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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AOM Podcast which, since 2008, has featured conversations with the world's best authors, thinkers and leaders that glean their edifying, life-improving insights, without the fluff and filler.
The AOM Podcast is just one part of the McKay mission to help individuals practice timeless virtues through thought, word and deed.
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Now on to the show.
Not long ago, the primary concern people had about boys was that they were wild, impulsive and out of control, getting into fights, pushing limits and stirring up trouble.
Today, the problem has flipped.
The more common challenge isn't reckless behavior, but inert passivity.
More and more young men are anxious apathetic, socially isolated and seemingly uninterested in doing much of anything at all.
Vince Benevento, the founder of Causeway Collaborative, a male-specific counseling center, and the author of Boys Will Be Men eight lessons for the lost American male, has spent nearly two decades working on the front lines of this shift.
As a therapist, coach and mentor who specializes in helping young men between the ages of 14 and 30, Vince has worked with both the combustible and the checked out and developed a clear, experience-owned framework for what actually helps guys get unstuck, take ownership of their lives and move forward with purpose.
In today's conversation we unpack what Vince has learned through years of work with boys and men and how his approach, which is rooted more in action than in talk, can be applied not just in the therapist's office, but by parents and mentors.
We dig into why traditional therapy often fails young men and how to give them the drive, accountability and sense of connection they crave.
We discuss the importance of teaching young men to build life brick by brick and helping them find their wild, their thing and a good group of friends.
After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash boys into men.
All right, Vincent Benevento, welcome to the show.
Great to be here, man.
Thank you, and happy to be on, for sure.
So you are a therapist that specializes in working with men between the ages of 16 and 30.
How'd you end up working with this demographic?
So if my wife was on the show next to me, she would say that it kind of all worked out, because this is the only thing I'm good at.
You know what I mean?
So I found my way to something that people would say that I've done relatively well.
But I mean, truth was, like many people in this field, I have my own story.
So I was a lost and wayward young man.
I was a guy who struggled with addiction.
I was a guy who struggled with pretty profound mental health challenges.
I, you know, came from a broken home, dealt with divorce.
My dad came out when i was young.
So, like i had some stuff, you know, and my stuff is different than everybody's stuff, but you know, i had some stuff that required that i had to do some personal work at a pretty young age and so i needed support.
I was very resistant to receiving it personally, mostly because I wasn't ready to do the work.
But I really couldn't find anything that spoke to me in terms of what I felt engaged to do.
And so I started puzzling and being curious around what kinds of things young men would be open to and willing to do.
And years later came up with some stuff that has been useful when supporting young men trying to get their lives on track.
One of the things you argue at the very beginning of the book is that talk therapy is largely useless for men between the ages of 16 and 30.
Why is that?
Yeah, yeah.
And a pretty bold statement from a therapist of like 12 plus years or 15 plus years, whatever it's been 15, total 12 as a licensed practitioner.
And so, yeah, it's a bold claim, but I stand by it.
I mean, I think young men especially don't have a lot of rich life experience to process through and to pick apart in ways that men women, more mature individuals do.
And so I think part of what we practice and preach is the notion that therapy, or the therapeutic support process for young men, should be much more about doing and not talking.
Men and young men in general, this is a generalization, but usually true, learn better from doing.
And so men, because they learn through experience, gravitate towards frameworks like mentorship and coaching and, as opposed to kind of traditional talk therapy, which tends to be a little more nebulous and a little more open-ended.
So we try to impress upon the guys we work with the setting of small goals, the step work in achieving those goals.
The literal experience of going out into the community and doing a thing can be a little more impactful than sitting and talking about something that someone may or may not do in the week in between sessions.
And just in addition and sort of separately, I think back to when I was 16 and pissed off.
I didn't have the emotional fluency to talk about my issues in the way that I do now.
I would contend that men, as we know, and young men, are typically slower to mature than their female counterparts, particularly within the emotional realm.
