The Reclaimed Man · Episode 11

Every Man Should Be Dangerous

When I say every man should be dangerous, I don’t mean violent — I mean capable: force in you, and the control to choose what you do with it.

I’ll be honest with you. That word scares me. But it scares me in a good way, and that’s exactly why I want to use it.

Somewhere along the way, dangerous got welded to violent, and violent got welded to toxic. So the moment a man says he wants to be dangerous, it sounds like he wants to hurt someone. That’s not what I mean. Think about a pen. It can sign the contract that changes a family’s life, or write the letter that ends a career. Whether it does harm or good depends on what you do with it. But it’s dangerous either way, because it can do something.

The opposite of dangerous isn’t safe. It’s harmless. A man who can’t make anything happen.

This episode is Part 1 of the Reclamation Triangle — three sides, and on each one a word for where a man believes he is and a word for what he actually came for. Broken. Lost. Settled. Dangerous. Worthy. Called. These three episodes are the map, not the how. Because you can’t get anywhere until you know where you’re standing.

So we start with broken: what it actually sounds like, why so many men have quietly concluded it about themselves, and why it’s a place rather than a life sentence. Your body has been sending you alarms for years, and you’ve been turning the volume down and calling it coping. The alarm was never the problem.

Then dangerous, through three moments. A panicked knock at my front door one summer night: “We’ve got a fire. Have you got a fire extinguisher?” Standing up in front of a government-backed registration board and moving a vote of no confidence — terrified, and not of the fight, of the humiliation if I lost. And rebuilding the deck at the back of our house, a job well beyond me.

And then the other half of it. A bloke pulled out in front of me at a roundabout and braced for a mouthful. I smiled and gave him a thumbs up. When something goes wrong, a man can go three ways: cower, explode, or handle it. From the outside, cowering and handling it can look the same. The difference is underneath. Meek never meant weak. It meant strength under control.

The force never left you. It’s been turned down, not taken out.

So this week, when something needs handling, ask yourself one question: am I about to cower, explode, or handle it?

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

INTRO

About fifteen years ago.

A summer evening, just gone dark, around nine o’clock.

There’s a knock at the front door.

Not a normal knock.

Panicked.

I open it, and it’s my neighbour from a couple of houses up.

“We’ve got a fire.

Have you got a fire extinguisher?”

I’ll come back to what happened next.

Because I want you to sit with that for a second.

Not whether you own a fire extinguisher.

The question underneath it.

If that knock came to your door tonight, which man would answer it?

Most of us honestly don’t know.

And not knowing tells you a lot about where you’re standing.

And that matters more than you’d think.

Because you can’t get anywhere until you know it.

Open the maps on your phone and type in where you want to go.

Before it gives you a single direction, what’s the first thing it does?

It finds you.

That little blue dot.

Where you’re standing right now.

Because the route to anywhere depends completely on where you’re starting from.

Same destination, different starting point, completely different trip.

And if the GPS doesn’t know where you are, it can’t take you anywhere.

It just spins.

Most men I know are trying to get somewhere without a blue dot.

They know something’s off.

They might even know roughly where they’d like to end up.

But they’ve never actually stopped and said, out loud, this is where I am.

So they just start driving.

A new diet.

A new program.

A new plan for the business.

And they wonder why they keep ending up back where they started.

So for the next three episodes, I want to do something different.

I’m not going to give you the how.

Not yet.

Everything I do on this show from here on is the how.

Those are the vehicles, and we’ll get to every one of them.

These three episodes are the map.

Where you are, and where you’d like to be.

I call it the Reclamation Triangle.

It has three sides, and on each side there’s a word for where a man believes he is, and a word for what he actually came here for.

Where he believes he is: Broken.

Lost.

Settled.

Where he’d like to be: Dangerous.

Worthy.

Called.

Here’s what I need you to hear before we go any further.

Those first three words.

Broken.

Lost.

Settled.

They might be true for where you are right now.

But they’re not a prison.

They’re not set in stone.

They’re not who you are.

They’re where you are.

And something happens when you put a name on where you are.

It stops being a fog.

It becomes a place.

