Bill: In this episode of not your typical Leadership Coaching, we have guests, Geoff Laughton and Mark Johnson, both facilitators and founders of the Undaunted Man Men's Coaching, mostly groups, and they do individual coaching as well. We invited them onto the show to talk about how the work that they're doing with men is affected by their leadership roles, the leadership roles that they take, the leadership roles that their, the participants in their coaching take.

Bill: And how their coaching affects the men that are leaders in their groups. A couple of great quotes from this podcast are at one point, Mark said, "Nothing that can be taken from you is you." And that reflects. The idea that in order to really support these men that are coming to these men's groups, they, help them to remember who they are and to return to who they actually are.

Bill: Again, that quote is, "Nothing that can be taken from you is you." And I asked Mark if that was a quote from him directly, and he's, he attributed it to Viktor Frankl or, and or many others who said similar things. And then, we heard Geoff say, If you're not afraid, you're not ready. And I got to tell you, that wrinkled a couple of brows on my forehead and, rubbed me kind of a little bit wrong, frankly.

Bill: But I didn't challenge that in this episode, so what we did was we scheduled another episode for about a month from now, where we're going to have that be our topic. Again, if you're not afraid, you're not ready, and there's an actual book written that is referred to in this podcast by, I think it's Susan Jeffers called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, and that first came out in the late 90s.

Bill: I hope you enjoy this episode. We certainly did, and, it might even stir up a little bit of controversy for you, and I hope so. I hope you get some value from it. Enjoy. Well, Here we are another episode of Not Your Typical Leadership Coaching and today we have special guests Geoff Laughton and Mark Johnson. What Geoff and Mark have in common is that they are facilitators and coaches for The Undaunted Man. I'm going to tell you a little bit about Mark and then I'll tell you a little bit about Geoff and then Marty I'm going to hand it over to you because you've known both these guys longer than I have.

Bill: Mark is a trusted advisor and executive coach at Pioneering Leadership. And a facilitator and a coach at The Undaunted Man, which is theundauntedman.Com. He has more than 25 years of experience of optimizing people and companies. He blogs at the undaunted man's sub stack. And we'll put that in show notes.

Bill: And then Geoff Laughton is a relationship architect and coach multiple international best selling author, speaker, and workshop leader. He's the founder of the Undaunted Man. He has spent the last 26 years coaching people worldwide with a particular passion for supporting those in relationship and helping men from all walks of life step up to their true potential.

Bill: Gentlemen, thanks for joining us today.

Bill: Marty, take it away, man.

Marty: To hear your voices and to have you with us. Well, let's start with the name. This is a beautiful word. How often do you hear the word "undaunted"? I mean, it's a beautiful, almost poetic word. And so I'm really curious and I think our listeners would like to know how did you come up with that?

Marty: What does it say about the work itself?

Mark: Well, that's a great question. Well, we searched around, we were operating under a different name before and ran into a copyright issue with that name unintentionally. And, we were searching around for another name that would kind of capture, what we were about and what we want to bring out of people.

Mark: And when we came across the word undaunted. And the definition of courageously resolute, very difficult to think of a better name for the company 'cause that's what we're really about. Crazily resolute.

Mark: Crazily resolute, right? Courageously, crazily, courageously resolute.

Bill: Oh, courageously, courageously resolute. Okay. Yes. Courageously ue, crazily. That might be a different twist on it. Yeah,

Mark: that would be a very, very different company.

Geoff: So, we, we get a little of that from time to time.

Mark: Yes.

Marty: Is it that people who are not courageously resolute come to and want to get credit or is it that you choose to work with people who are courageously resolute?

Mark: It's people that want to become courageously resolute. I don't think it's a stretch to say that every man that we work with already have, in many cases, they may already have a great life or they may have a life that they don't feel is so great, but either way, they want something more than what they have or something different than what they have.

Mark: And as you know, Making those kinds of changes to really change the kind of life that you're experiencing requires courage, and it requires being resolute, being determined and committed to making that change because it's not always easy. Right?

Marty: Just 1 more thing on this. On this on the title. So I assume that, like you say, it's central to what people want.

Marty: What can tell us about how you engender? I'm trying to use a very general word here because I don't want to presuppose how you get courage going and people and resolution. What's the process since being undaunted is squarely in the middle of the work. Well, how, what's the process to getting there?

