t step back from his body.

Here’s something worth naming before we go further. Everything we’ve talked about so far — emotional capacity, accountability, courage — we’ve talked about as things that happen in the mind and the heart. But there’s another way in, and it’s often the faster one: through the body first.

Sometimes the quickest route to feeling more courageous isn’t thinking your way there. It’s standing differently. Shoulders back, chest up, open. The body talks to the mind, not just the other way around.

That’s what I mean by physical presence. It’s not a separate pillar sitting off to the side from courage and accountability and emotional capacity. It’s often the doorway into them. Stand like a man with nothing to prove, and something in you starts to believe it before your mind catches up.

We’re becoming a desk-bound society, and men are wasting away — not just emotionally, physically too.

I’m not talking about being an Olympic athlete. I’m talking about being the commander of your own body. Can you do twenty air squats? Twenty push-ups? A single pull-up?

Here’s a simpler test, and you already know the answer to it. Does your back ache? Does your shoulder ache? Can you get up out of a chair without a groan escaping you, without that little sound men start making somewhere in their forties and just accept as normal? If not, that’s not just getting older talking. That’s a body that’s stopped being used as the tool it actually is.

Because there’s a whole part of being a man that isn’t cerebral at all. It’s kinesthetic. Movement-based. It lives in the body, not the mind, and no amount of thinking your way through the other six characteristics replaces it. A man who can’t move well can’t fully show up — not because his character is lacking, but because the vehicle carrying that character has been neglected.

I want to say something here that might land uncomfortably. We’ve turned “dad bod” into a joke, into something almost expected — a rite of passage a man is supposed to shrug and accept once he crosses forty. I don’t accept that, and I don’t think you should either. Letting your body go isn’t a harmless inevitability of getting older. It’s often a quiet lack of self-respect, and it deserves to be named as one, not laughed off.

This links straight back to accountability — because eating well, moving your body, showing up for the basic discipline of taking care of yourself is exactly the kind of promise a man makes and keeps to himself, the small deposit that builds the bigger trust. And it links back to episode three, to soul worth. If you actually believe you’re loveable, if you actually believe you’re worthy — not because of what you produce, but because of who you are — then neglecting the one body you’ve been given stops making sense. Self-respect isn’t vanity. It’s worthiness, made visible in how you treat the vehicle carrying you through this life.

Here’s why that basic level of strength matters more than most men realise. The PURE study — one of the largest studies ever run on this, following more than 140,000 adults across seventeen countries — found that for every 5kg reduction in grip strength, the risk of death from any cause rose by 16%. Grip strength predicted mortality more strongly than blood pressure did. Let that sit for a second. We obsess over blood pressure numbers at the doctor. Grip strength is a stronger signal, and almost nobody measures it.

There’s a self-esteem link too — in adults over fifty, greater strength is associated with roughly 30% lower rates of depressive symptoms. A man who holds himself with strength, with posture, with some muscle on his frame — that’s not vanity. That’s a man carrying himself with presence, and the research says it’s protecting his mind as well as his body.

Compare that to a body that’s shut down, forward-flexed, closed in on itself. The posture usually mirrors what’s happening underneath.

I’ve had to fight harder for this than I ever expected, because ADT has taken away the fuel that used to make it easy. But that’s exactly why it matters more now, not less. Multiple times a week, I’m still in the gym, shifting steel, doing what I can with the body I’ve got.

There’s a reason that when we picture a man, archetypally, some version of physical capability is almost always part of the image. I don’t think that’s an accident, and I don’t think we should be embarrassed by it. But I want to be clear about what this new man actually is. He’s not physically capable at the expense of everything else — some throwback who can lift heavy things and nothing more. He’s capable across every realm at once. Strong in his body and soft in his heart. Grounded in his physicality and fluent in his emotions. That combination — not either half of it alone — is what we’re actually building toward.

5. LEADERSHIP

The fifth checkpoint on the list: leadership.

Richard Rohr, in Falling Upward, said something that’s stuck with me — that we have a growing population of elderly people, but not necessarily a growing population of elders. Elderly just means time has passed. Elder is different. Rohr describes it as a capacity of soul — not chronological, not something that arrives automatically with age. It comes from how a man has actually dealt with the dark side of his own life: disappointment, betrayal, failure, rejection. A man who’s avoided all of that stays elderly. A man who’s walked through it becomes an elder.

