David Chambers asks a head of risk what he does, and the man sits up and talks with total confidence. Then David asks about his relationship, and the chair rolls back.

Sound Bites

• "It's decided by the person often who is speaking, who lacks safety."
• "We call them vulnerabilities to the system because it's how the system can be hacked."
• "Most men don't know that they don't feel safe."
• "There's a sinking, there's a backing away, the chair rolls back."
• "Confidence isn't always transferable between different areas of our lives."
• "The resentment is like the poison of relationships."
• "You need to ignore the financial load. Ignore it."
• "The other men just look at us with care and nod and go, yeah, I do that too, actually."

David Chambers spent 16 years testing software, where a weakness in a system has a name. It's called a vulnerability, because it's how the system gets hacked. Most men, he says, learned the same lesson about themselves long before they had words for it.

Today he coaches men on love, dating and relationships. He talks about why a man who runs a room at work goes quiet at home, why the money is a smaller share of the household load than men think, and why a safe space isn't decided by the person offering it.

What We Explore

• Why a man who is sharp and direct at work freezes when she asks where this is going
• Being told your feelings don't matter since the playground, then asked to speak them fluently in your thirties
• The household load men don't see, and a monthly check-in that stops resentment setting in

Connect with David

Website: https://www.theauthenticman.net/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theauthenticman_/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IAmTheAuthenticMan

X: https://twitter.com/iamauthenticman

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAuthenticMan

The Authentic Man podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1447910686

The Authentic Man podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/64n26CAX3FIhJj7aMR2CO6

A little about Hamish Niven

For 25 years, I lived a life that looked successful from the outside. Inside it was falling apart, and I was throwing fuel on the fire — addiction, alcohol. I was on a steep path to self-destruct.

November 2018. I chose life, and had to change everything.

I built The 13th Room because nothing like that existed when I needed it.

The Brave Man Project — this podcast. It is about men, but not just for men. Men who broke under the weight of their own performance. Men who rebuilt and climbed so much higher.

The 13th Room is a space for the successful man who needs to change and knows it. 13 sessions, you and me. No fixing. Pure witnessing. Starts with a free 20-minute conversation.

Podcast website: https://thebravemanproject.com

Hamish's website: https://hamishniven.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBraveManProject

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamishniven/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@hamish.niven

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hamishniven/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hamishniven

He knows the feeling of like fear,

anxiety, nervousness, like, worrying in the about something's gonna go wrong.

But we don't always translate into the into the phrase of like,

well, I don't feel safe to speak,

I don't feel safe to open up. And that can

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

be really hard for

female partners to hear that because they're like,

well, I'm making, a safe space.

And you're like, no, because the safe space isn't decided on by the person who is,

is not decided by you. It's decided by the person often who,

you know, is speaking, who lacks safety.

and

David, thank you so much for being on the show with me today.

we, connected on Instagram a couple of months ago and

Mmm.

you know, after following you listening to some of your podcasts,

I thought we'd have a great conversation and you were recommended by one

of my other podcast guests. So thank you very much for turning up today.

This is great.

Welcome, it's a pleasure, pleasure to be here today.

Cool, so tell me a little bit about you,

about why you work with men, what brought you into...

understanding and supporting men in their journey through life.

I think that in the area, particularly the area of kind of love,

I'll call it relating as an umbrella term,

often used, you know, talk about love,

relationships, dating and intimacy.

I think when it comes to the area of relating,

I think when it comes to relating.

men are,

we're not taught how to do them well.

We're not, wow.

We don't get taught. And I say that not because there's no school lessons about it,

There's no school lessons about it.

which there aren't, there are now,

but there definitely wasn't when I was at school.

They're out now. ~

But we also get shortchanged when it comes to the sort of learning

We also get shortchanged when comes to the sort of learning we experience

we experienced by kind of absorption,

by kind of absorption, you know,

you know, through our younger years where we just absorb information through

through our younger years, have information through mothering and so forth.

modeling and so forth. Young boys,

and I definitely saw this in my own life,

And boys, and I actually saw this in we often don't practice those skills

where we often don't practice those skills in the same way that young girls

in the same way that young girls do or women do,

do or women do. You know, the socialising,

the talking, the emotional attunement,

and they're socialising and talking,

emotional and...

the

curiosity, the empathy. We don't practice those in the same

curiosity, we don't practice those in similar way

way because we're usually off.

because we're off running, kicking balls,

running, kicking balls, jumping over things,

doing other things, on some sort of adventure,

on some sort of adventure, doing something,

doing something, an activity we're all kind of centralized around.

an activity we're more kind of centralized around.

And for my own self, I saw this in kind of my own family system where,

And for my own self, it's sort of my own family system where my father

my father, the men that were in my life when I grew up were terrible at relating,

and my life, when I grew up,

were terrible with me. Who couldn't communicate,

you know? Couldn't communicate,

didn't know how to be empathetic

didn't know how to...

to kids and other adults.

for kids and other

adults, struggle with difficult conversations and comfortable conversations.

struggled with difficult conversations,

uncomfortable conversations, they could be maybe ~ misplacing

their anger and their other emotions.

So I was on the kind of the end of it as I was growing up.

So I was on the end of it as I was growing up.

And I also saw from my own experience that often as men we have a bit of

And I also saw my next big step off the list.

a kind of vacuum about what it means to be a good man and in particular what

Getting a bit of vacuum about what it means to a good man.

it means to be a good man in relationship or in love because a lot of when

And particular what it means to be a man in relationship.

We're in love because what we think

we think about being a good man,

about being a good man, it really comes down to a few areas.

it really comes down to a few areas when we generally think about.

We think about career and work and we think about relating.

We generally think about career and work.

And we think about the first things that come to us when we about being a good man.