Mark: It's a little bit unique to each man, right? I mean, every man has their own journey in a way, and I don't want to be, I'm not trying to be cryptic, but every man has his own obstacles to overcome. It always involves some form of what we used to say back in the nineties is feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

Mark: That's the courageous part. It's not that it's not that men become fearless. It's that they become capable of acting in spite of their fear and doing the right thing. However, they define that for themselves in spite of their fear. we help them become that or develop that quality in themselves by helping them see who they really are

Mark: then having them practice on smaller steps and scaffold them up to the big steps. Mark's right that every guy's different, and we intended to attract men who are beginning to be aware of a lot of them, that they've created this life that looks great on the outside, and yet they're bored. They're feeling lonely, even in a relationship, say. They've achieved some level of what most of them, I think, were raised as criteria for being a good man, and are successful.

Geoff: And both of those are often predicated on external variables, external validation. And one of the first things we do is help men see what we can sense they're caught in. And as Mark said, try to steer them towards getting reconnected to their spirit, their higher knowing and switching them from kind of helping them switch themselves from an orientation of externally referenced and move them to being internally resourced.

Marty: I could see how this also relates back to the courage part of being undaunted, because the internal is always there. It's the external that's constantly changing. So graphs yourself back to there, there's something stable and persistent. That's always going to be there. They can rely on.

Geoff: Yeah, and a lot of it, too, is trying to help, help them see how to reconnect with that internal knowing which also, to your point, Marty, it takes an enormous amount of courage, Mark and I know, because we're still doing the work ourselves. You know, we are not baked masterpieces. We just have more mileage on us and experience than a lot of the guys that we work with. But trying to help them just see what can you still find in there that's been a part of your essence or your, we like the term, true identity that, you know, we use in a spiritual context.

Geoff: If they can touch into that, even a little bit, it creates enough of a possibility that hopefully ultimately inspires all the guys to acknowledge the fears and go after it anyway. Yeah. Beautiful.

Marty: I can relate. you know, I attempt to touch into that every morning to start the day, like, get, get lined up with who I really am.

Marty: Even if it's just like a little, oh, yeah, a little whiff of my true self, like, okay, that's enough to go on, you know, yeah, that's great. Did you want to ask something, Bill?

Bill: I've got a bunch of questions and one of the ones that's on my mind right now is that, Geoff, I know that you've been doing these men's groups for a long time, and then at some point Mark joined you.

Bill: Is that correct? Yep. That you started them and you've had various partners that have helped you with this? Yeah.

Geoff: Including Marty back in the back about 15, 16 years ago. Yeah.

Bill: I'd love to, I, I just would like to hear the history of the group. If you could give me maybe a two or three minute summation of that.

Geoff: I'll start and then Mark can fill in the juicy stuff. He actually came to one of the groups one night and hung around and stayed and I don't know, maybe a year or two, Mark? Probably about a year. Maybe, yeah, maybe a year. I don't, I don't

Mark: remember exactly.

Geoff: And as I remember it, Mark approached me at one point, I remember we had lunch out on my back patio, and he shared, you know, I love the work, and I can see there's real potential here for scaling this to reach more men.

Geoff: He had the financial background of, you know, being a CFO and other, you know, very high management roles with nonprofits in particular. And I liked him. And his vision scared the crap out of me. And that was when I knew he was the perfect partner. So we became partners. Marty was part of that back then as well, because he had been there with me riding shotgun and partnering with me beautifully for several years.

Geoff: And then when Mark came in, we kind of became a trio of leaders and Visionaries and then at some point Marnie was called elsewhere and so Mark and I have been doing it ever since.

Bill: You have other coaches that that coach other groups for you?

Geoff: Working on it. We have one man, just showing that Dr. Kettelhut is the force that never goes away completely.

Geoff: Introduced us to a friend of his. That, uh, ironically lives about 40 minutes from Mark in Illinois. And he's now been co leading with us in a couple of groups for close to a couple of months now, it seems. He loves working with us. We love him and we just keep looking at how we can keep growing to give him an even bigger role.

Geoff: Yeah.

Bill: So the way you answered that had me thinking for the first time that these groups meet virtually. They're not local groups that meet face to face? Both Both. Okay. All right. So you're meeting face to face in Colorado.

Geoff: Yep.

Bill: Boulder area?