I think I didn't have the language to describe what I was feeling until years and years later, and hours of work in therapy.
And so I think, if somebody is not engaged in that kind of process of self-discovery, it may be more productive and beneficial to do a thing rather than talking about a thing that you might not do.
All right.
So your approach is a little less conversation, a little more action with these young guys.
Yeah, for sure.
For sure.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Something you describe in the book is in your career, you've encountered two types of young men.
The first type of guy is acting out, doing dangerous stuff, maybe has an addiction, is drinking, getting into fights.
The second type of guy is pretty much the way you describe him is anesthetized.
He just doesn't want to do anything.
He just wants to sit at home.
And you argue that the second type of guy is harder to work with.
Why is that?
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, on first blush, right, it seems almost unreasonable to make that assertion.
I mean, the second guy is just kind of not doing a lot.
He's not doing anything dangerous.
He's not doing anything risky.
He's not a danger to himself, not a danger to others, right?
So how could that guy possibly be more difficult?
I think back to, I was the first kind of guy.
I was the fighting drinking driving, acting out, getting into trouble, but just like the oppositional externalizing kind of guy.
And when I go back 25 years to when I was that kind of guy, I was a mess but there was energy there and momentum associated with that mess, right.
Like I had a girlfriend, I had a job, I had a car that I paid for for money that I saved through my job.
I was going to college, right?
So there is progression personally, and there's goals that are being set and achieved.
And that guy's doing stuff.
He may be doing the wrong stuff, but he's doing stuff nonetheless.
The second guy isn't really doing anything.
And this is the curious phenomenon that I talk about a lot in the book.
It's like this sort of.
I call him the second wave because I saw the first kind of guy 15 years ago when I started my business.
And now we see the second profile of just anxious isolative apathetic hyperactive, highly dependent young men who are not seeking to individuate in any way, shape or form.
They're not excited to go get a job.
We have guys who don't want to get their license.
They'd literally rather have their mother drive them around in the car because they're so anxious about driving a car that they can't even consider the notion of having their own vehicle and taking themselves to and fro.
And so, you know, the first kind of guy, at least, was doing a lot of stuff and was busy in the world and had energy and it was misdirected, but you, you could direct it.
It's very difficult with this sort of second wave to cultivate, you know, an active process with a guy who's so inert.
And this is where we have to move in the direction of really connecting with an interest and connecting with like, the soul of that person, to get them engaged in something that they care about, so that we can start moving them in any direction whatsoever.
Yeah, I've noticed this as well in my work with young men.
So I've coached flag football.
I'm a leader at my church's young men's group.
I remember in flag football, you'd see those two types of guys.
One guy was like super aggressive, had that just that kind of killer instinct, but he kind of messed stuff up.
But I could work with that because like, oh, he's got this energy.
I can direct that.
We can refine his skill and he'll get better.
Then you have the kid who just like just inert, like had no drive at all.
And it's just like, I can't work with this.
And then in church, like you see the same sort of thing kids, where it doesn't matter what it is, they'll be engaged.
They're excited.
Even if they think the activity we're doing is kind of boring, they'll try to make something out of it.
And then you have the boys where it's just like, it's pulling teeth.
You do everything you can to get them engaged.
And they're just like, meh.
It's so hard.
So they lack that.
You know the Romans called it thumos sort of that fire in the belly, that drive.
And I'm seeing it more and more in young men as you are.
What do you think is going on with this younger generation?
You talk about how you see this a lot in Gen Z guys.
What do you think is going on where you're seeing this lack of thumos and drive in young men?
Yeah, I don't think it's any one thing.
I think it's a crock pot filled with a bunch of different things that make it hard to do this work with young men and make it hard to connect with people in general.
I think there's a tech piece for sure.
There's a tech piece and a subsequent isolative piece in association with that.
We see a lot of skill erosion.
So like, as everything has become both automated and immediately accessible, we can have things done for us rather than do things ourselves.