Those are often the first things that come to us when we think about being

a good man. Another area is

around community, but it's not something that comes to our

Thank you.

mind straight away. So I just saw this big hole for myself and I had to find

So I just became cold for myself and I had to find a way to kind of fill that hole

a way to kind of fill that hole in my own life.

And then it became very obvious to me that a lot of men that I knew

with my own life. And then it became very obvious to me that I thought

and were around me were kind of struggling

of being like a blue-brown.

with the same things like...

How do I meet women that I'm really interested in?

How do I know what sort of woman is good for me?

How do I communicate in a relationship in the moments when it's difficult,

~

my partner's crying or upset? How do I stop these misunderstandings from keep

happening? And what I was seeing,

particularly in the dating sense when I first started kind of in this work,

was that a lot of the advice was about,

it was superficial. It was say this,

do this, wear this, know, respond in this way.

It was very much the top layer.

of the interaction, the things we can see and hear.

Hmm

It was all about that.

It was all about that and I know from my life and my experience and usually

And I've known from my life and my experience of using a lot

of superficial stuff early in my life,

all the superficial stuff early in my life that it only cares me so far.

that it only gets you so far. So

So...

I created a, I had a podcast with a friend of mine and from that turned into

I'm a with a friend of mine and from that,

coaching and really sitting with men one-to-one and in groups and supporting them

it's a really safe mid, and to what we need crews to support them

in expanding beyond the kind of the initial levels of being a man or the

in expanding Europe to cover the financial levels.

superficial levels of being a man.

I can completely relate to the upbringing thing.

My dad, at my grandparents,

one of their wedding anniversaries,

a marriage is...

How do you describe it? He described it as a marriage is based on incompatibility.

The man supplies the income and the woman the compatibility.

obviously it raised a few laughs but I think that's probably

Certainly from his era, you know,

born during the war, that's, that's what it was.

The man was the provider. He was the,

the, the, the support and all that kind of thing.

And he was, my dad worked and worked and came home in evenings and

was exhausted and repeat for years and years and years.

that masculine energy wasn't present that ~

Well, the discipline was the discipline definitely was there.

was one way of doing things, but yes,

that sort of balance wasn't there.

And, I can really see why you said it's,

it's, it's missing and you've,

you've seen a spot where you can help them support people.

Why is it so hard though, for guys to communicate?

Why do we struggle to share what we're feeling?

is it, yeah, why, why start with why,

why do we find it so difficult to communicate?

It can be really multi-layered,

right? So it starts off with that we...

~

It's the way that we, it starts initially with the way that we talk to boys.

We talk to them from a young age,

from in the womb. We use less words and emotional words with them.

And

Mm-hmm.

then we talk to them less about their feelings and emotions.

So there's less validation of their feelings,

emotions being valuable and useful.

And then we unconsciously and actively teach boys that they are,

their emotions don't matter. You know,

it starts with, you know,

Maybe it's not sweet.

Don't cry, it's fine. You hurt your leg,

it's fine. We tell them that their feelings and emotional experience,

experience.

they should suppress

it and it shouldn't matter and they should just get on with things.

So we are teaching them continuously in these small moments like,

you hit your knee. It doesn't

and

hurt. You're fine. Go and play with the other

Yeah.

kids. I've just told a child that his feelings and emotions are invalid

and he can't trust it because I know better than he does.

So, you know, this compounds through life,

right?

Mm.

continually happening. And then the adults don't need to do it anymore because

the society does it and the boys do it to the other boys,

right? We tease each other for crying.

We tease each other for being too close to each other.

We tease each other for needing each other.

You know, all these things are happening.

And this is, haven't even gotten to adolescence yet,

right? And then adolescence

Hmm.

kind of kicks in. And then there's this whole thing about being cool

and not seeming like you're too eager when it comes to dating and women.

Yeah.

So we're just continually bombarding men with this message that what we're feeling

doesn't matter. What we're experiencing doesn't matter.

And then we wonder why adult men struggle to communicate their experience because

we've told them their whole lives in very subliminal ways,

sometimes very overt ways, that what you're feeling doesn't matter.

And continuously telling them that and continuously reinforcing that

in various ways. So then you find a man,

he's in his...

30s, for example, he's in a relationship with a woman that he cares about,

or a man that he cares about. And he's like,

she's like, how do you feel about this relationship?

Where do you want it to go? And he is unpracticed.

He's unpracticed. know, it's like,

it's like asking that 30 year old man to speak Spanish,

when you've continually told him that speaking Spanish is bad,

and you've

You

not really taught him how to speak Spanish.

And then you're like, come on.

Yeah. Yeah. Shit.

Yeah, you know.

you know, ¿Qué kipasa.

and he's sitting there like frozen because he

Yep.

now relates to communicating through his nervous system as a threat to his survival,

right? Because he's probably also,

probably also has some experiences where he's communicated things

and he's communicated it really badly,

clunky, know, hurtful words were left.

And I say this as someone who did this time and again,

It is time to get...

when I, my,

in my years, and I still haven't completely shaken off that affliction.

you've communicated things in a way that is harmful,

it's hurtful, right? You're trying to be direct,

Hmm.

you're trying

to be honest, but you haven't been tactful,

you haven't thought about how someone else can digest what you're saying.

You say it, they get upset, you take that as another message that

you shouldn't communicate. What you have to say is causes pain in her.

So you're fast forwards, you're 30 years old,

you're sitting in front of a woman you really care about,

and she asks you how you're feeling about the relationship,

where do want it to go? And then you're terrified.

It feels like a threat. It feels like a trap,

Mm.

right?

So...

you don't communicate, right? And then there's also another side of this,

where it's like some men do wanna communicate.

They want to, there's an instinct in them.

It's like, I wanna share how I'm feeling.

