Awakening Men to Purpose

What's working on Purpose anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want Working on Purpose now. Here is your host, Doctor Elise Cortez. Welcome back to Working on Purpose program. Thanks for tuning in again this week. Great to have you. I'm doctor Elise Cortes, your host. Join you live from Dallas, which is home base for me. If you don't know me, I'm a management consultantsizing in meaning and purpose, organizational logo therapist, inspirational speaker, social scientist, and author. You learn more about me and how we can work together at at least quartet dot com, Orgusto dashnow dot com. Let me thank my partner and sponsor work Proud. We are a perfect collaboration. Everyone wants to know they matter and that their work they do is meaningful and appreciated. Work Proud is a mobile platform built to encourage employees to share stories and recognize each other's contribution. Work Proud empowers hr and business leaders to help create company cultures where all employees are inspired to feel proud of their work and proud of their company. Learn more at work proud dot com. With us today is Gabriel Kazan, a transformational men's coach, speaker, writer, and thought leader in the space between mythic imagination and embodiment. He is a trauma and art therapist living in the mountains of Western Canada, currently working on a book entitled The Wholehearted Man, Unclenched from the Fear so you can claim purpose and personal freedom with balls, backbone and heart. He joins us from Nelson, British Columbia in Canada. Gabriel, Welcome to Working on Purpose. Thank you so much. Great to be here with you. I'm so glad to catch you. I'm happy that we met through our common Global Purpose Leaders group here and you were willing to come on and share what you're up to. I'm very interested in what you're doing, in part because you might remember that I am just now launching an anthology focused on men and sharing their stories of how they discover and are living from their purpose and then I smack right into you. So this ought to be a fun conversation. So for this first segment, what we want to talk about is why men need to do this work and really the opportunity that at present. So that's what I want to focus on for this And so, as you well know, I read things cover to cover when I come on and prep for these conversations, and I really appreciate you you shared your ebook with me, and so let's just start with what you say here. You say men are in crisis, a crisis of roles, expectations, and conflicting signals. Three out of four suicides are men, and the numbers of men taking their own lives has been increasing. As men, we are in a potent time of shape shifting our identities by descending into the mud of our humanness. Can you say more about what you mean by that and why this work is so important? Yeah, I'd love to, well, which part of the question I like, the maybe entering into the mud? Yeah, and the descent, because that's really where my approach to this work comes in. Is uh, you know, working with men on purpose is often a process of coming in and down rather than up and out. And that's what I think of when I think of the Mud, is a descent into our humanness and the messiness of that, the mistakes. Often I find men coming to me when they're in crisis. That could be a divorce, it could be, you know, an illness, could be a major transition like a loss. Essentially, it often involves a real kick in the ass from life, and that could have something to do with grief. Grief's another big entry point where men go through a death and need to ask themselves all over again, well who am I? Now? You know, something brings them to their knees and and that's what that's when they get to recalibrate and say, yeah, well who am I here? And and then that's where things get really powerful. And one of the things that you and I have in common in both working in the purpose space is we both know that. And you talk about this too in your book. You say making your purpose matter is the remedy for depression, anxiety, addiction, existential angst, heartbreak, relationship lost, all kinds of trauma, learned, helplessness, and a host of other issues here here, Gabriel completely agree with that much cheaper than therapy as well regular therapy or any kind of drugs too, for that matter. So you're say more a bit more about why this is such a great remedy. Well, see, I've been a therapist for five years specializing in men and men's issues. But here's what I see. And in terms of therapy, I like to come back to the words of James Hillman, who was a bit of a warrior within the field of therapy because he wasn't afraid to poke fun at the limitations of therapy. And he wrote a book called We've had a hundred years of psychotherapy and the World's getting worse, And the title of that says, says an f And so that's also what I started to notice in my practice is that you know, men will come in to see me and they'll dip into their troubles and their traumas, but there's no accountability, there's no follow through. And from what I've seen, the men who actually go deep enough to find out and clarify what their purpose is are the ones