That’s worth saying again. A man who’s avoided the dark side of his own life stays elderly. A man who’s walked through it becomes an elder.

That distinction is exactly what younger men are actually hungry for, even if they’d never phrase it that way. Think back to the teachers and coaches you actually respected growing up. Chances are they weren’t the easy ones. They were the ones who were hard on you — but fair. There was a strength in them, a directness, that you don’t get from softness. It’s a completely different quality to the tenderness we want and need from our mothers. From a man, what we’re actually looking for is strength and direction. Not harshness — direction. A man willing to hold a standard, and hold you to it, because he respects you enough to expect something of you.

Five years ago something shifted in how I understood leadership. For a decade before that, I’d been chasing it by trying to become a better version of myself. Better character. Better leader.

Then the definition flipped. Leadership stopped being about making me better. It became about my capacity to make others better.

That took an enormous amount of pressure off me. And there’s a name for this in the research — servant leadership, a concept Robert Greenleaf introduced back in 1970, built on the idea that true leadership is synonymous with service. The academic work since then — Owens and Hekman’s research out of the Academy of Management Journal is some of the most cited — found something specific: leaders who model humility and growth for the people around them produce measurably better outcomes. Not just happier teams. Better performance, more engagement, more trust flowing back up to the leader.

I believe that’s exactly the shift a man makes moving into the second half of life. It’s no longer about him. He becomes the conduit — the example, the vessel — that helps someone else find what’s best in them. Becoming, in Rohr’s terms, an actual elder rather than just an elderly man. The research backs up what I felt: when a leader stops centring himself, everyone around him gets better, including him.

So how does a man actually start, especially if he never had that kind of leader in his own life? Because that’s true for a lot of you listening. You can’t model what you were never shown. Here’s where I’d begin.

Start with one man, not a movement. You don’t need a program, a title, or a room full of people looking up to you. You need one younger man — a son, a nephew, a guy at work, someone in your circle who’s a few years behind you on the path — who you actually pay attention to. Leadership starts as attention before it becomes anything else.

And remember what we said — leadership is not you showing that young man how amazing you are, parading the wonderful things you’ve done with your life. It’s the opposite. It’s letting him know how wonderful he is. Bringing the best out of him. Serving him in that moment. So if you’re sitting there thinking, “I’ve got nothing to be a leader about” — that’s the point. It’s not about you. It’s about taking a younger man and reflecting back to him what he can’t yet see in himself, guiding him through — and sometimes all that takes is being vulnerable enough to share your own mistakes.

Ask more than you tell. The instinct, especially for a successful man, is to hand over the answer. Resist it. Ask him what he thinks. Ask him what he’s actually struggling with. The coaches you remembered as hard but fair weren’t handing out answers constantly — they were asking questions that made you find your own.

Let him see the real you, not the performance. You don’t lead by looking like you’ve got it all figured out. You lead by being honest about the parts you’re still working on. That’s what makes a man worth following rather than just worth admiring from a distance.

And be patient with yourself in this. If you were never eldered yourself, you’re learning this skill in real time, the same way you’re learning everything else in this list. That’s not a disqualification. It’s just where you start.

6. HUMILITY

Checkpoint six: humility.

Humility is the opposite of self-righteousness.

I’ve watched what happens to people who hold onto being right in a conflict — in business, in relationships. It rarely ends well. It drags out. It costs them, financially, relationally, emotionally.

I watched this play out with a friend going through a court case. He was right about ninety-eight percent of it — genuinely right. But there was that other two percent, a small place where he could have done better, and he refused to touch it. Wouldn’t acknowledge it. Wouldn’t even consider it. If he’d owned that two percent, the whole case might have looked completely different. Instead he dug in on the ninety-eight and let the whole thing drag on, longer and messier and more expensive than it ever needed to be. And here’s the part that stuck with me — the people who started out firmly on his side slowly drifted away. Not because he was wrong. Because the self-righteousness itself became ugly to be around. Being right and being humble aren’t the same fight, and he lost the second one while winning most of the first.

