Men and Emotions: How to Strengthen Your Emotional Connection with Yourself and Others with Mike Cameron
This week, I was joined by Mike Cameron, CEO, a TEDx speaker, author, and father, for a conversation on his teaching for men to become more emotionally connected, the tragic experience that led him to his calling, and how he turned this tragedy around and was able to accept the calling. This episode is very much for men who crave emotional connection but aren't sure where to start but ALSO for the women who have men in their lives. If you have a husband, brother, or son and you want to understand them better or communicate better, this episode is for you.
Who is Mike Cameron?
Mike Cameron is an eight-figure CEO, ultra-marathoner, a TEDx speaker, author and father, who teaches men to become more emotionally connected. How he came to do this important work stems from a powerful yet tragic experience, his partner was killed by an ex-boyfriend, a situation no one ever wants to find themselves in. Yet he was able to turn this tragedy around and accept the calling to help men everywhere.
He did a TEDx talk called Redefining Badass: The Way Men Think Is Wrong. He also wrote an op-ed titled Dear Men that got over 125,000 shares. And he's basically taking the world by storm about this very important topic. Before we start, I want to make it very clear that this episode is very much for men, men who crave emotional connection but aren't sure where to start. But it's also for the women who have men in their lives. I'm hoping that if you have a husband, brother, son, etc, and you want to understand them better or communicate better that you will read this post and find some value as well.
Turning Tragedy into a Calling
In terms of career choices, Mike felt like he didn’t even have a choice in this. It was more “thrust upon me more than I sought it out.” When he was in his 20s, just starting in his career, he worked for a wholesale garden supply company, he worked his way up the company into sales because, “being the driven young man that I was, I knew that wasn't where I wanted to stay.” As he spent more time in sales, he began to research the emotions behind the customers when they are purchasing, “and as my journey progressed, and I got into business, and leadership, and I recognized that my team, my staff responded emotionally and again, diving into the research, I started to recognize that as human beings not only do we buy on emotion, but we make decisions based on emotion.”
But the biggest factor in his path was the tragic loss of his partner, Colleen. The night before, he had done a podcast interview with Bob Berg, author of The Go Giver.* Later, during dinner with Colleen, he was discussing the interview, “we ended up back at my place, snuggled up on the nest chair, I was reading a book, she had grabbed a copy of The Go Giver.” In The Go Giver, the first law of stratospheric success is the law of value. “So Colleen kind of put it down and looked over at me as we're snuggled up, and she says, hey, I've got a tip for you on adding value. And I said, oh, what's that? She says, when you think I look pretty, you should tell me. And then I being the kind of playful idiot that I am, I said, well, I'll tell you what, how about this? How about when I think you look ugly? I'll let you know. Otherwise, you can just assume I think you look pretty. It prompted this incredible conversation about the importance of sharing how we feel about each other and sharing with the people in your life, what they mean to you.”
The next morning, Colleen got up for work as a yoga instructor, got ready, kissed Mike goodbye, “I said have fun at yoga, and I rolled over and went back to sleep. And when I got up I shot her a text and I said, hey, how is yoga? To which I got no response.” As the morning went on, Mike went to meetings and then met up with some clients for lunch, he was still texting Colleen with no response. “As we're walking into the restaurant, my phone rings. And by this time, you've got that feeling in your gut that something's out of character. This isn't right. I haven't heard from her all morning.”
He answered the call, “the voice on the other end of the line says this is Mike Cameron. And I said yes. And my heart just sank. And I said, is she okay? And he says, Where are you?” So Mike told him where he was and walked out of the restaurant. He waited for “what felt like an hour but was probably just five or six minutes because my house was close by. An unmarked police car pulls up across the street, gets out, walks across the street, and I walk across the median, and right there in the middle of the street, he said those three words that would change my life forever. He just looked at me. And he simply said Colleen is dead. And that was it. This doesn't happen in real life. This can't be real. This can't be real.”