who go further, faster through their troubles and forward into creating the success in their life, and once they are aligned with that purpose, that sort of personal power linked to the mission of unfolding that purpose, then the troubles and traumas kind of silence themselves. They turn their volume down because he's got his direction. And that could be you know, in relationship or in work and purpose and career both it's it's a both, and as we know, there's an intersection of personal growth and professional growth. And that's what I see as the pendulum swings for men between those polls of you know, just stepping into more courage to show up for who they are, because at the end of the day, in the purpose work field, there can be this mystical assumption that purpose is something outside of us. It's out there, I need to go find it. It's like, and I like to dispel that myth from time to time and remind my people that you are your purpose like you are your purpose. So really just getting more clear around who you are now, maybe maybe not who you were five years ago or two year or even two months ago, but right now, what is life asking of you and bringing that fire of presence into the question so that men can make bold and decisive changes and get the outcomes state that they're looking for. I love that fire of presence. That's so great, and that kind of stands just I want to just to quickly surface. You talk about waking up men from sedation, and certainly I have been a member of the Walking Dead by the way, so I was a card caring member. I know what that feels like, and it did actually help to go through my divorce to kind of get me out of that. So so this whole idea of waking up from saydacious sedation. Yeah, Well, another way to word it is default purpose. And when we're the walking dead, we're often living out a program that is someone else's, it's not ours, and that's what makes us feel dead. So that's when the transition from default purpose or living a life by default like towards a purpose driven growth where all aspects are aligned and there's a straightness and a clarity to that trajectory. Yeah. So the sedation, I think it's easy to fall into because we're not really taught how to know who we are. We're not encouraged too, we're just encouraged to go do it. I've been in rooms where there's hundreds of businessmen in one room, and when they asked, like, how did you get to be doing the business you're doing now? By default or by design? Fifty percent of the room is by default, you know, fifty percent, like half half the hands went up by default. They're just like, I just ended up here, just ended up here, you know. And there's a way, there's a way we can make that work. You can find excellence in a default purpose to a point, but there comes a limit when usually some powerful crisis needs to emerge to awaken us from that sedation and and then say, actually, this is not what I'm here for. And maybe it was for a while, but I'm going for who I am. And there's a mythic image of the hunter who discovers the golden feather on the trail, and his horse is a talking horse, because it's a myth says, if you pick up that golden feather, you will know trouble, and you will know grief and and and the question is will you pick up that feather? And the feather, of course, represents the genius and the heat of that that that one shiny thing that so few are willing to say yes to, to pick that up, that one shiny thing and say I'm all in. I'm going to get all in on this shiny thing. And in the Firebird story, which is the myth I'm telling, the hunter picks that up and he goes and shows it to the king. So he brings it right to the center of the realm, the center of his being, his psyche in the story structure, and he faces the trouble. So that's the trouble, is the call to pick up that thing, that that thing that's calling you look, and that's going to get me right into where I want to go next. One of the things that you had said to me when we first were on the phone getting ac coointed talking about this conversation, you mentioned that you had done some work reading David Dita's work, and so of course I picked up the book and I read most of it over the weekend, and I wanted you to comment on this passage that I thought was very compelling. This comes from his The Way of the Superior Man book. He says, some men fear the feeling of fear, and therefore don't even approach their edge. They choose a job they know they can do well and easily, and don't even approach the fullest leaving of their gift. Their lives are relatively secure and comfortable, but dead they lack the aliveness, the depth, the inspirational energy that is the sign of a man living at his edge. Beautiful. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think Data presents like a wild card in the field of men's work and men's personal growth work because he said so much that nobody else was willing to say or could even articulate when he started putting his workout. And it's provocative because he pokes at the wounds of all this sedation that for so long men have been put in a position of comfort and not challenged. Men need challenge in order to rise and need that accountability. Actually, men need to be confronted by truth mirror, to look in the truth mirror and say, where where am I lying to myself? Where in my life am I dead? And am I willing to move through that and stop lying to myself? To clean up my chaos and to start to own it. And I think that's what what Data is getting at is is the challenge to if you're not living your purpose now, then your purpose must be to find your purpose, which is a purpose in itself. Is that unfoldment because as we know, purposes somehow paradoxically always the same because it's unique to each person, but it's always changing as we move through the phases of life. And you know, it's like it's kind of like expression something. Yeah, well, I like actually you you actually say this, And the way you situate your work is you talk about that you're in terms of your approach to purpose. Coaching is to disrupt the way men live live their lives. That's exactly what you're doing with them. Yeah. Yeah, And and see that's the slippery part is they have to be open to that disruption. They have to say, yes, I'm lying to myself and I need help. I need someone to hold me accountable. I need someone to put me between that rock and that hard place so that I push through this this stuck place, this sedated place, this dead zone of where I've I've fallen into depression or addiction. Yeah, that those are whole other you know, major things beyond grief. There's there's those other troubles of depression, anxiety, and addiction, which can you know, you can get by with for a while, but unless you go deep and do the grief work and the anger, transformation work underneath those problems, then you're just going to be spinning your wheels. And so what I've found is that transformational coaching is a greater gift for me to be able to give because I get to hold men accountable because they've made a bigger commitment to getting the outcomes, whereas in therapy they might might show up and then it's like, well, so what you know, they get to choose whether they come back to see me one at a time. And what I love is seeing men come alive. And I've seen it. I've seen men transform their lives from having the brink of a divorce or you know, being so utterly stressed out by their work that they can't see their life clearly, and then through working with me, get clearer and clearer around what they need to say no to where they need to ask for help. Yeah, because for many men, asking for help is a taboo. We're taught not to We're taught to toughen up, we can do it all ourselves. We're supposed to be figuring it all out. But that nothing could be further from the truth. Asking for help is a power move. I love that and a great way to go into our first break. Gabriel, I'm at Least Cortez your host. We've been the air with Gabriel Kazan, a transformational men's coach, speaker, writer, thought leader in the space between mythic imagination and embodiment. We've been talking a bit about why men need to do this work and how they win. After the break, we're going to get into his approach to purpose coaching. Stay with us, We'll be right back. Doctor Release Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose, operational speaker, and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elise Cortez dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise ali Se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on purpose. Thanks for staying with us and welcome back to working on purpose. As I watched the pandemic continue on, I've looked for ways to help company support their employees handle their anxiety, stress, depression and feeling disconnected, while also helping to lift and inspire them with ongoing professional development. So we now offer a well being learning series called Grab your Gusto Vita well Being from the inside Out. You can learn more about it at at least cortes dot com or send me an email to at least cortes dot com if you're just joining the program. My guest is Gabriel get Kazan, a transformational men's coach, speaker, writer, and thought leader in the space between mythic imagination and embodiment, is currently writing a book titled The Wholehearted Man, Unclinched from Fear, so you can claim your purpose and personal freedom with Ball's backbone and heart. You've joined this today from Nelson, British Columbia in Canada. I'm your host, doctor Lease Cortez, and I'd love the title of that book, all right. So you started to say something before that I really want to grab and I think this is a little bit arresting for people and that's why I want to make sure we cover it. You say that your purpose may be connected to your primal wound as a man, and aligning with purpose takes commitment, courage, and accountability. That's why you need to warrior up to a sobering, eagle eye view of your life. So first this idea of wound. What do you mean by wound? I think I have an idea, but let's hear it for our listeners and viewers. Well, that's a great question. Thanks for clarifying that, because you know, I think we, I think the dominant culture generally likes to deny wounds and deny pain or discomfort. We like to put band aids on things. Yes, we do, and just override, override