I wanna tell you what's going on for me.

And maybe even to a point of like,

maybe wanting to do that too much.

And then they find themselves often in relationship with women who don't wanna hear

how they feel.

Yeah.

Who reinforce the invalidating experience they've had about their feelings

and emotions.

So we really shortchange men when it comes to communication in terms of feeling.

then we're like, you're 30, 40 years old.

You should be able to communicate.

you

You should be

able to communicate. So now we're making them feel shameful

and guilty about something they can't do that's hard for them to

do because the people who are pointing at them,

because you're putting something in the heart.

often their partners,

have had this whole schooling around this topic.

their whole life that's been happening from before they were born,

they've been slowly raised in the art of communicating feelings and emotions,

expression, the nuance, the empathy and so forth.

So you've got two people sitting in front of each other,

one with a

you

PhD in communication and one of them has barely left,

~ what's it called, reception at school.

Yeah.

And we're wondering why they struggle to have a relationship.

Yep, I've just seen that picture.

she can communicate. She knows what feelings are and he's like,

ow.

Yep, that's me. Absolutely.

You

~ And I'm back at the playground and I bang my knee and I've cried

and I'm being laughed at, know,

boys don't cry.

It's you, you, I, often wonder how,

how men and women do communicate or why we do.

Well, I mean, I think most people like sex.

So think that is one thing that brings them together and we're hardwired

to bring children into this world,

but it's hard. And you've explained it so beautifully.

Really, really nicely. And yeah,

I can just see, I can see that fear of communication.

Certainly for me, I mean, I didn't communicate with my wife,

just everything was all right,

you know,

We're fine. We're broke. We're fine.

You know, and it was tragic, absolutely tragic.

But to say, Hey, it's not working.

Hey, I'm not coping was that just wasn't happening.

You know, it was not, I was not able to say that.

But why, why is it so hard to be vulnerable?

Why is that what women ask of us,

you know, what are you feeling?

Why are you feeling? Why?

when we risk it, it, does it feel so catastrophically scary?

And then when we actually do, why is it ~ catastrophically scary or why can it be?

And this comes down to that we are taught that strength is often in knowing,

right? In knowing everything.

time.

We're taught that strength is in

knowing. A man should know. You know,

we shouldn't have to ask how to do something.

We shouldn't not know how to do things.

We should be the ones telling people how to do things.

So in asking, you know,

saying we need help, there's a vulnerability in that.

And we also talk the vulnerability is weakness.

You know, I worked in

Yeah.

worked in software development for best part of 16 years.

And I was a software tester. And what do we call,

we call them software bugs, but we called them vulnerabilities initially.

We call them vulnerabilities to the system because it's how the system

can be hacked, it's how the system can be hurt,

how the system can be damaged.

So when it comes to vulnerability,

One of the parts of the schooling,

know, the man box is often called about,

this set of rules we have to live by as men,

and we're taught and bullied into from a young age.

One of those is that vulnerability is weakness.

Vulnerability will lead to us being hurt because then we remember,

like everyone, know, all the listeners yourself,

you can probably remember a time at school where you were upset and

you said to someone, I'm upset.

so-and-so was mean to me, so-and-so hurt me,

blah, blah. And then that person went around and told everybody what

a little weakling you are and,

Yeah.

you know,

whatever it may be. Maybe you remember a time where there was a girl that

you fancied at

Thank you.

13 or whatever it may be, right?

And you plucked up the courage and you told her like,

hey, I really like you. And her and her friends laughed at you,

you know? Or maybe you

Yeah.

were in your 20s and you, you know,

there's a...

woman that you got to know and you were friends and you said to her,

hey, I really like you. I kind of think this could go somewhere.

And maybe that moment, she even might have delivered to you kindly,

Thanks.

like,

I don't see this going anywhere.

But what you start to learn, you,

she might've said it perfectly nicely to you,

like, hey, like, you know, I don't see it that way.

But what you internalize is the rejection,

you know, you've internalized the repeated experience of rejection.

That's probably happened to you before,

which has definitely happened to you before.

So you learn.

When I'm vulnerable, I get hurt.

That's you, our brains, as smart as they are,

it's like little super computers that they are,

right? They, unfortunately, especially in moments of pain,

they can be very binary. They can be

Damn.

very binary. Good, bad, pain,

pleasure. We've really become very binary.

So in those moments where we've been vulnerable,

maybe it's been with a partner,

we've said, hey, like I'm really struggling.

around work, like my business isn't doing so well.

And she has her own experience.

Maybe she starts to worry about,

She

you your life together or whether you're to provide for each other,

whether, you know, she starts to have some sort of stress and fear around

the burden of her having to support you.

Her

narratives that she's been taught about men suddenly becoming engaged as well,

you know, because she's been indoctrinated the same way about men as you have.

Okay.

She may even...

be triggered in like, my God, this man is not a good enough man.

He can't be the right sort of man.

And she might react to your vulnerability with,

what's wrong with you? Why can't you sort this out for yourself,

right? She doesn't mean to. She's not deliberately being mean,

but she's being activated in the indoctrination and the narratives

and stories that we've all soaked up.

And then suddenly you're like,

wow, when I'm struggling, no one's there for me.

When I'm vulnerable and I open up,

no one's there for me, right? And what we do as human beings,

we're very good at

collecting evidence about things that we already believe.

We're very

Yeah.

good at collecting evidence for those things and ignoring evidence

for things that we don't believe.

So we collect evidence often as men that vulnerability leads to hurt and pain.

And we

Hmm.

ignore all the times that we were vulnerable,

whether that's in leadership, whether that's opening up our hearts,

whether that is showing how we deeply feel what we really want,

where we actually got the result we want or things went well in some way.

and we remember all the times that it went badly and that we were hurt by somebody.