His brain was trying to wrap his head around what had happened but it just couldn’t, but as time went on, “hours turned into days turned into weeks and I started looking at, you know, how can I make an impact, what can I do about this?” Mike was approached by a lot of people who knew he loves to “champion a good cause and I'm one to make things happen. They wanted me to go after the justice system, which certainly let her down. She had a restraining order, she'd done all the right things. But when I looked at that, as a business guy, I'm all about getting to the root problem, how do we build a better restraining order? But a better question is, how do we prevent men from getting to that point in the first place? How do we prevent that man from existing in the first place? And so I started asking different questions.”
So all of the research he had done in his sales and leadership journeys about “the impact that emotion has on human behavior” came full circle. The man who killed Colleen, her ex-boyfriend, made a decision with very permanent consequences based on a very temporary emotion. And when I look at, okay, so what is the actual cause of this? I mean, that's a very, very big part of it.” So talking about emotional connection and why Mike felt so called to teach men “the art and practice of emotional reconnection, is because emotionally connected men don't kill people. Emotionally connected men don't kill themselves. Emotionally connected men make better fathers, they make better husbands, they make better partners, they make better leaders, they make better human beings. And so for me, that was a much better answer than how do we build a better restraining order?”
What Leads Men to Emotional Disconnect
So what is the underlying cause of things in men's lives that might lead to disconnects? Mike says we first have to understand and believe in the research that supports “that we make decisions based on emotion, and if we don't understand those underlying emotions that drive the behaviors we take, we have zero chance of living a fully awakened and purposeful existence.” For example, talking about performing your best, Mike has been a CEO for a company for sixteen years and that company did “exceptionally well because of that level of emotional connection, a more efficient, more effective way of performing at that high level is to really tap into this piece. So I think it's important that we touch on that because it is easy to say, but I'm not that guy. I will never be that guy.”
So those disconnects, and even more extreme situations like what Mike experienced, are because the ability to process those strong negative emotions is missing. In his TEDx Talk, Redefining Badass, Mike spoke about how men think about strength and why those thoughts are wrong. “We tend to think that strong means suppressing, avoiding or burying, how we feel putting up that mask that front, I got this. And that kind of stuff just doesn't work because your emotions are coming out one way or the other.” Take an inventory of things like how well you sleep at night because those emotions that are being buried and avoided will eventually show up, does it show up for you while you’re asleep? Or are you struggling with insomnia? Or maybe “your emotions show up in your physical ailments. And so they're coming out one way or the other. So you can either pretend to bury, suppress, and avoid, but they're coming out. Or you can be intentional about how they come out.”
For Mike, his support system made a huge difference in his life, specifically a Yogi friend from Montreal. His friend sent him a copy of Ram Das’s letter “Rachel” the day after Colleen was killed, “that letter changed my life, maybe even more so than the experience.” Three pieces of the letter really stuck out to him, “the first was, he said, ‘is anyone strong enough to remain conscious through such teachings as you’re receiving?’ And I knew in that moment, that I had to remain conscious through those teachings that I was receiving. And the second piece that he said was ‘our rational minds will never understand. But our hearts if we keep them open to God will find their own intuitive way.’ And the third piece was ‘now is the time to let your grief find expression, no false strength.’” For Mike, a man who took pride in being strong and hard, that was difficult “but finding those moments where I could just break down and be with her to an extent, and let my grief find expression like that. The timing, the delivery, everything about that letter, that absolutely 100% changed the trajectory of my life.”
True Strength Comes from Experiencing Emotions
How do men, who tend to believe they can “brute force these things, suck it up,” start healing and then feeling that emotional connection again? Realize that real strength doesn’t come from avoiding and suppressing difficult emotions, “true strength is really about having the courage to sit there, experience those feelings, and learn from them what we can.” Mike uses the acronym SOAR with the men he works with.
S stands for slow down, “practice that pause, for many of us, especially if you're talking to high performers, what happens is we're moving so fast that we miss things. We actually miss what's going on in here. So when we slow down, and then we open up and just allow those to come up.”
O is open up “and let whatever is there come up. One, it's opening up to myself and really allowing what's there to come up. And the second piece is open up and share. So whether that's to my partner, whether it's to another man, whether it's just saying, you know what, right now, I'm feeling a lot of gratitude. Just opening up not only to yourself but sharing that. And the discoveries you'll have are incredible.”