the pain and maybe take a pain killer and just keep going. So to track wounds or to invoke that is actually to slow down and start to look at where our pain comes from with a different angle. And so, yeah, when I say wounds, I mean the deeper questions of like what's driving me, what's driving my life? And and usually at the root of it is some kind of question of worthiness that we can you know, go way back to look at family of origin stuff. You know, mommy stuff or Daddy's stuff, And and the question is, like, whose approval am I seeking by driving my life in a certain direction? What am I trying to gain or achieve? And you know, there's a saying if we don't tend our wounds, then we project them into the world and then and then they can, yeah, and they can run our lives. So I don't want to, you know, be stuck in some pity party staring at my wounds, you know, but we do need to go in and down and tend them because there's trapped emotional energy in there. There's grief, there's fear, there's sadness, and there's anger in there. And so when we can open up a space enough to go in and find out what that is, what's that voice inside, that flame in that trapped energy, and listen to it, it can give us direction. And then we reach a place of being both broken and unbreakable. Mostly there's a denial of being broken, of not wanting to face that feeling that I'm maybe fundamentally flawed or that I'm wounded. There's a there's a want to quickly deny that, but I say, we've got to go through the paradox of feeling the feels feeling the blisters. Joseph Campbell said, follow your bliss, which is true, and I'll encourage that that's going to lead you to your purpose. It's that one golden feather, that shiny thing. But don't get that you're going to need to follow your blisters along the way, which is the ouch spaces, the upper limit problem that we bump up against when we actually are ready to expand into a new level of success or abundance or freedom or happiness, and then something self sabotages that. Unless we do our wound work well and marry the sense of being broken with also being unbreakable both, then we're going to be stuck. So I work with both the spirit of being bulletproof and unbreakable, but I'm not going to deny or override the need to actually tend those deeper waters so that we can get really clean and clear on what are our emotional drivers underneath our purpose. Because there's the strategic and the tactical around purpose unfoldment, whether it's running a business or navigating career choices or a marriage, But underneath are the deeper drivers. And if you try and move the tactical without engaging the deeper drivers. It's like being a rider on an elephant and the rider can't move the elephant unless the elephant is willing to go. And that's the emotional body, that's the deeper longing. So yeah, what are what are The question I have is what are the the deeper emotional charges that are pushing your purpose forward? You know, and our listeners like, what is that for you? You know? For some it's freedom for summits, love for summits belonging, but it's good to know what it is and that way it helps you kind of clean your your your wheelhouse, sort of speak and be really clear. And once you claim that that alignment with this is what I'm here for and these are the tactics and strategies that I'm going to fulfill, that life gets easier and roads open up absolutely right well, And to that end, I just wanted to give our listeners and viewers kind of a breadth of what it is that you do. Obviously we can't go super deep on these because we don't have too much time, and this is your program, but the way that you go about helping you the men that you coach you these four keys to thriving in life, love, and business, and I want to I'll say a little something about each one of these. First is aligned with your purpose, then live your creativity unclinched from your fear and get all in with your inner king. So let's talk about the first one. First, align with your purpose. So your purpose statement is a living expression of the power of your of your soul contract with the world, you say, which I think is beautiful, and it has your connection with your genius encoded in it. It will naturally become multifaceted and evolve over time, which you alluded to before. But can you say a little bit more about this first key that you work from, yesh yesh. So alignment is totally essential, just like really getting back to what are the emotional drivers and and then working in a reverse engineering fashion. One way I like to support people get really aligned with purpose work is to befriend their death and say, yeah, well, do your write your obituary as if you're going to die to moral for one thing, and then see what it says, Oh, oh, that's what my life has been. Oh okay, And then write your obituary again as if you lived life to your fullest and gave your gift fully, and we're fully satisfied with everything you've got to do. So touching in with death can bring a kind of urgency into the contract of like, oh, that's what I need to fulfill while I'm here. And then what rises to the service when we write that second obituary is the alignment