Leading with Compassionate Masculinity
As far as taglines go, this has been one of the ever-shifting endeavors since launching my practice 2.5 years ago. Where I’m landing today is Sympónia Men: Leading with Compassionate Masculinity. I’ve always been someone who likes to tread into the provocative and to bring juxtaposed ideas together.
I’ve found that there’s resonance for Compassionate Masculinity on a few levels. One, people aren’t used to seeing those two words together and so it creates a level of intrigued to learn more about what this is and how these words are used. Two, in a time where toxic, healthy, unhealthy, conscious, unconscious, and integrated/unintegrated have been ways to describe masculinity, I offer a way to think about masculinity in a non-dualistic way. Moving from there is a right/wrong, good/bad, higher-level/lower-level version on one’s relationship to masculinity.
Masculinity is a construct pure and simple. It’s a think that has been created outsides of ourselves that holds norms, ideals, and social conditioning based on what past generations, the media, our parents, organized religion, and peers to name a few have said masculinity is and show be.
In many of the circles that I’m in, we talk about the human experience as seeking to come into one’s essence, or one’s highest self and the shadow experience where the unknown is hold. This unknown parts of ourselves that wants to stay hidden and is often surrounded by fear and shame. Carl Jung stated the shadow to be the unknown dark side of the personality. According to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to psychological projection, in which a perceived personal inferiority is recognized as a perceived moral deficiency in someone else.
Yet, in our personal and spiritual growth, we learn to love and accept all parts of ourselves including our shadow, which can be the stuff within us that holds the most unconscious shame, but is what creates many of our strongest triggers.
I believe this journey as men, as humans, and as leaders, it to look at ourselves deeply to understand our true essence, the possibilities that emerge from our highest selves, and our know our shadow and to tap into the places that hold our shame, how our fears, and that which can hold us hostage from coming into our full potential and into our deeper humanity. As men, as humans, and as leaders, we often wear masks where we project the best possible image from our constructed identities. However, the question, who are we really at our core, at our essence and how have we learned to unearth our shadows and embrace that part of ourselves as well.
Coming back to masculinity. Many of us across the gender continuum hold masculinity as this thing that gives us a roadmap for how we should be rather than allowing us to be who we are. Masculinity is often referred to as the social roles, behaviors, and meanings prescribed for men in any given society at any one time. As such, it emphasizes gender, not biological sex, and the diversity of identities among different groups of men.
So it’s a construct that informs how men are supposed to be and show up. Now when you put anyone into an organizational system that holds a preference for masculinity, you begin to realize that everyone regardless of gender is taking on the attributes that prefer and speak to masculinity.
When we combine these two words, Compassion and Masculinity into Compassionate Masculinity, it begs a question - what happens if we take this construct of masculinity that we said is often referred to as the social roles, behaviors, and meanings prescribed for men in any given society at any one time and surround it and inject it with compassion? What happens?
And if we take this idea of compassion and begin to question and challenge where our notions, connotations, and assumptions around compassion come from in relation to our relationship with masculinity? Why is masculinity seen as strength? Why is compassion seen as weakness?
Compassionate Masculinity offers men, women, and all across the gender continuum to have an experience of tapping into the energy of love and reframe the ways we minimize or diminish love-based approaches.
Leading with Compassionate Masculinity could be reframed as Leading with Love on a so many levels. Compassionate Masculinity offers an invitation for all of us to tap into love in a new way and to unlock the holds that prevent us from tapping into love. So what if we were to lead with love? What if we were to recalibrate our relationship with masculinity and masculine ideals, and what if we were to embrace compassion by opening our hearts to the fullest level of our compassionate expression? These are some of the questions that come forward as we consider Leading with Compassionate Masculinity.