Geoff: Yep, and with So right now I think we have seven different groups going and mark Solo runs an all virtual group then well actually he solo runs two virtual groups right now then With the group we're co leading together along with Mike.

Geoff: Mike Sherrick is the other man. Mike and Mark come in on Zoom and the rest of us, most of the rest of the group, are in the room. I see.

Bill: Okay.

Geoff: And then I run two groups. Three groups by myself, then they're local. I see. No, pardon me, two local, one all virtual. So we're,

Bill: we're a mutt. Sounds like you're serving, how many men in a group on average, would you say?

Mark: Typically eight ish, give or take. Yeah. We like to keep it Eight. It gets a little more challenging when we get above eight in our format. I find the same

Marty: with my groups. Eight is a good number. Any more starts to get a little out of, you know,

Mark: yeah, it's a little unwieldy, a little, little clunky.

Mark: It's one thing that Geoff didn't mention when Marty was, when we were still the trio, we started experiencing growth almost immediately. And we suddenly went from one group to two groups to, I don't know, maybe got into three groups at that point. I don't remember exactly, but it was really starting to grow and we've grown to, it took us this long to get to seven because we're putting a cap.

Mark: I mean, Geoff's capacity and my capacity combined, that was it. That was, And it was all in the evenings and Geoff has a day job and I had a day job and there was other things going on. So we couldn't really, really focus. So there's just so much capacity and we managed to shoehorn seven groups in the work in the way we have.

Mark: If we hadn't had those same limitations, who knows where we could be now, because the demand for what we do, the hunger for what we do is almost unlimited now.

Bill: Why do you think that is? Why is there so much demand and hunger for what it is that you're doing?

Mark: Oh boy. That is a long, that is a big question.

Mark: Well, you're

Bill: probably hearing the answers to that from the guys that show up in your groups, right?

Mark: Absolutely. And it goes everywhere from, my dad was never around either physically or emotionally or both. All the way over to, I don't know how to, I don't know how to deal with women.

Mark: Nobody told me how to deal with them. And I don't understand how to have good relationships with women too. I don't know how to deal with this, you know, strong, these strong personalities in my job. There are so many obstacles and all the mechanisms that used to teach men how to be good men

Mark: are gone now. They're effective. They've all been torn down, um, over the last 60 years or so.

Marty: What are the, what were those?

Mark: Everything from, churches to the boy scouts to fathers present in the home to gun clubs to sports to you name it. All of those things now have been because of all of the, you know, the co mingling of the genders, essentially, and this, I don't, this is not a political conversation, just talking about the practical fallout, when the Boy Scouts, as soon as you put women, or boys and girls, or women and men in the same room, they both change.

Mark: They both start acting differently because of the presence of the opposite sex. And so when, when everything is co ed from, you know, nursery school all the way up and there are no, there's no room for separate, uh, Male only spaces and I guess there are still female only spaces, but there are no male only spaces available.

Mark: It becomes very difficult for, for boys and men to learn how to be what it means to be a good man because everybody's behavior is a little different when the opposite sex is around.

Bill: Couldn't agree more. I am currently in the process of filling up what I call a nice guy group. Know who Dr. Robert Glover is.

Bill: And we had absolutely on the podcast and, uh, and I've actually got women insisting that they should be in the group. And I'm saying, Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope. Right. For the, for the very reason that you just said, and, you know, I'm open to doing a women's group too for the very similar issues, but those similar issues could fall under the category of codependency.

Bill: And as Glover says it. The tendency to live life from the perspective of I'm giving so that I can get is a great definition for codependency, and that's common to both men and women, but it feels looks different and manifest differently for men than it does with women and for women than it is men and and having those groups that can be exclusively supported and attended by.

Bill: By that gender makes a huge difference in what happens in the groups You're absolutely right people men and women change when they're around men or women.

Mark: Absolutely you know

Mark: one of

Mark: the To my knowledge We've never had women that wanted to join our groups um, but uh No, they want to be flies on the wall, but they want, yes, they definitely want to be, they want to observe, right

Mark: they don't want to participate, but they'd love to be sitting in the back row so they could see what was going on. We have talked to Geoff and I have had conversations with women coaches that kind of bristle at this idea that there's value in male only spaces for men but what we have learned in the psychological evidence is incontrovertible about this.