And a place is something you can leave.

Today is the first side: broken, and what’s on the other side of it.

So let me show you what broken sounds like.

See if any of this is yours.

You wake at three, and your mind starts before your eyes do.

You lie there running a day you haven’t had yet.

By five you give up and get up.

There’s a tablet for the blood pressure, maybe one for the anxiety, and you take them at the kitchen bench before anyone’s awake, so nobody watches you do it.

The doctor asked how you were sleeping.

You said fine.

You don’t recognise the body in the mirror.

It happened while you were busy.

There’s a photo of you from a few years back stuck on the fridge, and you look at it more often than you’d admit.

You have a drink at six, because six is when the noise stops.

Not drunk.

Just enough that the day stops pressing on you.

And by two in the afternoon you’re done.

Flat.

And you compare.

You look outward, at other blokes your age, riding, lifting, up at five doing something.

You scroll past men on your phone telling you fifty’s the new forty, sixty’s the new forty, and doing things you couldn’t do on your best day.

But you look inward too.

At the man you thought you’d be by now.

The life you once pictured, the one you were sure was coming.

And you measure the distance between that and this.

Out there, and in here, and you come up short both ways.

So you’ve quietly come to a conclusion you’ve never said to anyone.

Not your mates.

Not your wife.

Something in me is broken.

I don’t have what it takes.

Other blokes got something I didn’t.

I’m different, and not in a good way.

And with it comes a kind of resignation.

Not a fight.

Just a quiet acceptance that this is who you are now.

If that landed, I want you to know three things.

The first is that you’re not the only one.

Not even close.

The second is that it isn’t permanent.

Your body has been sending you signals for years.

The waking at three.

The tension.

The weight.

The flatness.

Every one of those is an alarm.

And what have you done with every single one?

You’ve turned the volume down.

A drink for the tension.

A tablet for the anxiety.

A bigger belt.

More work for everything else.

What you’re calling broken is a man who’s been silencing his own alarm system and calling it coping.

The alarm was never the problem.

And the third thing.

A lot of this isn’t your fault.

The world you grew up in didn’t want you powerful.

It wanted you controllable.

Predictable.

Flaccid.

It’s spent years turning you down.

So if you feel muted, that isn’t you failing.

That’s you doing exactly what you were trained to do.

I know this one from the inside.

For years, my day started at five in the morning.

Up, out the door, walking the dog in the pitch black.

Rain, hail or shine.

And I loved it.

I felt capable doing it.

And then there was a stretch where I couldn’t.

A walk with my dog, something I’d done thousands of times, and I couldn’t get out the door.

I just felt so incapable.

And at the peak of it, I genuinely believed my brain was broken.

That I was never going to get out of this.

It was terrifying.

I’d come from a place where I felt so in control, and now I had none.

None at all.

I’m not there anymore.

Even with what I’m dealing with right now, I don’t feel that way.

But I can put myself straight back in that moment, and I know exactly how powerless I felt.

How incapable.

And that one thought, over and over.

My brain is fucking broken.

That’s broken.

That’s where the blue dot sits for a lot of us.

And the cost of leaving it there is this: you spend the last years your body will let you do anything about it, anaesthetised.

So if it’s yours, name it.

This is where I am.

Because now we can talk about where you’d like to be.

And it’s a word I nearly didn’t use.

Before I tell you what it is, let me ask you a question.

And I want you to answer it honestly, in your own head, where nobody can hear you.

Would you rather be capable?

Or would you rather be dangerous?

Most men will say capable out loud.

And I reckon a lot of them, underneath, would rather be dangerous.

I’ll be honest with you.

That word scares me.

But it scares me in a good way, and that’s exactly why I want to use it.

Here’s why it’s so hard for us to say.

Somewhere along the way, dangerous got welded to violent, and violent got welded to toxic.

You’ve heard “toxic masculinity” a thousand times.

So the moment a man says he wants to be dangerous, it sounds like he’s saying he wants to hurt someone.

That’s not what I’m saying.

Not even close.

In the last episode I talked about anger, and how I spent forty years believing anger only goes one way, straight to violence.