Yeah, thank you, man.

Men are all right,

really, aren't they? We are good at talking when...

when we feel safe.

and feel safe. And I think that's

Mm.

such an important point, isn't it?

Like, most men don't know that they don't feel safe.

They kind of have a, they feel it,

you know, in their relationships.

He knows the feeling of like fear,

anxiety, nervousness, like, worrying in the about something's gonna go wrong.

But we don't always translate into the into the phrase of like,

well, I don't feel safe to speak,

I don't feel safe to open up.

Mm-hmm.

And that can

Yeah.

be really hard for

female partners to hear that because they're like,

well, I'm making, I've, I've, is a safe space.

And you're like, no, because the safe space isn't decided on by the person who is,

is not decided by you. It's decided by the person often who,

you know, is speaking, who lacks safety.

it took me

until late thirties to realise that vulnerability was not weakness.

I really, that's what I thought it was.

~ and then your story about the software,

the weaknesses, the bugs, their vulnerabilities.

Absolutely. no wonder, no wonder us poor blokes.

And as you said, I think this is really important.

Women are also brought up girls women brought up to have expectations from

men so it's not it's it's it's terribly nuanced isn't it really is layered and.

Yeah, those expectations both ways.

You have to be the provider. You have to be their security.

And it is lonely when I'm, when I want to share something and who can I talk to?

Much easier not to pretend everything is all right.

And then taking it one step further,

you know, you're a successful businessman.

You're good at what you do. You're brilliant.

You're working hard 10, 20 hours,

10 hours a day, 12 hours a day,

40, 50, 60 hours a week.

I guess you see this as well, men coming back from a successful

job where they're good at what they do,

they know what they're doing, and then they have to come back into that family

environment where there's chaos and noise and,

know, if the mum's a stay at home mum,

she wants to talk, she wants to unload.

What, what goes wrong there?

Yeah, this is a very common one that lands in my Zoom room.

And in many ways, I resonate with this,

know, I had the really successful tech career.

I go to work and I could be really direct and straight and honest

and people really appreciate that.

And then I'd come back to my partner and I would struggle to say how I was feeling.

I'd be like, oh, everything's fine,

you know.

You just, it just wasn't the same sort of man.

didn't have the same sort of confidence in my,

my relating ability, you know,

and it's, it's an important thing because sometimes we'll see a man.

see this very often entrepreneurs,

serial entrepreneurs, C-suite men,

heads of, know, engineering products,

whatever it may be.

Hmm.

And there, when I talked to him about their work,

I always ask a man, what'd you do for a living?

And he'll be like, oh yeah, I'm,

I'm head of risk. And I'm like,

oh, what does that entail?

You know, because I'm always interested in what people do and what it entails.

Mm-hmm.

And they'll tell

me, and you can see the confidence,

like, yeah, you know, we do this and then we do this other thing.

We put this together and make sure these things don't happen.

You're like, fantastic, great,

awesome. And then I'm like, OK,

cool. So I've got a bit of a picture about you.

Tell me. Tell me about your relationship.

And then you can see in their body.

Yep.

Yeah, there's a sinking, there's a backing

away, the chair rolls back. And what it is is that confidence isn't always

transferable between different areas of our lives.

Something really important to remember,

someone who is super confident at work or in sport,

or may go home and not feel have that sort of confidence and that ability.

And being able to communicate really powerfully at work or in the business world

and be observant and aware in the work and business world is one skill set,

right?

but the same skills don't work in relationship.

If I apply

Hmm.

my logical business mind to my relationship,

my relationship on relationships and family life will be tumultuous because work

Yeah.

is built on like logic and thought and planning and like it's

all very, very masculine, right?

Hmm.

very structured,

right? Most of our work, that's how it goes.

If we really look at this, there's a structure,

there's a flow, there's clear intentions and stuff like that.

And we bring that into our romantic life.

It doesn't work because relationships are emotional entities.

They are emotional entities more than anything else.

Yeah.

They require structure. They do require planning,

Yeah.

but they require

emotional attunement. And that's one of the things that's not really needed

in the work world very much, especially when you get to the upper

you

echelons, like maybe you're a middle manager.

you know, to some degree, you have a certain level of emotional attunement that's

Yeah. When you go into the room,

needed. But when you go into your relationship,

please, should talk about the e-text machine.

your partner, your family, you need to be able to attune to them.

Like, oh, I walk in the door, what's going on?

And, um, once coming home,

What's my partner feeling? Like,

once my heart is beating, I reach the e-mail.

oh, actually, she's been at home all day with two,

I'll put David Tate and me and the kids.

three, four kids.

And she is absolutely knackered right?

She's put three of them to bed.

You know, one of them's still up,

two of them were a bit sick, you

Thank you.

know.

she's feeling exhausted.

And this can go multiple ways in this moment,

because sometimes I've had men,

come home and they like, I don't understand,

you why, why is she so tired? Like,

you know, I've been at work, I've been closing these deals and da da da.

And then the problem becomes because they see what they're doing as harder than what

she's doing. And then you're in a

Yeah.

battle, you become you're not seeing each other equally.

That can be a big problem. Another big problem can be if man does come home

and he has expectations.

of how the home should be, what his wife should be doing and so forth.

That can be really big problem.

Or like I said, he comes home,

the example you gave, he comes home and she wants to talk,

she wants to unload. And he has no capacity for it,

but he's unwilling to say that,

Please don't believe the Right?

right? He can't just say either,

Be careful of snake.

I don't have capacity for this right now,

give me half an hour, right? Which is clear communication.

Or.

He's before he even steps in the door,

Yeah.

he creates some capacity in himself because he knows his partner is going

to want to talk. So he knows he's going to want to unload and talk about

Yeah.

