I've been reading Craig White's Tell the Fucking Truth this week (highly recommend!), and one chapter has stuck with me: "We can't be what we can't see."
I think about the men I grew up around: my dad, coaches, uncles, the older guys on teams I played on. None of them ever said "I'm struggling," "I'm in pain" or "I need help." I tried to look back for moments where someone showed some vulnerability or openness around tough things going on in their lives, and I couldn't find any examples.
What I generally saw was men who just got on with it and toughed it out. Men who played through injuries, didn't talk about the hard stuff, and just stayed quiet when life got challenging. So that's what I learned to do.
None of that makes them bad men. Most of them were doing exactly what they'd seen, too. But it means a lot of us are walking around with a back that's been sore for five years, or a marriage that could use some real fucking conversations. A weight on our chest or a lump in our throat that we've never talked about out loud.
We've never seen what the other way looks like.
The example from my life is my father never expressing his pain, physical or emotional. He just bit his tongue and let his internal dialogue and the stories he made up take over, until it all came to a head in a family crisis that no kid should have to carry.
What I learned from that as a kid was that I should just hang onto my own struggles and pain, that nobody cared about it enough to help, and that I just needed to crack on with life.
So that's what I did, for years. When I was injured and in pain, after my son Harper passed away, when my marriage was failing, when business got tough. I just sat there, took it in the nuts and never spoke a word.
What changed for me was a lot of therapy, a great mentor, and a space where I finally felt safe enough to slowly start letting some of my shit into the world. And my goodness, what a shift it created: the freedom of living my life without the burden of hanging onto everything, and a friend group where it's expected that you speak up if you're struggling.
This is why Saturday mornings matter to me as much as they do. The workout's good, but the part afterwards is the true value. Every time one of you sits in that circle and says something true about your health, your kids, your marriage or your grief, the guy next to you sees it. Maybe for the first time. And now he knows it can be done.
So here's a challenge for you this week: be the thing someone else needs to see.
Tell one person the truth about how you're actually doing. It could be your partner, your kid, a mate, your brother. The real version, though. Let it go.
And if your kids are watching, even better. They're learning what a man looks like from you right now.