And so, you know, the old example that I used to give was, like not so long ago, in like the early 2000s, like I used to know how to get places online, you know, and like now i just don't, because i just throw it in the ways just like everybody else and i'm not paying attention to where i'm going anymore.
And so that's like one very small detail of the day in which we live where like, we're not exercising our brain, we're not exploring, we're not engaging with our surroundings, we're just passively moving through our day, and that happens, you know, more readily than we would care to admit.
There's an instant gratification piece where, like i'm hungry and so i just order dominoes and they send me a you know, 44-ounce Coke and a pepperoni pizza, with the fee is 31.
I just swipe that or my parents swipe that.
There's no reward-based system where you do a task and you get a reward, and then you can subsequently use it for whatever purposes you see fit.
There's not a lot of delayed gratification and sequencing and work that goes into achieving goals.
And I just think more broadly, because we're so flooded with information and kind of information that scares us.
This pervasive culture of fear that we live in has raised the stakes in terms of the cumulative anxiety that we all experience as people, but specifically young men.
And so young men are not excited to go get their first car and drive fast like they used to.
Now I'm not saying that that's behavior that we shouldn't relish upon our boys, but boys used to be excited about getting their car and shining it up and driving around fast.
They're not excited about that anymore.
They're scared.
And they're scared of things like that.
And they're scared of talking to a girl.
And they're scared of getting a phone number.
And they're scared of going on a date, which is why they watch porn and lock themselves in their room incessantly.
And so this fear that is pervasive in our young men has caused us to opt out of taking healthy risks.
I'm not talking about inappropriate risks like the risks that I took when I was a younger man.
I'm talking about healthy risks, age-appropriate developmental risks.
And that I think has robbed us of some of the heart work and the soul work that is really important to being a young man.
You also talk about how parents might have unintentionally contributed to creating this second type of young man.
What's going on there, you think?
Yeah, you know, I...
I think it comes from a good place.
And I've seen, over the course of 15 to 20 years of doing this work, 15 years of running my own business, 20 years in mental health in general.
I have seen parents' awareness of mental health skyrocket, skyrocket.
Parents are knowledgeable.
They understand the resources.
They speak the language.
They even understand basic symptomology.
Even parents who haven't been through a round of therapy with a kid or have had a kid with mental health challenges.
Your baseline parent understands and speaks the language of mental health.
That was not the case when I first started.
And so that has bore a lot of fruit in terms of the way we engage with our kids emotionally, but also just in terms of how you triage an issue in a situation.
So it certainly comes from a good place.
I think the unintended consequence is we pathologize.
We pathologize a lot of behavior.
Parents pathologize.
And so if your kid is acting out, he's depressed, he's anxious, he's got a mood disorder.
And those things may very well, in fact, be the case.
And so far be it for me to say in all situations, that's not true.
But sometimes he's just not accountable to his behaviors, or sometimes he's acting out and being manipulative, or sometimes he just doesn't feel like doing it and he goes in his room and he games for seven hours instead, because he has the autonomy to do so and there aren't the checks and balances in the system that will make it so that he can't do those things.
And so I don't think that mental health is always the reason why someone is struggling.
And I think parents, you know, jump to conclusions, sometimes around you know, pointing a finger at their son's pathology as being the rationale for what's happening, when in fact a behavioral approach can yield better fruit.
Going back to the idea of anxiety, I think a lot of parents are anxious these days for their kids because life in the 21st century it is pretty complicated and complex.
For sure.
There's this anxiety that, oh, my kid is not going to be able to make it.
It's just there's a lot more you have to do to establish yourself in the world economically.
So a lot of parents are like, I'm just going to do this for my kid.
I remember when I went to college, and here's a great example.
When I went to college, my parents were like, oh, you want to go to college?
Great.
And that was it.
And I had to fill out all the forms.
Yeah.
And I had.
You know, I was like Dad, I need this.
You know the IRS stuff for the VASA, you know things there.
Okay, here you go.
But I had to do it on my own.