~

how she's feeling or even ask you about your day,

right? To fill that connection.

Because if you've been, you know,

I can imagine I can only, I've got one little boy and when you're at home,

I've been at home with him for a couple of days now and there's a joy.

There's a lot of beautiful joy in that,

You

but there's also a

mind numbing aspect to it because

He's a small child. basically does the same things.

He runs around, he shouts, he kicks the ball around.

He wants to play the blocks. He wants to read the same book 15 times as well,

right? I need to put the washing on.

I need to take the washing out,

put it back on the line. I need to do the dishwasher,

take the dishwasher out. I'm doing the same things.

It can feel quite mind numbing.

So when you meet with another adult,

you're like, my God, I can have an adult conversation.

Now he's been at work all day having adult conversations.

So he's tired of adult conversations to some degree.

And this is where there can be some friction.

And if we don't talk about

Thank

it, about what happens and how we can work together in this,

the resentment grows because maybe he comes home and she's talking

and he's rolling his eyes and he's trying to shut her down.

you

I'll

end her solution. Maybe she's got a problem.

She's like, know, the kids

Mm.

are doing X, Y, and Z and he's giving her solutions.

You should do this. You should do that.

You should do this. And he's thinking,

great, she's going to stop talking.

No, she feels like you don't care about her.

You don't care how she feels. She didn't want a solution.

She just wanted to air

Yeah.

her thoughts.

for a little bit to come to her own solution,

right? So suddenly you've got this resentment that builds up over time.

She's like, you'd ever listen to me.

He's like, yes, I do listen to you.

I listen to you every single goddamn night.

And I actually don't want to listen to you and I still do it.

She gets angry. And this dynamic I just described there,

this can happen for years between two people,

right? And then the resentment kicks in,

right? The resentment is like the poison of relationships.

Resentment is...

is like the poison of a relationship or marriage because once resentment starts

to set in, if you leave resentment unchecked,

you don't start to repair the resentment.

And so if we don't air the resentment,

you don't listen, you don't pay attention,

then it gets into every aspect of the relationship and relationships fall apart from

what I see time

Mm.

and time again, because of, of resentments that are never taken care of,

never looked at.

Yep.

met that once or twice and certainly in a couple of my relationships where,

yeah, didn't know how to communicate,

didn't know how to hold space.

You asked me a question, I've got an answer.

I've got a solution. I've got a solution.

I don't want solutions. Tell me you don't want solutions.

know, we're not listening. I wasn't listening to her,

she wasn't listening to me. And I think another thing that you touched on,

he doesn't want to talk. You know,

how was your day? Fine. Please don't ask me.

I don't want to know. Please don't ask me.

Please don't ask me. Fine. Shut you down.

I mean, you must see that a lot where it's just the day was fine.

It was shit. It was horrible. I hated it.

I don't like my job. La la la la la.

It was fine with the capital f-f-f-f-

How do you encourage guys to sort of get over that?

Because you've just mentioned so many times it is communication.

one of the things that we lack often is actually knowing what our state is,

our emotional state and feeling is.

So we might be overwhelmed or we might be exhausted.

And sometimes we don't know until it's too late.

We're not clear.

Hmm.

We're not clear. Like, what does it feel like for me when I'm exhausted,

when I don't have the capacity to listen or I'm struggling capacity so that

I can actually communicate that.

Like relationships, unfortunately,

you know, sometimes they want to make it really sexy.

You know, this is where I see people talk about masculine and feminine polarity

and things like that. But really healthy relationships work around communication

and it's not sexy. It's very simple,

right? It's not particularly complicated.

You can teach someone

Mm.

this stuff in three to six months.

They just have to do it and repeat on repeat.

It comes down to a few things is so there's a level of knowing,

knowing by self.

It's really funny. I've been watching this Star Trek series called Star-Trek Picard,

which isn't that good. But the particular episodes I was watching a couple

of days ago was talking about knowing myself.

And actually is really beautiful because in the episode,

there was this whole like going back to past memories in a child healing inside

of this thing so he can love properly,

which I think was really beautiful.

Hmm.

Part of the series. What we don't always know is like,

how am I feeling right now? When I do walk into the walk,

come home from work.

How am I feeling? I'm actually feeling quite exhausted from work and I don't know

if I really have capacity for a big conversation.

So when we walk in, our partner's like,

hey, how are you doing? You might say,

you know what, I'm actually feeling really exhausted.

And I feel like I just need 15 minutes,

half an hour just to myself. Like,

yeah, actually is that okay if I take that now and I can come back and be

a bit more recharged or I can be bit more present with everybody.

We don't know how we're feeling.

And then we don't know how to resource ourselves back to what we would like

to be feeling, right? So that we can show up for our family.

And there is a big cocktail for problems because,

and I've been guilty of this so many times of like,

okay, what do I need? You it's hard.

You've got kids, you've got a house,

you've got a partner. You know,

how do you allow yourself to take the things you need?

Because you feel guilty. Like,

how dare

Hmm.

I take half an hour.

an hour to go to the gym or go for a walk in the forest when,

you know, my kids need looking after or my wife needs some support.

Like I get that. But one of the things that I'm really having to push myself

to do is I need to nourish myself because then I can actually support them.

Then I can actually be there for them.

Yeah.

Otherwise I'm

in this really kind of halfway like bad mood with them not really being there

semi-present, you know, and then they're actually,

I'm giving them a worse version of myself.

I'm feeling more guilty and shameful because of the version of me that's showing up.

And I'm actually doing damage to the relationships between me and my children,

Hmm.

me and

my partner. So it's being able to know what we're feeling.

We have to like stop and go, actually,

I'm feeling this. What do I feel like I need?

And we often go to the phone as a way to resource ourselves because it numbs us.