Mark: The social evidence seems to me, at least in my interpretation, to be incontrovertible is And this is no knock on single parents, women can do most of the things that men can do, except teach a man how to be a good man.

Bill: Correspondingly,

Mark: men can do most of the things women can do, but they can't teach a woman how to be a good woman.

Mark: Because I don't know what it's like to be a woman. They don't know what it's like to be a man. And it is a fundamentally viscerally different experience to be a man or a woman at a spiritual level, at a biological level, there are incontrovertible differences. And a lot of those lines can be blurred and we can have a conversation about social roles and whatever else.

Mark: But when it comes to the fundamental essence of manhood and womanhood, The genders are what they are,

Bill: and

Mark: they, and they need, and they stand alone. They stand separate.

Bill: Yeah. Distinct. Better word. Thank you.

Bill: Marty, you have a question there that you'd like to jump in with? Our podcast theme, the theme of this podcast is leadership.

Marty: Maybe we can relate this back to everything we've talked about so far. I think, being courageous,

Marty: Growing a business, being those people that either bring people to the genders together or keep them apart. That leadership is, is running through the whole conversation. That's the theme of this podcast is leadership. And so I'm wondering, what are the men in your groups? Thinking and feeling about leadership are, you talked about them in their relationships at home and at work.

Marty: And how are you addressing leadership? If, if at all in, in your undaunted groups?

Geoff: Most of the men who find us are really not leading their own life. They don't in the content, because you talk to Glover and you know, you talk about no more, Mr. Nice guy, nice guys, which This is not at all deliberately planned, but I would say probably 90 percent of all the men in our community are active or recovering nice guys.

Marty: Interesting. Wow, that high?

Geoff: That high. Including Mr. Johnson and myself.

Mark: Absolutely.

Geoff: We have a fucking great resume of nice guy things. And if we can go back, we would probably, you know, re record anyway. It really, it starts with, you know, whether it is like career issues or a lot of guys either aren't in a relationship.

Geoff: Or are in one where they're not feeling very happy with. And what we always point to is, well, where is in particular, where's your masculine leadership showing up in your relationship, in your home, in your career, in how you relate to yourself and treat yourself. So that's one key thing. Another is you can't, my experience, you can't be an effective leader if A, you're going to be worried about what other people are going to think about you.

Geoff: And that's, you know, that's territory where, Bill you truck in every day dealing with childhood patterns. But then the other thing is, how do you lead if you're not going to take full and absolute responsibility for how you're showing up, how you're behaving, how you're not behaving? So we're big proponents of you've got to really take a cold hard look at where you're passing the buck on how your life is feeling to you.

Geoff: And if you can take that back, and you, okay, this is me, I'm the only one driving this boat, then we add in a lot of stuff around accountability and integrity, because you can't be a great leader without those two things either. So there's my take on it.

Mark: Yeah, I think I would only add that, it's important to mention that we actually get women,

Mark: metaphorically, I use, I say this half jokingly, some of them I think actually have done this begging us to get their partners into our groups because they want their partners to grow up. One of the catchphrases, kind of the little catchphrase in our community is grow the fuck up, it's time to grow up because they want their men to be men.

Mark: They don't want their men to be boys. I get a lot of mileage out of the fact that my partner, she said this years ago, and every time I repeat this all the time, I said, I'm going to use that in all the groups. And she's like, go ahead. Cause it's true. She says. No woman wants to be her man's new mommy

Bill: and

Mark: nice guys.

Mark: Now she's never read the book. She doesn't know anything about any of this stuff. She just, that came out of her mouth spontaneously and nice guys are effectively little boys in adult bodies and helping them make that transition and step into their own masculine leadership like Geoff described It's the crux of it's the crux move for that climb for nearly all men.

Mark: And once they get over that, that's when everything else opens up to them.

Marty: One of the things that I'm listening for in, in this myself, cause I, I have a book coming out on leadership and in about a month, actually. Excellent. Congratulations. Thank you very much. It was a lot of work and I very much enjoyed it.

Marty: The name of the book is "Leadership as Relation", just to keep this not from getting on to my book, but on track with this conversation. I'll make this short, most of the literature and most of the conversations and seminars and workshops that I've been exposed to on leadership.

Marty: They focus on that 1 person who's the leader and what that 1 person needs to look like and act like and say and do right and yet leadership is inherently a relation. It's not just about the leader. It's about the relation to the people who are being led as well. So leadership occurs in a relationship is my that's the, the point of departure from my book.

