#117: "Best talk I ever heard..."

A few reason why we are doing something right here

“That’s the best talk I ever heard,” he said to me —’he’ was a blond-haired boy around my height with a slight look of pain in his eyes. There was a queue of boys behind him to meet me. The next was a big man, dark-skinned, dripping in swagger — “you’re my hero” he said earnestly. Next up a nice boy who shook my hand gently with his eyes on the floor. All he said was he was very grateful for my talk. For almost thirty minutes they peppered me with questions in a desperate thirst. The deputy head eventually had to send them to bed. The talk was to grade 11 boys at Hilton College.

I was nervous to do it. Teenagers scare me. I think they scare anyone sane? And these were teenage boys in a boarding school tucked away neatly in the mountains with nothing to do (extra scary). And to make matters worse my only plan was to be brutally honest with them. Shamefully honest in fact. My talk built to the point where I could confess that I slept every night of my life with a teddy bear. His name is Angus and you met him on the thumbnail of this post. But that wasn’t what bothered me. Why was…

Like all of us, I need to manage my mental health. As an extreme introvert who might be quite high up on the empath scale, I learnt to manage mine from when I was very, very young. Until I was about thirty-five lots of wilderness, baths and meditation in stories did the trick. In the last five years, things have gotten a lot more complicated and I have grown to appreciate the fragility of my mind. Seeing a physiologist took effort and love. I hate the idea with burning fury but do it every two weeks mostly for the love of my wife and children. But talking about seeing a psychologist, that I still find very, very hard.

And so that was the subject of my talk. How do men manage their mental health. But before I landed my killer blow (which was embrace and protect your softer self to the point of possibly sleeping with a teddy bear) I had to build a rock-solid case. So we are started slow. First up, the slide below. Moore’s Law. Exponential change is our new normal and we should expect things to speed up quick. When it comes to manhood that means change …. the way of parents is dead. The manhood of our fathers is long, long gone. We need new urgently. Desperately even. Switfly onto slide two - teen mental health challenges have exploded in perfect alignment with the ubitity of smartphone in 2012 and all this change. It is a complicated topic we skirted deftly past but by 5 minutes into our time together a steady silence had already settled on the room.

Onto manhood (slides three and four below). Men are battling. Really, really battling. Suicide rates for young men are 15X higher than girls. Girls still suffer from greater levels of mental health challenges but boys’ growth rates over recent past is higher (second slide below).

The next slide was my the clincher. It comes from a friend who is one of Africa’s leading education economics. It says in Africa due to NGO investment and focus, girls have overtaken boys at a school level. It is worth taking the time to study it well (young humans are on the far left) as it is beautiful and disorientating all at once. When she presented it to a thousand NGO’s who have dedicated their lives almost exclusively to creating opportunities for women she told me she wished I had been. Here reason was it would have made great TV. An entire room of human jaws were on the floor. Two hundred years of effort and it seems we’ve overcorrecting with teens…

The slide below is the darkest. It is a desperate cry from men around the world. A fearful backpedalling of a hurting, confused group of humans who are furiously tugging at the only lever in their control — a conservative ideology. Look at it closely. Men want out of this new world. They want to go back. Return to a time when things were neat and orderly and ‘the way things were’. Men want a planet with a simple hierarchy. A place where they/we matter most. They want that jungle with simple stereotypes that make it easy for us/them (white, heterosexual, high testosterone males) to navigate through the world and most importantly, know your place in peace. But the group of boys sitting with me that night will be among the first who will experience a type of manhood that is almost entirely different from their fathers. Very little will be the same. My psychologist calls them ‘very at risk’. Heterosexual relationships with be predicated on equality or possibly a feminist vantage point (something they are not prepared for). As we are already seeing in schools (slide above) they will enjoy less privilege in the world becuase finally women, who are naturally more hardworking and conscientious (see distribution of character traits below), will take their rightful place as CEO’s, managers and politicians and the male ego that has grown used to being first will be lost in a sea of uncertainty (something they are also definitely not prepared for)…

I am almost a thousand per cent convinced that it was not the best talk the boy has ever heard; or that I am that young man’s hero; or that their questioning of me was because of anything I offered them that came from myself. Instead, I think the elixir they craved was my honesty… I know they didn’t want my answer’s, I told them straight they are un-parentable because of Youtube. But Rawness. Vunerablity. Truth. I think those things touched them deep inside because it made them feel safe and not so alone and I find that so wonderfully encouraging… Don’t you? All that Youtube, reading and TedTalks make us feel insecure. Like we need to be perfect as adults to mentor and love the next generation. They make us think we need all the right answers, clothes and quotes but I think we’re wrong in that. We need those things to feel less afraid, I think they need us just to be there and afraid?

So my encouragement to us few fools is not to forsake our role as mothers and fathers because of our imperfection, or lack of understanding, or even fear. And that really is the point of the tomfoolery courses. Our little rebellion against the apathy of teenage pain. Imperfect answer. Perfect conversations. An invitation to talk. So be encouraged. Phone a friend in a school and share the good news. What we are doing is working, worth it and will serve those beautiful, beautiful souls who are just behind us and matter so very much to our blue world.

PS. Sorry, I didn’t write last week… we were stuck happily in the snow without a signal

PSS. Sorry, I didn’t write last week… I was just a bit tired too. A beautiful wife; two-wonderful-screaming children; a house full of plants; a Master’s degree; five minutes of Duolingo Zulu each; forty-two push-ups a day; five chapter of the Bible app and a very busy work schedule etc etc etc… all that just got a bit much …

PSSS. Thanks and love to the amazing, world-changing Chris Kingsley who is the head of Hilton Transformation and founder of Sports for Lives for his incenant championing of me and my work. Please check out his work, get involved and share your love for him if you know him already. We all need champions like him in our lives

PSSS. I met a reader this week. He was kind and lovely and encouraging and reminded me we are doing something special in this black-and-white universe

PSSSS. The deputy head of Hilton said I saved lives with my talk. I am not sure but he seems pretty convinced. The point is there are good kids in real trouble who need honest, flawed humans to get in the mess with them even if they are a little nervous and uncomfortable and the good news is that is you. Yes dear reader it is you

PSSSSS. Another school booked an order yesterday so we are on a roll. If Tomfoolery courses help you serve younger humans everything you need is on the Tomfoolery TV YouTube page