piece. Oh, Okay, there are gifts I haven't given yet and things I need to say. I need to take some courageous, imperfect action, you know, and make some massive changes in so that I can really show up fully and live a life fully express which which is what I want for the people I serve, is to just do that. You know, have that me too, and really quick on the whole purpose. Purpose works in part because we don't know our expression date and how long we get to live. That's a big reason why purpose works so well. That is the urgency piece. And so I had an undertaker on my show talking about this, and it is one of the magic elctures that actually does make it work. So I love what you say, getting friendly with your death. So love that. Okay, your second key is creativity, and you say the secret to your creativity is having support and tools to remove blocks, prevent distraction and interruption, to create movement when things get stuck. This is where the sacred marriage of wildness and discipline come together. Sounds good to me, Well, I guess so. I'm trained as an art therapist, so the flow of creativity and inspiration has always been an interest in mine. And then the discipline is how to structure that you know, how to how to create time blocks that are uninterrupted where you can get into a flow state and work on that project you know, and and really feel maximize your production in a way that satisfies. Uh. That's that's I think working with the muses and working with creative energy and containing it. The wildness and discipline. Uh. Metaphor is also comes from the mythic literature on initiation. Is there's always a hero's journey where we go into the swampland, or we go to the forest's edge, or we go into some other world, some some underworld, and that's wild because we need to reclaim something there. We need to recover some elicks or some gift and then bring it back to the king or bring it back to the queen, bring it back to the courtyard. To have it seen in the world. And so there's always this arc the mythic literature between the structure of the work, the world, the court and the forest, the discipline and the wildness, and staying in touch with both is essential for the spirit, you know, so that you're you're connected with your inspiration and what that that still small voice is wanting to create through you. For me, my my leaver, is the emotion of awe. Being able to immerse yourself in some kind of a situation or experience that allows you to experience the emotion of awe. Because when we experience awe, it's just the sheer experience of it changes the mental models in our brain to make sense of it, and it expands us. It opens something. So for me, that's how it's my connection to that. And so what I find so interesting, right is this is your unique sauce, your unique way to be, your recipe for for doing this work. And I never tire of hearing the stuff. By the way, can you tell it's great? All right? So number three is unclinched from fear and this is so great what you say here, because I know that this four letter word scares a lot of people, men and women both so unclinched from fear. You say, fear is the absence of love. Fear gets into the body and hides while creating holding patterns that can keep us out of alignment with our highest purpose, which is the unfoldment of our gifts. Naming fears is the first step in the process of unclinching from their power grip. There are many types of fear. You talk about failure, ridicule, being seen, annihilation, rocking the boat, et cetera. This fear stuff is really important work. I'm really curious to get your perspective on how you work with fear. Well, it's kind of it's kind of obviously it's different, you know, depending on who I'm working with, and I'm going to really orient to what's alive for them. But another way of looking at fear is that it's it's also just wherever I feel unsafe, you know, like am I safe? It's it's a question of safe and there's a the ternel kind of struggle between freedom and security, and often in our identity, which is the self, which is where my wheelhouse is is we have character armor that keeps us feeling safe, Like oh, I'm safe because I'm going to wear this mask for now and I'm just gonna But there always comes a point where that character armor or the persona has to crack open and something deeper, some well of truth needs to flow from underground and upset that structure. So unclenching from fear is an embodied practice, and I talk about it from the ground up and about noticing where in the body are the holding patterns, like am I am I biting my tongue when I should be having my voice? Am I tents in my shoulders? Or am I clenching my fists? Everybody has a different place in their body where they store fear. So hunting fear is about going in and down tracking it through the body and then finding it and bringing presence to it, opening up saying what do you need? What? What does this feeling need? And you know, maybe it's a tightness in the tummy or a tightness in the chest. So it's kind of it's a yoga, it's a it's an embodied practice, it's a martial art. It's a way of moving and then and then finding out where to take a stand