Marty: So I heard you say, okay, they got to lead their own life with integrity knowing there's themselves and, and what they're here for and, and being true to self. So I want to just. Open it up to the relational side of this, um, which you've been hinting at, you know, by in a lot of ways, but I just wanted to bring the focus to the, the relation.

Marty: So how, how is it that on daunted men, as opposed to nice guys, let's say, are need to show up in the, in relationships differently.

Mark: Well, we talk a lot in terms, we use several terms to kind of frame what you're pointing at, Marty. We talk a lot about what the nature of masculine leadership is, since we are predominantly dealing with men's groups.

Mark: We also talk in terms of masculine containment which is essential containment, which is, which essentially what it, what it means is When you are in a leadership role, you're taking, you take on a PR there's a protector component to that role. And in order to be a protector, and to have, so there's the protector role.

Mark: And then you also have the, have to have the trust of the people that you are leading. And I think that's the relational component from our perspective, without trust, a leader can't lead. Right. And how does a leader develop trust? Well, they care and they make sure that. And they let the people that they are leading know that they care and they demonstrate their care by operating in the best interest of the group, whatever that group is, however you define that group through protecting that group, making hard decisions for that group, and also reaching out and connecting with, to the degree that they are able to with each individual person in that group, if that's possible.

Marty: That makes good sense to me. So just to really push into this a little bit. So how a protector and I would add empowerer, in, in the undaunted sense different from a nice guy who's trying to protect his mom, right?

Mark: Well, it depends on the context there. if somebody's trying to break in the house and the nice guy protects his mom by chasing the way the robber there's no difference there

Marty: What about in a corporate meeting?

Mark: The nice guy is operating in his own best interest always He's always manipulating, always, there's always a hook. There's always a, well, this is going to work out for me kind of thing. There's always a sense of what about me and everything he says and everything he does.

Mark: A leader sets is able to set that stuff aside.

Mark: And

Mark: operate in the best interest of the people he is responsible for and responsible to

Marty: Thank you that's really helpful for our listeners you know to hear because We've still got it You're you're on the cutting edge because we still a lot of us still have it in our heads.

Marty: I know a lot of my Male clients still even female clients still have it in their heads that when you say masculine power or masculine leadership, that means the guy who's going to go off in the corner office and shut the door and keep to himself. Right and that's not what you're pointing at.

Mark: Absolutely not. When we speak in terms of masculine and feminine, those are not gender specific terms

Mark: for

Mark: us. I mean, there's obviously a Venn diagram overlap, but the Venn diagram is not a circle.

Mark: And so when a, we would argue that when a woman is in a leadership position, say in a corporate, in a corporation, she is in her masculine. While she is performing that leadership role, I got it in the same way that if a man is at home and taking care of his children for whatever reason, he's likely in his feminine in a nurturing role with his Children.

Mark: So gender people of any either gender can. They can move back and forth. Now they happen to be more comfortable. People are more comfortable in one than the other. They're in one predominantly more than the other. I happen to be masculine most of the time. But that doesn't mean that I can't go into my feminine and, and take care of somebody that's really hurting.

Marty: But leadership itself is masculine. When a woman's being a leader, she's being masculine.

Mark: And that's not a criticism. And by the way, that is not, I want to be very clear with that is not a criticism. That is not a negative. I mean, you can be, a woman can be an extremely powerful leader. I mean, Hillary Clinton, like her, hate her, whatever.

Mark: She is a brilliant leader, very masculine when she's leading. But I'm sure that when she was at home with Chelsea, when Chelsea was a baby, she was a nurturing mother and solidly in her feminine at that time.

Bill: I'm actually needing a little more clarity here. If you could help me a little more resolution, we might say, sure.

Bill: Would you define masculine? What do you mean in the context of the groups that you're doing? What is masculine? Are you using the word energy or masculine leadership compared to feminine?

Mark: You want to do this, Geoff, or you want me to go?

Geoff: Well, I'll start.

Mark: Okay.

Geoff: Mark just said what I was going to say and what I'm going to add next is Mark and I relate to masculine and feminine.

Geoff: Okay. Okay. As spiritual principles

Marty: like yin and yang.