It allows us to kind of dissociate from what's going on with us into the phone.

So it feels like it's soothing us.

And to some degree it does. There is a soothing element to the phone,

to the scrolling, to the mind-numbing stuff that we do.

But there's probably some, a very few number of things that would resource

you faster and for, to a more deeper level,

like internally making you feel good than just scrolling on your phone.

Scrolling on a phone has just become very acceptable.

it's just learning,

Amen.

like number one, like learning what am I feeling?

What do I need? And then courage.

You know, this might sound like a really odd one,

but so many men I speak to, they're terrified to kind of say what it is they need

or say what it is they want to their

Thank

partner. Not because their partner is some sort of,

you

I could think of some sort of like a ghoul that's gonna attack them in any way,

not at all. It's just that they're unused to being like,

Mm-hmm.

I'm gonna put myself first in this moment and ask what I need

or communicate clearly.

because there also, there's a vulnerability there in saying that like,

hey, actually, I really need to go for a walk for 10 minutes on my own.

There's a vulnerability because the person could turn around and go,

no. Your partner might be like,

no, you're not doing that. And suddenly you've asked what you needed.

You put yourself out there and you've been shut down.

You've been told no, which is probably an experience we've had many times

in our lives in many relationships told that we can't have what we want.

And it triggers all pain that we've experienced.

big part of it is courage, knowing how we're feeling and being able

to communicate what it is that's going on for us,

what we need. And also, one more,

it's growing our capacity. Growing our capacity.

I spend a lot of time with men on this.

How can we grow our emotional capacity?

How can we grow our capacity for the life that we are living and the life that

Hmm.

we want?

Because as we've said, men's emotional capacity is small because

we aren't trained in this way.

So then we need to go through some active training in our

conscious training and choice to grow our emotional capacity so that

we can actually be there for ourselves,

our partners, the life we want and our families.

I It really is a win for everybody.

it's, it's being brave, isn't it?

It's, being able to do that. It's,

it's being present. It's joining the dots.

It's everything. Yeah. You make it sound so beautifully simple.

And it's not,

it's not, hard. It's hard. It takes a lot of practice.

Yeah.

You know, I think this

is what it is because what I see is,

that most of the time the things we want to communicate,

what's important to us, what needs to be said,

what comes up for us is a level of stress,

anxiety, nervous

Bye.

system activation. I say activation,

it means that that sense of, you know,

we're almost feeling quite triggered or we're feeling this kind of fight

or flight or something's gonna go wrong.

Am I gonna be rejected? Is she gonna say no?

And this creates a state in us where there's fear.

And

Hmm.

when we are kind of in that space,

in that feeling and emotion and physical state,

it's much harder for us to communicate because simply because

our brains are emotionally flooded.

Our brains are actually emotionally flooded and our executive function,

the kind prefrontal cortex, has less ability and power to cognitively engage

and cognitively process information.

So we...

become a little bit kind of emotionally,

cognitively impaired in those moments

Yeah.

where we need to be able to have full availability.

And

Mm-hmm.

that's why there's practices, physical practices,

breath practices that can allow us and bring us back into now.

Because often with fear, we are not in the present moment with fear.

Fear is usually a projection of the past,

a projection into the future, Or we are...

We are distracted by, we're taking something that's happened in the past

and we're putting it into the future and it's creating fear and more anxiety for us.

And we're not really present, not really here.

So so many of the practices, you know,

is about bringing ourselves being present.

And also the practices are like,

how can I grow my capacity to be in the state like this?

But instead of it being like, I use an example of like a cup,

you know, if my cup is only this big.

the listeners who you're listening to,

just listening, can't see the video.

The cup is, you know, size of my one hand.

If your cup is only that big, your emotional cup,

what happens is, that as soon as someone pulls a little bit of motion in there,

the cup starts overflowing, you're overwhelmed,

you're emotionally flooded, you're not processing well,

you're not ready to communicate very well,

you're not ready to connect very well.

But if you start to do practices that can grow your capacity,

now hold my arms open like it's a,

like a mixing bowl, right? You grow your capacity.

That same emotion gets pulled into your life.

And you're like, man, I've got loads of capacity.

I'm cool. Like, you're crying about something happened at work today,

darling. Got it. What happened?

Tell me more. she said that. God.

She said that before, hasn't she?

Yes. ~ how does that make you feel?

How are you feeling now about this?

Got it. Okay. What are you thinking about?

You know, is there any thoughts you have about what you want to do about that?

Because I've got capacity to keep thinking.

But as if I'm doing that with my little cup.

Yeah.

when that crying comes in, I'm overwhelmed.

I want to the situation down. I'm going to not talk to you.

I'm going to maybe completely shut down emotionally myself,

or I'm going to just try and get a solution so that you can stop your feelings

and I don't have to deal with it anymore and I can relax again.

As you said, it's being present and it's being able to respond rather than react.

And it's not

Mm.

being that fight mode. You're not coming home expecting a fight or expecting...

no idea what to expect. you your guard's up,

you are just ready to react, to fix at whatever cost.

Yeah, and breathe as you said,

you know, just being in that space.

One thing I want to touch on, this is something that some friends of mine do.

I've never met this before. Once a week,

they go out for a business meeting and the business meeting is,

how are the finances with the family?

Not the business, the family. How are the kids?

Clothes? What do we need? How's the pension?

How's all this thing? it absolutely blew my mind.

I've never met anyone.

do anything like that. And I just thought this was quite spectacular.

you met this kind of thing? Is this kind of thing that you share with people?

it's, I mean, that's adulting on a different level as far as I was concerned.

I never met it before, as I said.

Me and my partner have, not something exactly like that.

We have a couple of check-ins on Sundays.

I think it's like every other week.