It doesn’t.

And neither does dangerous.

Think about a pen.

A pen is dangerous.

It can sign a contract that changes a family’s life.

It can write the letter that ends a career, or the one that saves a marriage.

Whether it does harm or good depends entirely on what you do with it.

But it’s dangerous either way, because it can do something.

That’s what I mean.

Dangerous is potential.

It’s force in you.

The ability to get a result.

To stand for yourself, and for the people you love.

And here’s what I think we’ve got wrong.

As a society, instead of teaching men to control that force, the anger, the potential to be dangerous, we’ve tried to take it out of them altogether.

Not “learn to hold it.” Just “don’t have it.”

And I think we’re all worse off because of it.

The opposite of dangerous isn’t safe.

It’s harmless.

Impotent.

A man who can’t make anything happen.

Now, there is a physical part to this, and I’m not going to pretend there isn’t.

Which brings me back to that knock at the door.

I knew I had a fire extinguisher.

And my brain just went into automatic.

I raced down the back of the house, grabbed it, and I was out the door before anyone inside even knew what was going on.

Into next door, pulled the pin, and put the fire out.

And here’s what I remember most.

It was like something in me literally took over.

There was no thought about it.

Nothing.

It just took over.

And I felt power in that.

And it worries me that we’re trying to rob men of that power.

Our young boys most of all.

My neighbour didn’t knock on my door so I could ring someone for him.

He knocked because he needed someone who’d grab the extinguisher and come.

And something in a man wants to know that when the knock comes, he’d be that bloke.

That matters to me.

But it’s one part of dangerous.

Most of it has nothing to do with your fists.

Let me show you what I mean.

About fifteen years ago, I was president of the Victorian Chiropractors Association.

And the registration board, government-backed and pretty intimidating, was moving to limit what chiropractors could do.

In particular, it was moving to restrict the care of children.

For a lot of practitioners in this state, that would have been devastating.

And I decided I was going to take a stand.

We called an extraordinary general meeting.

It was the biggest meeting of chiropractors we’d ever had in this state.

And the registration board sat in the front row.

And I stood up, in front of them, and moved a vote of no confidence.

Now, I don’t want you hearing that as some kind of hero story.

I was terrified.

It wasn’t an easy time.

It was a lot of hard work, and I felt very exposed.

Because here’s the side of dangerous nobody talks about.

Standing up like that, I wasn’t only risking the outcome.

I was risking humiliation.

Ridicule.

Embarrassment.

If it hadn’t gone our way, I’d have been the bloke who stood up in front of the whole profession and lost.

That’s what a lot of men are really scared of.

Not the fight.

The exposure.

We’ve been taught to fear that vulnerability, that shame, more than almost anything.

And to be dangerous, you have to be prepared to put yourself out there anyway.

And standing there, I felt powerful.

I felt dangerous.

Like I could have an impact on something.

Like I could actually make a difference.

And we did.

The restrictions on paediatric care didn’t go ahead.

And some of the people pushing them were removed from the board.

That’s dangerous.

Nobody got hurt.

Something got done.

There’s a much smaller version too.

A while back I rebuilt the decking at the back of our house.

I’d always done a bit of handywork, but this was well beyond me.

So I sat down, worked out what it needed, and rebuilt it, meticulously.

When it was done I felt incredibly capable.

Dangerous.

Manly.

Over a deck.

And I think that matters more than it sounds.

Somewhere along the way, with everything getting more and more specialised, men have stopped doing the basic stuff.

Changing a flat tyre.

Rebuilding a deck.

Putting up a fence.

We get someone in.

And I think it’s costing us, in how we feel about ourselves, and in who we think we are.

I marvel at my dad.

He can cut down a tree.

He can rewire a trailer.

Nobody taught him.

He didn’t have YouTube like I did.

Somehow he just learnt how to do it.

And now we’ve got a generation of men who just aren’t doing those things.

We’re becoming less dangerous in the process.

A fire, a meeting and a deck.

Three very different moments.

But look at what they share.

Every one of them was beyond me.

And in every one, I didn’t shrink from it, and I didn’t ring someone else.

I took action.