There’s decades of organisational research on exactly this, most of it building on Owens and Hekman’s original work. They define leader humility as three things: a willingness to see yourself accurately, genuine appreciation for the strengths and contributions of others, and openness to feedback — being teachable. What’s striking is what humility is protecting against. Researchers studying narcissistic leaders — inflated self-importance, low empathy — have tied that pattern directly to some of the biggest organisational failures on record: cover-ups, accounting scandals, catastrophic misjudgements. Humility isn’t the soft option. It’s the countervailing force against exactly the kind of ego that destroys what men spend decades building.

Here’s something I think we know instinctively, even if we’ve never said it out loud. When we meet someone who seems too perfect — who presents like they’ve never struggled, never failed, never had a single crack show — we get suspicious. And we’re right to. Nature doesn’t produce that. What we’re usually looking at, even if we can’t name it in the moment, is some version of narcissism. And it colours everything else about how we receive that person.

We don’t actually want our leaders to be flawless. We want the opposite. We want to know they’ve been tested — that they’ve had real trials, real failures — and that they came through those in a way that built character rather than bitterness. Humility is one of the core ingredients in that. It’s the evidence that a man has actually faced his own foibles instead of hiding from them. And that’s exactly why humility and vulnerability sit so close together — they’re both a man saying, out loud or through how he carries himself, I am not above this. I am still in it with you.

This matters enormously for anyone who wants to lead, teach, father, or share anything real with the people around them. If you want your message to actually land — as a husband, a father, a community leader, a man stepping into the role of elder — people need to see the humility and the vulnerability first. Without it, the message bounces off. Perfection doesn’t invite anyone in. Humility does.

Part of what humility asks of us is to step out of binary right-and-wrong thinking altogether. The moment a man is locked into needing to be right, he’s lost access to compassion and empathy — he can’t hold someone else’s experience as valid while he’s busy defending his own position.

So here’s a working roadmap, questions I actually use in the moment I feel myself wanting to be right. What can I learn here? What am I not seeing? If I stood in the other person’s shoes right now, what would the truth look like from there? And underneath all of them, the most important one: what result am I actually after? Because if the honest answer is “I want to be right,” it’s worth asking why that matters so much. If I’m already worthy — if that’s settled, the way we talked about in episode three — then I don’t need to win the argument to feel whole. But if what I actually want is closeness with this person, or growth in my business, or to help someone else expand as a human being, then being right stops being the objective. Once you’re out of the right-and-wrong game, you can ask what actually gets you closer to what you want. Almost every time, the answer is humility.

Compare that to the person who can look at a hard situation and ask: what’s my role in this? What can I learn here? That’s not the same as taking blame that isn’t theirs. It’s ownership. And I’ve noticed — every single time — the humble path is the easier one to walk, even though it feels harder to choose in the moment.

7. PRESENCE

And the last one. The seventh checkpoint: presence.

Presence, at its core, is being here. Not fantasising about a future that hasn’t happened, not anxious about a future you can’t control. Not catastrophising some version of the past you can’t change either. Just here. Now.

That’s simpler to say than it is to live, and I’m still learning this one in real time. What I’m discovering is that most of my suffering doesn’t actually happen in the present moment. It happens in my head, in the future I’m imagining or the past I’m replaying. Right here, right now, in this actual moment — very rarely is anything genuinely wrong.

Getting to that place, for me, has required something I’ve resisted for most of my life: surrender. I’ve got the word tattooed on my arm, because I need the daily reminder. For a long time, surrender meant one thing to me — giving up. Stopping the fight. And I’ve felt like I’m in a fight, with a job still to do. So the word scared me.

Richard Rohr, in his book Adam’s Return, reframed this for me completely. He makes the point that surrender isn’t passivity — it isn’t capitulating or switching your brain off or refusing to plan. It’s something closer to a “peaceful inner opening” that keeps you connected to something larger moving through you. It’s less about giving up and more about trusting — trusting that you’re held, the way a son is held by a father, and letting that trust do some of the work you’ve been trying to force with sheer will.

That’s what actually makes presence possible. You can’t be here, fully, while you’re gripping the future or wrestling the past. Surrender is what loosens the grip.

My son Sonny is my greatest teacher in this one.