They were just they wasn't like, they were holding my hand.
And then I see parents.
You know my peers.
Today we've got kids going to college.
They're doing all this stuff to get their kid into college, you know, signing up for these prep classes, doing doing these elaborate college tours, helping them refine their essays.
And I'm thinking like that did not happen 20, 30 years ago.
Not even close.
No, not even close.
And talk about you know it's a really good call by you Brett, but like talk about contributing factors to the collective anxiety.
You know, I remember filling out those applications literally in pencil at my dining room table in the year, you know, 1998.
So like it's not that long ago and I did them all by myself and there was no private SAT tutor and there was no educational consultant to pick my colleges for me and no one filled out my FAFSA stuff.
Like I did it first kid, sink or swim, figure it out, go to college or don't.
It's on you, junior.
Ready, set.
So the world is just not that way.
And I mean listen.
I know a lot of people in this space.
They do extraordinary work in this space the college space, the private university space and the game that is getting your kid into the best school humanly possible to set them up on a trajectory for life.
And what I can tell you is the emotional pressure that kids experience as a result of like this conveyor belt that has been socially constructed for them, whether they fall alongside it or not.
And, by the way, I got kids who mostly don't fall on that conveyor belt and are trying to be shoehorned into it.
You know has a lot of challenging consequences for kids and for families.
And I see a lot of kids who parents elect to send them to college because there's no other option.
Like you have to drive around with a sticker on the back of your car that says where junior's going to college, whether they should be going to college or not.
And so I get a lot of parents who call me in November the following semester and say hey, he didn't make it.
What do we do now?
And I think that the college is for everybody and you have to go to a top 50 school framework is not one that every single person should subscribe to.
Not every parent, not every kid.
And I think the people who are having awareness of that in advance are far better suited than the people who are learning that lesson on the backside.
And then you know when parents do, because it comes from a good place again.
They want to help their kids succeed.
But when they do that stuff for their kids, sort of the unspoken messages, you can't do this.
I got to take care of it.
And then that just carries over to other areas of their life.
Well, yeah, you can't get a job on your own.
I got to like pull some levers to do that for you.
So it just disempowers these young men who are already disempowered.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
100%.
Yeah.
And the job example is a perfect example because you know most of the people.
I mean I'm in Westport, I'm in Westchester, I'm in West Hartford Connecticut, like you know, pretty affluent pockets with a lot of you know high profile, high influence people.
And so when their kid is struggling, you know, usually dad will come into the center and say Hey, I'm going to get my kid a job and such and such.
What do you think?
I say, don't you dare get your kid a job.
Instead, let's support him in the process of him finding it for himself and navigating and figuring out where his strengths are and where his weaknesses lie.
And that'll position us much better to help him down the line than it will if we just scoop something up and put it in his breadbasket.
So in your book you've laid out several principles that guide your approach to helping young men that come to your clinics, these sort of disengaged young guys.
I want to walk through some of these.
The first one is brick by brick, and this is about helping young men build a life for themselves.
Why is this the first principle in your philosophy?
Because I think that to do anything of substance in your life, men have to commit themselves to a long, focused approach.
And I think the world sends quick fix messages.
The world sends messages around both instant gratification and overnight celebrity.
I'm advocating a different message.
I'm advocating that anything I've ever built, whether it's been my marriage or my relationships with my kids, or my business or meaningful relationships any of those things that matter to me deeply, were patient in their growth process, were things that were step by step, one after the next, after the next after the next, were filled with trial and iteration and reset and debriefing and learning, were messy at times and were not a straight line, none of them.
And I think that's the case when you build something of substance across life.
You don't usually finish exactly the way that you start.
And when you make a blueprint for something, typically there's unforeseen challenges that come up along the way.
And as long as you keep working step-by-step day-by-day brick-by-brick, it's a good mantra to set you up for success in whatever you're doing.
So how do you help a young man start becoming a builder?
So a young man who can you know?