It's like, you know, what's going on with you this week?

You know, what are you coming up this week in terms of work?

We both have run our own businesses.

So it's like, you know, have you got a lot coming up this week?

Have I got less? Okay. Am I going to need to,

you know, look after Bjorn in the evenings a bit more?

or, you've got a more spaciousness,

like, okay, great, I have this thing coming up.

So we'll talk about that. And we obviously talk about the stuff that he's

got coming up, if anything's there.

And we'll talk about money, like how are you feeling about money?

know, like, is there, how are you feeling?

How's things going in the business?

You know, financially, like, how's that making you feel?

That's a check-in that we have kind of bi-monthly,

twice a month. But I do like the aspect that you talked about there about,

you know,

the finances, I can see that's really beautiful,

really useful, maybe like even once a quarter to really like,

sit down and look at those things.

It's the load, isn't it? They're talking about

Yeah.

the ~ relationship load, which,

you know, can be things like mental load,

emotional load, and so forth of the relationship,

which is really important to do because often that falls,

that falls to women to do ultimately,

you know, I think a lot

Yeah.

of the time as men,

we take on the load of the providing,

financial providing. We take on that

Yeah.

load as our responsibility. We're like,

that's the thing I'm going to do.

That's my load. And we then generally forget

you

about all the other loads of the emotional load,

the mental load.

the relational load of actually holding the relation together.

And we also then make the mistake of thinking that this financial load,

if we call this like, say there's 100 % of all the load combined as 100%,

we often mistakenly believe that the financial load is the 60 % of

all load and everything else is 40%.

So we're like, I'm taking care of this.

So I'm taking

Hmm.

care of the most important and the most job done.

Yep.

I don't need to worry about anything else.

She can deal with everything else because

you know what? I'm taking care of the most important thing.

This isn't always the case, but I see this a lot where as

Yeah.

men we over, you almost over index on the providing and then we leave

the rest of the load to our partners.

When in fact, you know, something I've said to a few clients now is like,

you need to ignore the financial load.

Ignore it.

Don't even count it as a load.

Like, you know, making money. Most of the people I speak to,

both partners are working. Maybe the man's earning more,

Yeah.

which is quite common. The woman has a part-time job or something like that,

but ignore it. Not because it doesn't matter and it is inconsequential,

but then it will have you readdress and look at,

wait, I'm not

putting all my attention on this making money load because that doesn't exist

anymore. What are the other loads in our relationship?

~ kids need clothes all the time.

and they go to the doctors constantly and they go to dentist appointments

and they get sick randomly. And you know,

all these things you suddenly become aware to the other load that you

had no idea about that you weren't really paying attention to.

And you suddenly realized that,

~ man, that financial loads like 20%,

like 10

Mm.

% because all this other stuff,

this financial load is reasonably fixed.

I go to work, I make the money,

I get a promotion every couple of years.

Cool. Good. Like that's,

it's pretty fixed. This

emotional load is this kind of mental load of like,

ah, what shopping, what shopping do we need?

Whose birthday is it? Like, oh,

it's so and so's birthday. Oh,

one of the kids can have a, their birthday is gonna be in a month and a half.

Do we need to stop planning for anything?

It's ever changing. It's not a fixed entity.

It's like ever changing. So having conversations like your friends there about

it is really, really important to have on a very regular basis.

Somebody like that. One of the things me and my partner do is we have

a monthly check-in. We call it a relationship check-in.

We sit down and we have a group of questions.

~ What's going well? What's not going well?

~ What would we like to change?

What else? What we'd like more of?

~ I think we've added in a question there about parenting,

about how we feel about how we're doing parenting as well.

And that's our relationship kind of load.

We like looking at our relationship and we will make notes individually throughout

the month.

And then we come together and we kind of exchange our notes.

We sort them through in a very structured way.

One of us shares first, like, this is what I think is going well,

you know? These aspects of the relationship are going well.

Cool. The other person listens.

Cool. Thank you. And then we ask the question,

is there anything you want to add to the agenda?

Do we have an agenda afterwards if we talk about things in more depth?

There might be a no. Cool. Then it's my turn to say what's going well.

And we go back and forth like that.

So in the first kind of...

half of it, there's actually very little conversation.

Right, there

Yeah.

might be like, can you said this thing,

I don't quite understand what you mean.

Right, clarifying questions, but there's not much discussion,

there's no defending either, especially with that question of what's not going well.

Yeah.

That's the one that we all panicked about really.

You're will

you just there's this unconscious thing that you have to you like,

Oh my god, my partner's gonna tell me that they they're really unhappy

in a relationship and they want to leave.

That's, that's kind of what you're worried about.

Yep.

And then we talk about in the agenda.

And we then create some actions or some responsibilities.

And that stood us in really good stead for our relationship.

This means that we talk about our relationship.

We talk about what's going well and what's not going well.

There's space for these conversations constantly to happen.

Not constantly, but on a monthly basis.

And there's times that it's been hard conversations actually,

like where we're like, we're really,

something's really bad that we don't like.

Hmm.

But 90 % of the time, things are going well.

things we want to change. Sometimes,

you know, especially with since a little boy has been born,

some of the things we want to do and we want more of are harder to kind

you

of bring into our lives to take responsibility for.

But again, it's promoting this level of good communication in a relationship

Thank

and it creates a structure. You're

creating a structure for good communication.

And the why I think this is so important for relationships is if you just leave

and hope good communication is going to happen,

you're going to revert back to your

Initial programming or the level of your fears a lot of the time,

right? As human beings. Whereas you put some structure in place,

you put a calendar invite. Every single Sunday,

we're gonna talk about the business of our relationship,

the finances, the load, how much money there is,

what shopping needs to be done,

blah, blah, blah. You put a structure in play,

you don't have to think about it,

it's just they just need to sharp for it.