There have been times I’m playing with him and my phone pings, and I pick it up. There have been times he’s grabbed the phone right out of my hand. Times he’s grabbed my face with both hands and turned it toward him and said: “I want your attention, Dad.”

Presence isn’t about the number of hours you give someone. It’s about how fully you show up in the time you do give them. I know I’m not built to play Lego for three hours straight. But I can give forty-five minutes of everything, then tap out, rather than three hours of half of me.

The same is true with Lauren. Am I actually listening? Or am I just waiting for a gap so I can get my point in?

For me this gets tested most nights, when we get into bed after a long day. All I want to do is read my book. And that’s often exactly when Lauren wants to defrag from her day — so she starts talking. The temptation is to give her a cursory answer, one eye on the page, one ear half-listening. But there is no book I will ever read that’s more important than my wife in that moment — and I have to remind myself of that. That presence is what she needs. The book will always be there tomorrow. These moments to connect with her come, and they go.

Presence has a certainty to it. A confidence. It comes from owning who you are — which takes us right back to episode three. You are worthy. You are loved. When you know that at your core, nothing else needs proving. You can just be there.

And here’s what I’ve come to see, writing all of this. Presence isn’t really a seventh, separate thing sitting alongside the other six. It’s closer to the result of them. It’s what a man looks like when emotional capacity, accountability, courage, physical presence, leadership, and humility are actually alive in him at once. A man who has done that work doesn’t need anything from the room he walks into. He’s not performing, not proving, not scanning for approval. He’s just there, fully, because he already knows his own worth. And strangely, that’s the man a room turns to notice — not because he demanded the attention, but because there’s nothing left in him asking for it. That’s presence. It’s recognition — a man finally recognising his own soul’s worth, and simply standing in it.

CLOSE

So there they are. Seven checkpoints. Not commandments I’m handing down — the list I wrote for myself, the one I keep coming back to as I make my own way from warrior to king.

Emotional capacity. Accountability. Courage. Physical presence. Leadership. Humility. Presence.

These are my seven — what I felt was important for me in my own transition from warrior into king. Feel free to borrow them. They might be exactly the right ones for you. Or you might land on seven completely different ones — and that’s okay. What I trust you to do is listen to your inner voice, your inner guidance — the same voice we talked about in courage. It’ll tell you the characteristics you need to develop as you move further into this journey.

I want to be really clear about something before we finish, because it changes everything about how you hold this list. These are not seven things you need to go out and learn. They’re not add-ons, not new software you install on top of who you already are.

I believe they’re already in you. Hardwired. Foundational to what a man actually is underneath everything that’s been piled on top of him. The work isn’t acquiring these seven — it’s uncovering them. Clearing away the interference that’s been burying them for years. Same as everything else we talk about on this show. The magic was always inside the marble.

Now let me tell you why this actually matters — not just for you, but for everyone around you.

The world needs more men. Not instead of women — that’s not the conversation today, and I’m not here to tell you what women need to step into, that’s a conversation for someone else to have. But I am here, on this show, talking specifically about men, and about what happens when a man makes the move from warrior into king. And here’s what I know: when a good man does that work, everyone near him feels the effect of it. He raises stronger families. He shows up as an actual leader in his community, not just a presence in it. He brings strength that protects instead of dominates. He brings direction that steadies the people around him instead of controlling them.

That’s not a small thing. That’s a man doing exactly what he was built to do.

So here’s the invitation. Don’t try to uncover all seven at once. That’s not how it works — you don’t excavate a whole statue in a day.

There are two ways in.

The first — where is the biggest gap? Where is the pain, right now, in your life? Maybe it’s accountability. Maybe it’s presence with your kids. Maybe it’s the twenty push-ups you can’t do anymore. Start where it hurts the most.

Or — think about debt recovery for a second. The advice is usually to pay off your smallest debt first. Not because it’s the biggest problem, but because the quick win builds momentum. So the second way in is this: which one is easiest for you? Where could you get a fast, visible win with the least resistance? Maybe accountability already comes naturally to you. Start there. Build from a win.

Either path works. What matters is that you start.

And here’s the last thing I want to leave you with. This isn’t a checklist I’m handing you to follow blindly. You already know, somewhere in you, which of these is calling for your attention right now — because it was never missing. It was just buried.

The answer is inside you.

It always has been.