For more than fifty years I have enjoyed a successful career in the emerging field of Genders-Special Medicine and Men’s Health. In a recent article, “Men’s Work: Why I Do What I Do,” I responded to a request by a colleague to answer these two questions:
- Why Do What You Do?
- What Do You Receive?
Like many colleagues I know in the “helping professions,” I developed an early interest in helping others when a family crisis turned my world upside down. When I was five years old my mid-life father took an overdose of sleeping pills after he had become increasingly depressed when he couldn’t find work to support his family. Though he didn’t die, our lives were never the same.
My father was committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital, north of our home in Los Angeles. My uncle Harry visited my father every Sunday and I was charged by my mother to go with him. I was confused and scared and asked my mother why I had to go. She told me:
“Because your father needs you.”
She also thanked me for being her “Good Little Man,” a role that caused a great deal of stress, confusion, and unachievable demands I have made towards myself over the years.
I grew up wondering what happened to my father, when it would happen to me and what I could do to keep it from happening to other men and their families. My own healing journey and what I’ve learned is reflected in my most popular books and on-line courses:
- The Irritable Male Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the 4 Key Causes of Depression and Aggression.
- Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Overcoming Romantic and Sexual Addictions.
- My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound.
As a child thrust in the role of caregiver long before I was capable of helping anyone, I learned to sacrifice my own needs to care for others. The old adage: “It is better to give than receive,” seemed the most natural thing in the world. It has taken years of therapy, self-reflection, and support to learn that I had to give to myself before I really had anything I could give to others.
This truth came home to me when my wife and I were raising our two young children. As every parent knows, little ones require a huge amount of time, attention, love, and care. But if we don’t take care of ourselves we can easily become overwhelmed and burned out. I was forced into self-care when my doctor told me my stressful job would kill me if I didn’t get some regular exercise.
My wife told me our marriage wouldn’t survive if we didn’t have more time for each other away from the kids. She insisted on a Wednesday, date-night, that soon became sacrosanct. Over the years I have continued to find ways to give to others without short-changing myself.
Give First: The Power of Mentorship
In recent years I have been approached by experts in the field who had books or programs coming out and asked for my support in promoting their work. I turn down most requests as not being aligned with my expertise or where I don’t feel my help would significantly contribute to the field of men’s health.
I see part of my role as an elder in the field to offer support and mentorship to others. For those I felt were doing significantly good work in the field of Gender-Specific Medicine and Men’s Health and where I felt I had something significant to offer, we set up a time to talk. Here are a few of the people I felt would be helpful to do an on-line interview, write an article, and share it with my large community:
I don’t charge for the time I spend interviewing them, writing articles, and sharing them with my communities. I have been helped by others in the past and I enjoy helping where I can. But this isn’t just “Giving.” I always get something back. It may be from the person who I helped. It may be from someone else. The old saying “What goes around, comes around,” seems appropriate.
I recently came across a book, Give First: The Power of Mentorship by Brad Feld. Feld has been an early-stage entrepreneur and investor since 1987. He co-founded two venture capital firms and multiple companies including Techstars. His view of giving helped me make sense of what I had been doing for some time. He says:
“One of my deeply held beliefs to the secret success in life is to give before you get. In this approach, I am always willing to try to be helpful to someone without having a clear expectation of what is in it for me. If, over time, the relationship is one way (e.g., I’m giving, but getting nothing), I’ll often back off on my level of give because this belief doesn’t underlie a fundamentally altruistic approach.
“However, by investing time and energy up front without a specifically defined outcome, I have found that, over time, the rewards that come back to me exceed my wildest expectations.”
That was certainly true for me and I believe it is true for most colleagues I know who are successful in their careers and in their lives. Based on his work at Techstars (Techstars is a global startup accelerator and venture capital firm founded in 2006 and headquartered in New York City.) Brad Feld and his partner David Cohen developed “The Techstars Mentor Manifesto” with 18 practices that Feld elaborates in the book. Here are some of the points that particularly resonate with me and my work:
- Be authentic — practice what you preach.
- Be direct. Tell the truth, however hard.
- Listen. (With your heart as well as your head).
- Clearly commit to mentor or do not. Either is fine.
- The best mentor relationships eventually become two-way.
- Know what you don’t know. Say “I don’t know” when you don’t know. “I don’t know” is preferable to bravado.
- Be optimistic.
- Provide specific actionable advice; don’t be vague.
- Be challenging/robust but never destructive.
- Have empathy. Remember that startups are hard.
Although Feld’s book, Give First, was written from his experience as an entrepreneur developing startup communities, I believe there is a lot of wisdom here for parents, therapists, business leaders, artists, writers, and healers. For example, you can read an article I wrote about giving love, “The 5 Stages of Love and the Go-Giver Marriage,” and an interview I did with best-selling author John David Mann.
For more articles like these, please visit me at https://menalive.com/
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