Look for a job, find a job, apply to college by themselves, build a relationship.
How do you help a young man who just hasn't done that before?
Because he's one of those passive anesthetized type young men.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I think you begin with the acknowledgement that at some point every person hadn't done it.
Right.
So like, you know, me, you, everybody, we all had to get started somewhere.
And so for me, I get really excited about vision work.
And what I mean by that is helping a young man get excited about crafting a vision for where he wants to go.
Young man or man, because we see people as young as 14 and we see guys, you know, into their early 30s.
So crafting co-crafting leading, sharing a vision for what ignites you, what feels right, what have you felt purpose in doing, what have you done that's been exciting for you, and just dreamboarding it and vision crafting and helping them get excited.
One, because if this is their first blush with mental health supports, it debunks their preconceived notions about what it is.
I want a guy coming into my office and feeling good enough that he wants to come back the next time of his own accord.
And typically this kind of vision work will draw them in in that way.
And so we start with vision crafting and developing a sense for where you want to go and what you want to do and what you want to be.
And from there we get tangible.
We do research.
We answer questions.
We go out and we learn through experience and service and shadowing and job acquisition and all these different processes.
And we teach and instruct and we fill in the gaps as needed.
So it starts very broad and very opaque, you know, to just cultivate enthusiasm.
And then we get down to it sort of step by step, brick by brick.
So that's that action part.
You're not just having a weekly session where you're talking about things.
No.
Maybe you have that session to lay out the vision, but then you're going to assign this guy homework and then there's going to be follow up.
It's like, all right, did you get that application?
Yes.
Okay.
Did you fill it out and turn in the application?
I mean, that's what it is.
It's a lot of coaching and mentoring.
For sure.
And it's positioning a guy to be better off than when he started.
And I don't just mean broadly around the process.
I mean in that hour.
Part of what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to get you farther in the hour you come see me that week than you were when you came in.
So you come, when you go see Vince, and you think to yourself wow, we're going to get a lot of stuff done today.
So, like one of my favorite processes to do with a guy and it seems so simple is to come in and work with a guy who's never had a resume before a young kid you know 15 16 17, you know now sometimes 18 years old.
But listen, let's bang out your resume and literally hand the kid a piece of paper that reflects to him everything he's done in his life to walk out of that session.
And it doesn't have to be sexy and it doesn't have to light the world on fire.
And I'd started doing this 15 years ago and I know you could throw it in your chat, GBT.
You could do it in two seconds.
But the co-constructing of that process to build what you've done and to reflect to you what you've done, so you can hand it to your parents and be proud of it, or you could put it in somebody's hands and go look for a job.
Now that's actually reflecting to you self-worth about your own achievements and positioning you to get excited about the next thing we're going to do next week.
So that's just one example, but it's a pretty good one.
It's a very simple exercise that denotes how we get kids moving forward in that very tangible way.
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I think if you're a mentor or a parent, you can start doing this with your kids now.
Take those basic life skills that you just take for granted.
And then actively like, we're going to do this.
Like we're going to make a resume.
We're going to, I did this with my kids.
Like they wanted a bank account.
I was like, okay, let's go to the bank.
And I made them talk to the bank teller.
I love that.
It's great.
You're going to have to figure this out.
And I say, here's all the stuff you need to get your social security number.
You have all this information.
And I mean it was like this.
The thing is like this stuff can be tedious and it's boring, but it's important work.
A hundred percent.
Yeah.
And I mean I even think about like when my kids were young.
We'd go out to dinner and like I remember watching people you know, their kids were like 10 and they would order for their kids in the restaurant.
And when my kids were five, four and two, they were ordering food for themselves, just because building that requisite skill is essential for everything.
You need to have a conversation with somebody, look them in the eye and, to whatever extent is age appropriate, engage with another human being.
Now, the hardest part... is the consistent and persistent commitment on behalf of the parents.
Because you're going to get resistance very often.