and confront that fear and see it for what it is, because sometimes it can come into the body like fear lines, like like it feels like there's a contracts in the world that keep us small, that keep us hiding, that keep us shrinking or invisible or voiceless, whatever those contracts are, whether their relationships, jobs, professional peers, and then seeing where we're giving our power away and then seeing where those fear lines come in and then just clipping them kind of one at a time, and say, what would happen if I just clipped that one? What would happen if I gave myself permission to be who I am and speak my truth, the truth that's bubbling up right now in my life. And so that's what the practice of hunting fear or unclenching from fear comes from a somatic trauma embodied practice m attack that. We could go several layers on that, but they'll just have to come back from more conversations. So let's grab our last break. I'm Elise Cortez, your host. We've been on the air with Gabriel Kazan, a transformational men's coach, speaker, writer, and thought leader in the space between mythic imagination and embodiment. We've been talking a bit about his approach to how he coaches men. After the break, we're getting going to get into the real muck of purpose work. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Doctor Release Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elise Cortez dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is Working on Purpose with Doctor Release Cortez. To reach our program today or open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise ali Se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I mentioned at the first break about the Grab Your Gusto well being a webcast that I'm doing now. This program is actually taken from my book with the part one of my book which is called Purpose Ignited. How inspiring leaders, ignite passion and elevate cause, which is now available on Amazon. And I wrote that book, like Gabriel was saying before, to awaken readers to their passion and purpose and transform them into inspirational leaders who enliven the workplace and elevate the contribution of business to all its stakeholders. So that's how the program was derived and created. If you're just joining us, my guest today is from Nelson, British Columbia in Canada. Gabriel Kazan a transformational men's coach, speaker, writer and thought leader in the space between mythic imagination and embodiment. He is currently writing a book entitled The Wholehearted Man, Unclenched from Fear, so you can claim purpose and personal freedom with balls, backbone and heart. I'm your host, doctor las Cortez. So before we go on to a bit more of this mark here, let's just grab that fourth key that you talk about, Gabriel, and then go all in so so important, right, So, committing with your whole heart is your greatest power to actualize your purpose in your life, love and business. You say this all in quality of commitment and connection with your heart. And your knowledge of who you are acts as your primordial inner that is so great. Well, yeah, the king, right, the sovereign at the center of the psyche, so to speak, is how I think of these mythic, mythopoetic terms like the king. You could also call it the captain. You know, for men, it's that inner one in charge, the central emanating decision maker. And there's that different aspects to it. There's the ceo, there's the hustler, the drive, you know, there's the desire, the longing, and you know, either way, it's always a heart centered place because from from the teachings that I work with is the mind is a great servant, but we can't let it be in charge. It's got to serve of something down here that we're listening to. That's actually where the true power is. And when yeah, usually in times of you know, life or death circumstances, we come into a certain clarity around what's really important. And it's the heart that's making all the big decisions. And and that's why it's so important to do that wakefully and align heart with will and all the whole sword. What I do with my clients is we talk about the sword as the midline of the body, and for a lot of men collapse depression, addiction, or default purpose, we'll have a man not willing to pick up his sword and wield his personal power to create. We're designed to create. We're designed to provide, to provoke, to create, to make things, make things more free. So picking up the sword is about warrioring up to protect that king and to take direction from that place. So that's a little you know on the inner king, but it takes it takes giving oneself permission to go there, and and you know, for women it might be the queen. But working with these powers, this is uh, these are coded into our psyches. You know, through fairy tales we need to There's a line from I think it's C. S. Lewis that says, when you're old enough again, you will listen to fairy tales again. Oh I love that. I've never heard that before, But I love that stories are so important. That's one of the reasons I'm a story catcher, and I love that so well. This idea of the king and going all in. One of the things that, of course we both know that can get in