That’s how you tell a dangerous man.

Not by his size.

By whether he takes action, or cowers.

But that only tells you half of it.

Because there are moments when the force is right there, the moment is begging you to use it, and the most dangerous thing you can do is something else entirely.

Not long ago I was going through a roundabout and a bloke pulled straight out in front of me.

He just didn’t see me.

I had to stand on the brakes.

I looked across, and his face was fully apologetic.

Almost cringing.

Like he was bracing for it, waiting for me to give him a mouthful.

And I could have.

In another world, I would have.

And he might have come back at me, or he might have shrunk down in his seat.

Instead I just looked at him, smiled, and gave him a thumbs up.

We’ve got this, buddy.

And I felt real strength in that.

I was in control of that situation.

Here’s what I think is going on.

When something goes wrong, a man can go one of three ways.

He can cower.

Shrink, go quiet, let it happen to him.

That’s harmless.

He can explode.

Lose it, give the bloke a mouthful.

That’s force with nobody at the wheel.

Or he can handle it.

And here’s the part that took me a while to see.

From the outside, cowering and handling it can look exactly the same.

Neither man gives the bloke a mouthful.

The difference is underneath.

I didn’t hold back out of fear.

I held back out of power.

I knew I could have gone the other way, and I wasn’t scared of it.

The only question was: what does this situation actually need?

And it didn’t need somebody exploding and losing his shit.

There’s a word for this, and it’s a lot older than any of us.

It’s in a line you’ll know.

“Blessed are the meek.” Most of us hear meek and think weak.

A doormat.

But the Greek word there is praus, and it was used for an animal that had been tamed.

A horse that’s been broken in.

Every bit of its strength still there, but under the bridle.

Meek never meant weak.

It meant strength under control.

So what let me do that at the roundabout?

Why was a smile and a thumbs up even available to me?

Because I wasn’t gritting my teeth.

There was nothing to hold down.

Over the last few months I’ve done a lot of work clearing out the things I actually had reason to be angry about.

The stuff I’d never dealt with.

So a bloke pulling out in front of me was just a bloke pulling out in front of me.

In the last episode I talked about how anger blows up at the small things when the big things haven’t been dealt with.

This is the other side of that.

Deal with the big things, and the small things stay small.

That’s the bridle.

Put that together with everything else we’ve talked about today, and here’s where we’ve got to.

Broken might be where you are right now.

It’s a place, not a life sentence, and the blue dot sits there until you name it.

And dangerous is the invitation I’m extending to you.

Not violent.

Capable.

Force in you, and the control to choose what to do with it.

And when something goes wrong, there are three ways to go.

Cower.

Explode.

Or handle it.

If you take one thing from this, take this.

The force never left you.

It’s been turned down, not taken out.

When my neighbour was standing at my front door asking for a fire extinguisher, I didn’t build anything in that moment.

I didn’t have time to.

Something that was already in me took over.

And I want you to know that same thing is in you too.

It hasn’t gone anywhere.

So here’s what I want you to do this week.

Two things.

First, look at your relationship with that word.

Dangerous.

When I asked you earlier, capable or dangerous, which one would you actually say out loud?

If it’s capable, ask yourself why.

Where did you learn that dangerous was something to be ashamed of?

Are you scared of your own force?

Because just like anger, it can go down two roads.

The force was never the problem.

What matters is which road you take it down.

Second, find your deck.

Think back to the last time you were dangerous in the way I mean: something was beyond you, and you didn’t shrink from it, and you didn’t ring anyone.

Big or small, it doesn’t matter.

Write it down.

Because if it happened once, that man is still in there.

And then find the thing you’re finally going to stand up for.

And the next time something needs handling, at home, at work, at a roundabout, ask yourself one question.

Am I about to cower, explode, or handle it?

And choose handle it.

Because you might just be surprised at what comes up when you finally let the man inside you handle the situation.

When you get to feel what dangerous feels like, used the way it’s meant to be used.

There’s a power in that you might have forgotten you had.

Next time, the second side of the triangle.

Lost, and what a man is really looking for when he can’t find himself.

I’ll see you then.