It means that the communication.

has a space to happen and you don't need to worry about it.

You can even prep yourself to some degree that it's gonna happen

there.

here, you know? And then over time you get,

you're doing it every week like your friends and suddenly

the communicating becomes easier.

Hmm.

Why? Because

you're training. You're in this training every week for an hour,

two hours where you're having difficult conversations about money,

Yeah.

who's doing what, what kids need.

And then another side effect would that be I imagine is you start

to see there's patterns of things.

So.

Instead of you're like, ~ the kids need clothes.

yeah. I know this pattern. We're getting near to school time.

They're going to need some clothes.

You might just be going out to get yourself a beer,

maybe with some friends. And you walk past the school shop and you're like,

look, they've got cheap trousers and shirts.

I'm going to nip in there because that's going to come up in a couple

of weeks anyway. I know it is.

And you nip in, you buy a bunch of shirts and trousers and you come home,

hopefully not too half cut. And you're like,

you

look,

I bought these. And your partners are,

great.

I was just thinking about that.

You're like, yeah, so was I. And it has this knock on effect.

And it makes it easier because you don't have to like,

quote unquote, pluck up the courage to have some conversations because

you really have a space to have.

this has been great. Thank you.

Tell me a little bit, a little bit more about what you do because you you've,

you have articulated some really amazing bits of advice,

bits of wisdom and just general,

you know, how to be a better man,

how to look after a relationship,

how to show up. So how do you tell me a bit about how you work with people?

Because I think, you know, there's a lot of wisdom there and a lot of,

a lot of people would find an awful lot of help and support from what you're sharing

today.

I think we always start with is like,

where are you? Where are you right now?

And where do you want to get to be?

Where do you want to get to? Because ultimately,

when men come to me, there's some dissatisfaction from where they are,

some pain, I will call it. they're trying to figure things out.

They're trying to figure themselves out.

They're trying to figure out what they want in a relational sense and dating,

sometimes just with themselves to understand themselves better as well.

And there has to be a journey,

you know.

There has to be some exploration.

There's some questions to understand ourselves and our actions and

our behaviors and the roots of those as well.

Because once we start getting to the root of our behaviors and our actions,

we start to see what's really there.

And often there's some sort of belief,

there's some sort of idea of the man we need to be,

the man that we should be, which is faulty.

Or we're just re-acting, re-enacting out something from the past,

whether that's a past experience of our own or past experience that we've seen

in our fathers.

And there's just creating a new pathway,

know, for various ways to create new pathways to who we want to be.

So showing up in moments differently,

because in the small moments, we can really transform our lives,

you know, in the small moments of communicating,

the small moments of not getting angry and throwing things,

in the small moments of expressing ourselves instead of shutting down,

the small moments of leading a sexual moment instead

of ~ cowering or avoiding,

you know.

And that's where we start to see some big change in people's lives.

So I work with people kind of one-to-one in that way.

I also work with people in group,

which I think is a really potent way for men to work because

Yeah.

so much shame that men carry is related to

the assumption we have what other men would think of us if they saw

the things we're ashamed of. And when we start to talk about those in front

you

of other men, we start to

realise what we're experiencing and then we...

the other men just look at us with care and nod and go,

yeah, I do that too, actually.

I've really struggled with that.

God, you've done so well to move through this.

We suddenly, the shame dissolves.

Hmm? Yeah.

And I think there's

a really potency in that kind of group work that a lot of men like to avoid.

A lot of the guys come to me they just want to do one-to-one.

They want to have that encasement of the trust we have.

Yeah.

But the group work is incredibly

potent, incredibly useful for men.

You know, I saw...

Recently, there was an article I think in the New York Times maybe,

and they shared it on social media where it was like a kind of men's retreat,

weekend long men's retreat. And there's a lot of like comments by people being like,

~ men will do anything to avoid therapy.

And I will tell you that I've done therapy and I have a therapist now.

But some of the most potent therapeutic experiences I have had are

in groups of men, in groups, whereas online,

Okay.

in person, in group.

they have been some of the most potent therapeutic moments.

Also some mixed group stuff that I've done as well.

So I also think that mixed group,

single sex groups, mixed groups can be really potent for men because

it allows us to see ourselves in ways that we've never seen ourselves before.

Yeah.

And it also allows us to have people reflect to us how they truly see us.

And that we can get really honest feedback,

good quality feedback.

And when I say feedback, it's not just because when we think of feedback,

think of negative things, but also the ways in which we're amazing that

we don't always see or we can't acknowledge for ourselves.

Yeah. You explained that really nicely in one of the podcasts I listened

to before I got you on here and.

Being seen by another man is powerful.

It really, really is. And being seen as capable

and loving and supportive and those things that,

no, I'm not. No, I'm not. can't acknowledge that.

Yeah. I think it's spectacular.

Yeah. Thank you.

Thank you.

So where can we find you? Where do we find David Chambers?

Yeah, there's two places. If you're an Instagram person,

you can find me on Instagram at theauthenticman underscore.

And if you're a podcast person,

you can find my podcast, it's called The Authentic Man with David Chambers.

You can find that all kind of podcast platforms,

including YouTube, if you want to watch me talking,

you can also find me there. But those are probably the best two places to start.

Brilliant. Well, I've really enjoyed having you on here.

Thank you so much for your time.

Yeah, really brilliant.

It's been a real eye-opener.

So there we are everybody, that was David Chambers.

Thank you so much for listening to and watching another episode of

the Brave Man Project. If you like what you've seen,

like what you've heard, please share it.

Please pass it on to other men.

Please pass it on to the girls or wives or partners of other men who

you think may benefit something from this conversation,

because I certainly did. So thank you ever so much.