the way of that is shame and one of the things that you talk about that I was very, very drawn to. It's this notion of shame shifting. And this is so important ladies and gentlemen to listen to and really get your arms around or even start to investigate. But the way you say at Gabriel, which I appreciated, you say, shame is a deep feeling of being unworthy that can be lodged in the tissue and energy systems of the body. Shame can be frozen into the muscle memory in a freeze response. You say, you teach three movements for shifting, healing shame, and shatter the trans unworthiness through your chosen embodiment. Practice is the opportunity. Shame is fascinating and it's very powerful. Yeah, yeah, and I think to get you know, it's different than guilt just to you know, identify guilt being more like I did something bad, and then shame is like when I am bad or I've internalized the belief that I am bad and somehow not not worthy. And so shame shifting is I say, it's warrior work because it's deep and it requires the precision of truth, which is that blade that's going to cut away the lies. Which if we have a false belief of self that I'm flawed or unworthy, it takes that kind of courage to cut that away. It's like a form of psychic surgery. So it happens best in relationship, So having a mentor or a facilitator or a group to work through these deeper places and saying what needs to be said. Because shame is insidious. It has a freeze response, and I think of it in terms of freezing like an iceberg or an Arctic ice sheet across the ocean, and the nervous system will shut down and it breeds in silence. So not talking about that thing puts a layer of shame on top of the shame, and then it can grow like a scab. So cutting in with presence, penetration and claiming a space for asserting truth is a way to break those ice sheets. And I have a moodra where my fingertips are together at my midline and this represents like a little tug boat that goes in front of the oil tankers in the Arctic Ocean, and the tug boat has to break the ice. So so for me, that assert asserting into the frozen places takes that kind of heart courage to break through the frozen places and to let the truth through. So that's one kind of image and movement of shifting shame, really just going from silence to sharing and from contempt for the self to compassion for the self. Yeah. I was just listening to a TED talk today by Peter Sage, who really whose work I quite admire, and he was also talking about this notion and where it is that we pick up this shame early in life. And it might have been something very just simple that one of our parents just said something when they were having first rate to day and we took that to be the truth, and we've kept that all these years. But that's why all the more reason that, however, we get to that and you're talking about ways to excess this, but first and foremost, and this is what we talked about before, which I think is so important. You say asking for help is a power move, and I think that is just profoundly fantastic and just right to the point. And you say feeling your pain and having it seen and contained with empathic witnessing as a way to tend your wounds. Yes, yeah, sometimes it does need a set of outside eyes to just see it and release that energy that and I mean that happens in the therapy room, but it also happens in personal growth and and in coaching work just as much when we can see the stuck places, see the wounds, the broken parts, and then just bless them. Just go Okay, that's that's there. And then what's the next step? You know, how do I move that energy bio energetically, Just keep moving forward and and you know, not not to the denial of that tenderness. And we need both, We need fierceness and tenderness, both in an integrated way. M You know, I there's a reason that I host a radio show and that I speak five different languages, and that I've I've written a book. I love words, right, I love language, and you have a beautiful way of using language, Gabriel. So I have to go on to another thing that you sent her that I thought was so great. You said, getting in getting in touch with emotions and moving through that through our bodies is so necessary and healthy. And you say, acting in honor of the greatest sense of loss and allowing tears to flow and set set wet on the cheeks, tears off a ce better. The grieving man is most in touch with his bone memory, as grief pulls him in and down. Yeah. Yeah, when I first started getting into the men's workspace, I had a mentor bring that up. You know, there's a taboo around male vulnerability, right, we're taught. If there's one thing that is unique to the male male mode of shame, is that we're taught to not show weakness. Yes, you know, and women have a different shame experience. But to not be able to show weakness is such a wound, such an incredible wound. So I had this mentor talking about, you know, the importance of weeping in a circle of men. And you know, it can easily get cliche about it or stereotypical. But when a man can let his tears fall on his cheeks and wear them on his cheeks like with pride, to me, that's a power. That's a powerful man. Yeah, because