It's so much easier to just opt out on one or two or three occasions, and then a habit that you're trying to cultivate gets extinguished because you don't consistently curate it.
These kinds of, the bank example that you gave, it's fantastic.
We should be trying to impart these life lessons and skills to our kids, beginning as young as is appropriate.
It just takes a lot of energy to do that over time.
Here's another example.
This was my daughter.
She's 12 and she got this bad grade on an assignment and she thought, I did the work.
I don't agree with the teacher.
And she was really upset.
And she asked, Dad, can you email?
I'm like, no, I'm not doing that.
And she's like, I'm just going to write him an email.
I was like, no, you're not going to write an email.
I want you tomorrow. have a conversation with him that night.
Like we role played it.
I was like, I'm going to be your teacher.
Yeah.
And you're going to be.
You talk about how you're going to approach this without getting emotional and accusatory.
And we workshopped it.
And then she did it.
She had this tough conversation with an authority figure, you know, challenging him on a grade, and it worked out great.
Like he saw, okay, I messed up there.
You know, it was, it was, it was really productive and I was really proud of her.
And I could see that she was proud of herself that she did that.
Right.
Right.
No, yeah.
And that's how you build esteem.
Esteem and purpose and self-belief is cultivated by kids doing for themselves independently, with support and with guidance.
But had you written the email to the teacher, you're kind of robbing your daughter of that rep.
And part of what we're always trying to do with parents is helping them.
Support, but not do for and enable.
Okay, so that's brick by brick.
So just start helping these young people, young men in particular, start doing things on their own.
It's going to take a lot of support, but that's important.
The second principle is name it to tame it.
What do you mean by that?
Being radically honest with yourself about your strengths, but also your challenges.
And I'm speaking mostly in terms of the realm of mental health diagnosis and stigma.
I'm pretty transparent in the book around my own struggles with substance use and my mood.
And I've know, had a diagnosed mood disorder since i was 19 years old.
I was hospitalized for it when i was 19 years old and i was an alcoholic, for you know years prior and years post, until i was able to kind of clean my life up and get my act together.
But it was really my ability to acknowledge and come to grips with those two diagnoses that were the prescription for me getting well And the acknowledgement of the limitations I now faced as a 19-year-old kid in college who was a substance user, who needed to figure out how to manage my life.
It was those limitations that actually provided me with freedom and helped me relearn how to exist as a human being in the world.
And so that was a very difficult process that was shameful and humbling for me.
But to come to terms in an honest way, which occurred over a series of years, gave me information, helped me take the right steps, helped me understand my boundaries, things that I can do, shouldn't do, and positioned me to be successful really for the rest of my life.
Truth be told yes, you're primarily focusing on working with young men who have a diagnosed mental health issue, but i think this is applicable even if a young man doesn't have a mental health problem.
Like you said earlier, a lot of young men they're you can call them emotionally illiterate, like they have these emotions, but they don't know what they are, and because they don't know what they are, they don't know how to manage them right.
And so helping young men learn how to recognize okay, i'm feeling frustrated.
I might think it's anger.
It's not anger.
It's just more of a frustration.
When you frame it like that, it's like, okay, I can do something about that now.
I do this a lot with young kids who are feeling scared, nervous about something.
A lot of them will say, I'm just really anxious.
I'm like, no, hey, look, yeah, you're nervous, but that's good.
It's not like something bad's happening to you.
It's just getting you ready to take on this challenge.
You're like, oh, okay, yeah.
That reframe helps them be more proactive with life.
Yeah.
And those clarifying questions, Brad, I think are super important.
So, okay, you're angry.
What does that look like for you?
How does your anger show up in different situations?
Are you blowing holes through the wall?
Are you yelling at mom?
Are you swearing?
Are you not doing your homework?
Yeah. what do you do when you're angry?
And from there we can develop ways to address that in different fashions depending upon how it shows up.
But I think, like you said, also, it's the emotional fluency piece.
Guys don't understand basic emotions besides sadness, which they typically can't articulate, and anger.