A is for “accept what’s there. For many of us, it's like, who the hell am I to feel shitty, because I've got everything, I've got all the resources, and I don't want to accept that I feel crappy in the moment. So now I feel crappy for feeling crappy, which just becomes this cycle.”
And R stands for reconnection, “and the reason I use reconnect is because if you think of kids, toddlers, we're not disconnected from our emotional selves as kids, anybody that's had toddlers knows that a two-year-old is very good at expressing their emotions. It gets beaten out of us as we grow up.”
So what about the people in a position to support men? Maybe they're noticing that they're struggling with processing emotions, or they don't know how to actually talk to them about this kind of stuff. And that can be a real challenge. For Mike, he’s seen that struggle a lot with the men he works with, “I also work with a lot of sort of average, everyday Joe's who, whose partners will send them to me, because they see they're hurting, and they want more for them. But sometimes what happens, and I've seen this a few times, not a lot, but there are varying degrees, is when the man starts to get a little more connected, it can be intimidating for their partner, because for a lot of partners, that's the role they've filled. They're the emotional support.”
So what happens if your partner starts to get more connected with themselves? Are you still needed? Still relevant? It can be scary for a partner to watch a man evolve so we have to be mindful of when it starts to come up “for you as a support person, and you know, it may not be as direct as I'm scared they won't need me anymore because they're figuring their own crap out.” But that does often come up in some way.
It’s all about opening up a safe space for your partner and saying “hey, babe, you look like you're really stressed today. I'd love for you just tell me about it. I'm not going to give you any advice, I'm not going to fix it, I just want to hear about what's going on in there.” And that becomes a practice too and over time you get to a point where “you can start to recognize in others when things are coming up. So again, for guys, you know, the hands are tensing, the jaw’s tight, the something or other is going on and recognizing and say, hey, what's going on there?”
Mike asks them about their physical reactions, men are better at recognizing what’s going on in their physical being, “so I'll say, hey, Joe, what's going on there? I see, you know, your hands are going or your foot’s tapping or your leg’s bouncing, what's going on there?” First you look at the physical and then dive into where it’s coming from and when that connection is made, “that's when things start to flow. But that's a real skill. That's an art. And it's a practice.”
The Power of Sharing With Your Partner
From a support system standpoint, in relationships, it’s about being intentional for each other. Saying “you know what, let’s sit down and just talk about what’s going on.” Maybe you sit together for five minutes or ten minutes just to sit and slow down. Mike and his partner do what they call “forehead time” where they spend a few minutes sitting forehead to forehead. “That's become a thing for us and it's amazing, because anytime either one of us needs more connection with the other we don't have to explain it at all. Hey, babe, I need a little forehead time. Okay, when? How about tonight at five after dinner?”
So creating that intentional space and starting with that slow down opens up for further connection. Then you can move forward and share with each other for a set amount of time, start small with things like “what are you feeling physically?” Then you’re able to open up more with “okay, so how does that equate emotionally? What do you feel? I'm feeling calm? I'm feeling peaceful. Or, you know, maybe it's my job title tense, frickin angry and pissed off. Okay, well tell me more about that. Again, it's not about fixing anything. And that's the biggest thing and especially for us guys. Right? We want to fix everything.”
Presenting that practice of connecting and taking those moments to slow down can be tricky, but it’s important to communicate openly that however much your partner wants to share, the details they share, is entirely up to them and you aren’t there to offer feedback or advice. You tell your partner you want to talk about it, but they don’t want to talk about it, so “we don't need to talk about it. I just want you to tell me what you're feeling. We're not going to talk about it. You're going to tell me how you're feeling.”
Another thing men often run into is the feeling of becoming a burden, their feelings becoming a burden, on loved ones, on partners, but Mike encourages the men he works with to recognize that yes, “you don't want to burden them because you care so much for your partner. You're carrying this giant weight. The last thing you want to do is take that weight and put it on their shoulders. But think about this, how powerful is it when you can say I trust you so much. I care for you so much that I'm going to open up my heart, and I'm just going to share with you what I'm feeling. I don't need you to carry this for me. Like, how powerful is that connection?”
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Affirmation
I embrace the emotions I feel and allow myself to pause in acceptance so I can reconnect with myself.
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