Geoff: Yeah, yes, very much. It, it really, you know, so in my experience as somebody who is in this male body that spent decades, mostly living in my feminine energy, creative, caring, chaotic, reading, you know, being very much equating my emotions as reality and the truth.

Geoff: And I could be led around by my own nose by myself following that. And add in the nice guy pieces. I was a train wreck that looked better than a train wreck, but internally in hindsight, being so oriented there, I wasn't because I didn't grow up with strong, masculine men. I didn't grow up with men around.

Geoff: The only men that were around me were generally drunks and losers.

Bill: I want to keep up and I want to be clear at what I'm hearing. So feminine energy is characterized by what I'm hearing you describe is emotional orientation. Would you say that's accurate? The kinds of, I guess, focuses and priorities that you described seem to point to preparation, and care.

Mark: Oh yeah. Yes. But I would also, I mean, add that the feminine is the source of life. It's this, it's the source of creativity. It is chaotic but that chaos is necessary to balance the masculine. Order. Masculine energy is the energy of order, of organization, of building. Feminine energy is the energy of creativity, and as I said, it's the source of life.

Mark: And they are complementary energies. You know, out in the world today, there's a lot of, you know, argument about which is better, you know, toxic masculinity and all this other nonsense, right? Masculine and feminine energy, the yin and yang example that Marty uses the right is the right analogy. They are absolutely utterly complimentary energies when you have.

Mark: Too much when you have an overabundance of masculine and not enough feminine image that pops in my head is of the old Soviet Union, you know, concrete apartment blocks, everything square corners and lifeless and dull, but it's very orderly, extremely orderly. Nothing happens there. Yeah, I got it. If there's way, if there, if you have an overabundance of feminine energy and not enough masculine energy, it's like the jungle, it's life everywhere.

Mark: There's no order to anything and you, it's impenetrable and you can't get through and you can't make sense out of any of it. But when you have a balance. When you have co actually better yet. I don't even like that. It's more like when you have cooperation between the masculine and the feminine, then you, you get a, an absolutely harmonious

Bill: and beautiful world.

Bill: So that, that harmony, that balance that you're pointing to can be in relationships between men and women, between men and men, between women and women who balance out their own internal feminine and masculine.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, there's a great

Marty: well, it's going on inside each of us, isn't it?

Marty: I'm 100 percent more of a feminine man, frankly, you're predominantly masculine. I'm, I'm predominantly feminine, but I'm a man and those emotions and that chaos, they don't, you know, I don't live in like this helter skelter world,

Mark: right?

Marty: Those are very powerful. In me and their indicators, I use them all the time and I've been using them throughout this conversation, right?

Marty: But I, but they're balanced within me. I'm not, you know, just like emoting all over the floor here,

Bill: right?

Mark: And we're typically, you know, feminine women typically don't do that either. So you're right. There is always a balance, but where we, where each of us individually are in our internal balance reflects how we show up in life.

Mark: And there's, it's important that we don't make this a right, wrong conversation, because there's nothing wrong with any of this. As a matter of fact, we argue. Be who you are, be absolutely and fully and completely who you are. That's the most important thing and the worst thing that any of us can do is, is clamp down on who we really are and waste time trying to be who other people think we should be.

Bill: That's the worst. So with, with your groups, the undaunted man, it's been fair to conclude that. If someone comes in with a problematic level of masculine energy, you help them to tap into the feminine and vice versa.

Mark: Yes. And if I'm being very honest, we have very few of those men that come to our groups.

Mark: Yeah. Very,

Bill: very few that come in with excessive masculine energy. Correct. What would you say is more common?

Geoff: Feminine, nice guy.

Mark: And nice guy doesn't imply feminine, by the way, that's important. Yeah. So nice guys and guys that have a more dominant feminine energy.

Bill: So nice guy is characterized by being shown how to be a man by a woman.

Mark: Yes. Well, yeah, as a S that's shorthand, but yes.

Bill: Yes. Historically. Yes. Yeah. From my generation, I'm 69 years old and the men. So I was a woman, we worked outside of the home, the women stayed in the home and that left the women to train me on how to be a human being in the world, which meant that they showed me how to be a man.

Mark: Right. And I actually would make the argument and this is a rabbit hole for another conversation, perhaps that, um, the, you know, cause people, we talk about, you know, we talked about the breakdown of male only institutions and blah, blah, blah. Really that start, you know, the real problem started when, with the industrial revolution,

Mark: because

Mark: that's what took men out of the home.