he's he's in touch with that. The power of grief is such that it shows us what we love, It shows us what matters to us. So to grieve is also to praise. So to be in touch with grief is to be close with that source of what the heart loves and and that's why you know, of all the male archetypes they talk warrior, king, lover, magician. When Robert Bly wrote Iron John, he wrote in a couple of pivotal archetypes that men need beyond those four and one is the trickster, and the other is the grief because that's the one that's gone all the way down to the bottom of the of the water and the mud and then returned up like a phoenix from the flame, you know, with with depth. So I guess in the purpose coaching work I do, it's all about purpose oriented growth, which is connected to the very bottom realm, very bottom of the realm, which is to me, the grief man, the ashes, the coals as well as the flames and the you know, the mountaintops that we can we can achieve, but we need to go both. We need to go deep so that we can go wide. It's so beautiful. Yeah. One of the one of the many things I appreciate about you, Gabriel, is the I love your depth of soul. I love your depth of person, your death of expression. And one of the things that you also cite in your in your ebook, which I think is beautiful This is a passage by Francis Weller that gets us as we're getting to the end of the show here, that is a nice way for us to kind of in this all home. You quote him as saying, we are all preparing for our own disappearance, our one last breath. It is difficult to pick up this thread and hold it in our hand. Each of us has faded to leave this shining world, to slip off this elegant coat of skin, to release our stories to the wind and return our bones to the earth. That's that's so alluringly beautiful. And it gets to purpose, it gets to being intentional, it gets to be going all in. It's beautiful. Yeah, Yeah, he's he Francis work bringing the relevance of grief into back to the world, has been remapping the territory with his revival of grief rituals and the transformation of that. I actually have another poem from that book of Francis Wellers that I'd love to share. I could share it right now. Yeah, if it's short, you bet, like about thirty seconds or a minute. It's Rushani Ray from It's called The Unbroken. There's an there's a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken, a shatteredness, out of which blooms the unshatterable. There is a sorrow beyond all grief, which leads to joy, and a fragility, out of whose depths emerges strength. There's a hollow space, too vast for words, through which we pass with each loss, out of whose darkness we are sanctified into being. There is a cry deeper than all sound, whose serrated edges cut the heart as we break open to the place inside which is unbreakable and whole while learning to sing. Oh, that is stunning. Again. I appreciate again this this kind of study for me. Right, there's so much, there's so much richness to it, and it goes on and on and on. I don't see that there's an end to this. So this is how I'm dedicating my life. We are at the end of the show, Gabriel, So you know, the show is listening to people by people all over the world who really want to be able to create lives of meaning, do something that matters with our lives and help create a world where we all want to live and do our best. What do you want to leave them with? I guess I just want to leave them with courage. You know you got this. You can do it, and just speak your truth and one step forward at a time. Yeah, the world needs your gifts, so only you can do it. Though no one's coming to save you. Yeah, and you might need some help along the way, but it is, it's for you, And I think that's a beautiful way to close. Gabriel, thank you and thank you for being willing to come on the show and share your gifts with us and what you're doing to help unlock purpose and men across the world. I think it's just beautiful work, so so important. And by the way, men, to me, a man who can cry is hopelessly irresistible and very sexy. If you want to learn more about Gabriel and his work, go to his website. It's Gabriel Kazan dot com. Let me spell that for you g A B R I E L and then Kazan is k E c z A N Gabriel Kazan dot com. And thanks again to our partnering sponsor, work Proud, which helps companies build a platform where your workforce receives meaningful feedback and thanks for their work from people across your company. Last week. If you missed the live show, you can always catch a recorded podcast. We were on the air with Marco Boger's talking about the dynamic approach to teamwork called Holocracy. Next week will be on the air with Jared Pope of Workshield talking about the work and its team due to support cultures where people are heard and conflicts are quickly resolved. See you there. Remember that work is at least a third or live, So let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortez, each week on the Voice America Empowerment Channel. Together, we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously, leadership inspires impassioned performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work on Purpose.