Mark: It was when, when, when the migrate, the great migration to the cities and men being in factories, um, and essentially abandoning the women to handle the kids for 12, 14, 16 hours a day. It used to be a joint project. It also

Bill: created our education system, didn't it?

Mark: Right. The line workers. Yeah. It was essentially the, the school system was designed by people whose goal was to provide good workers for the factories.

Mark: Yes.

Bill: Yes.

Marty: This is a change. So if you wanted to finish something there, I just had another idea pop it and this feminine chaos just came about.

Bill: That's awesome. Let me pause you, Marty. Let's just notice time. We've got, we need to wrap up within 10 minutes here, okay?

Marty: It's a wilder question, but I just got to thinking, like, would undaunted be more complex or, or less complex, or I don't know, what would be the difference of an undaunted group for trans people or even just for gay people?

Marty: I would think that there'd be like another whole level of balancing to do when you're not playing, you know, when you're not just talking about a straightforward. Male female, but when you get even closer to that middle place where the yin and yang are at play, even more. So, like, would that be a more daunting conversation?

Mark: I will say, I can't speak for Geoff on this because I don't think we've ever had a conversation about this particular topic, but I would say that I don't think it would be. And it's not because it wouldn't add some complexity for that individual, but it's really important that we're not talking about gender roles here.

Mark: We're talking about spiritual principles.

Mark: The only thing that we care about, and this is really important, the only thing that we care about is, you know, Is how you're operating, producing the life you want. And that's a yes, no question. And if it's, if the answer is no, then what, how can we support you in making whatever decision you need to make?

Mark: And we don't have an agenda for you. Our only agenda for you is for you to have what you want.

Marty: Yeah, no, I was just thinking that it would be an even more and I think appropriately more lively because the, you know, it's in that in between space where, you know, like, I have moments this way and moments that way.

Marty: And in a same sex marriage, for example, like, there's more of a sharing. It's not like. He does all this and she does all that. It's like, both sexes have to share these roles and these, these ways of being. So that's how I just thought it might. Anyway, it's a little bit of an abstract question for you guys, because that's not what you're dealing with, but it would interest me.

Mark: I think it's fascinating to that'd be a fascinating discussion to unpack. Honestly.

Marty: So 1, just the wrapping up kind of question. How do people who would be interested in your groups? How did they get in touch with you?

Geoff: Couple ways 1, they can go to our website, which is actually the undaunted man dot org. And I think we've done a pretty good job of being pretty transparent about our main operating philosophy, for lack of a better term. And so they can read about. all the different things we offer and there's a contact link where they can reach out that way or they can also just email mark@theundauntedman.Org or Geoff with a geoff@theundauntedman.Org.

Marty: It sounds like your message is be you. is there anything else you want to say in closing to undaunted men out there?

Mark: That is our fundamental message that the key to happiness is to be who you are. Our only agenda is for, is to support men in being the best version of themselves as they define it, not as we define it.

Mark: It's very important and then to remind them that nothing that can be taken from you is actually you.

Bill: Wow. I love that. That might be the quote for the episode here. Nothing that can be taken from you is you. Right. Yep. Is that one of yours, Mark? Did you make that up? Yep.

Mark: Oh, that's a paraphrase of various people.

Mark: Like they're the closest authority on that would be Viktor Frankl. Yeah. From Man's Search for Meaning. Yeah. Yeah. But,

Marty: that's been, that goes, you punny shots will tell you that.

Mark: That's absolutely true, yes. Right. Well, I haven't heard it before.

Marty: Anything that you want to add, Geoff?

Marty: To, just like the closing message to men out there?

Geoff: If you feel The hunger for yourself, go after it. And if you're not afraid, you're not ready.

Marty: Got it. If you're hungry for it, go after it. And if it's not happening, you weren't ready.

Geoff: If you're not afraid. Yeah. If you're not afraid of going after it, then you're probably not ready.

Marty: Got it. Oh, I see. That's even better. Love it.

Geoff: Yeah.

Marty: All right. Well thank you guys. It's been a great conversation and I wish you the best.

Mark: Thank you. Thanks for joining us, Marty. Yeah, thank you both. It's great seeing you again, Marty. It really is. Likewise. Thank you.