And so I mean, I remember being a guy at 19 years old who was so confounded by with my emotional world and so limited in my ability to articulate it that i just showed up as angry literally all the time, and i think it was essential for me to become, you know, better equipped at communicating where I was emotionally.
I'm ashamed because, I'm fearful because, I'm sad because, I'm lonely because.
These are all nuanced offshoots of anger that boys and young men and men experience, but naming them well and naming them precisely again gives the prescription about how to approach the solution going forward.
Yeah, it's like Rumpelstiltskin.
Remember that story?
Once you know his name, you have power over him.
It's the same thing with your emotions.
That's exactly right.
Once you name it, you have power over it.
All right.
So it's just all about helping these young men become more emotionally literate and not confuse maybe frustration or shame or anxiety for anger.
I think that's what a lot of young guys do whenever they feel those things.
They express it through anger.
It's probably not anger, it's something else, but help them understand that.
And those messier ones the fear and the shame and the hurt and the regret, like those emotions that are like dirty words to boys and young men, like giving yourself permission to hold the ability to articulate that and to communicate it.
And I think this is where parents can move mountains, like in their ability to model that in a healthy way for their kids in a setting of difficulty or challenge or conflict in the home.
Like when you are fighting in front of your son, how do you speak to your spouse?
How do you speak to your son?
How do you speak to your daughter?
And what do you do to communicate your own emotional response in the moment?
These are the ways that parents can do incredible things to support their kid, you know, moving more towards emotional fluency.
Another principle that you have in your philosophy towards helping young men is you got to help them find their wild.
Why is tapping into your well, first off, what do you mean by your wild?
What is that?
Yeah.
Wild for me is a rejuvenation of the soul.
And I think about it as losing it, right?
So it's becoming reacquainted with the things that make us feel alive.
I think there's a very primal natural peace that is deconditioned out of us as men as we move through life and as we move from.
You know young men competitive, moving through.
You know physical prowess, activities that cause us to evaluate ourselves against other people and compete in large groups or packs.
You know when you're driving around a minivan doing a girl scout cookie drive and you know reporting to the same cubicle for 10 hours a day, five days a week.
Those things are the opposite of wild.
So I think that as the lifespan continues and I talk to guys in their 30s, 40s and 50s all the time they just don't feel alive.
And they feel bored and they feel underappreciated and they feel like their value is waning and they're not alive.
And I think the process of finding your wild is reengaging with your soul and finding the things that used to make you feel alive again.
How do you do that?
So this is for older guys.
We'll talk about helping young guys find their wild.
But let's say you're a middle-aged guy and you're feeling just kind of that middle-aged burnout malaise.
How do you capture that wild again?
I think it takes effort.
I think it takes effort.
So you have to seek it.
You have to plan a trip with your kid and go ice fishing somewhere.
You have to finally stop complaining about the job that you hate and develop a strategy and walk out and start again.
You have to take your wife on a getaway to an island that you plan, because she plans literally everything.
Um, you have to, you know, make plans with a guy and go away.
You have to try a new hobby and do a new thing.
You have to put yourself out there.
And so i think you know a lot of the men that i talk to are highly isolated and they go through their routine and they sit in their house and they, you know, particularly in the winter, they are not actively doing new things that cause them to reevaluate the world around them and test themselves to be better.
Part of being wild is competing against yourself and testing yourself to see what you have the capacity to do.
And that requires planning and time and resources, but I think the yield is worthwhile.
What about a young guy, one of these anesthetized young men we've been talking about that just have like no wild in them.
Maybe they've never found their wild.
How do you help them find their wild?
Yeah, I think when we think about what has been lost in the society that we live in now, it's this male mentorship, male specific mentorship.
So 200 years ago, when you decided that you wanted to become a blacksmith, your dad was a blacksmith and your grandfather was a blacksmith, and your great grandfather and his father were also blacksmiths.
And so you grew up learning everything from them and mentoring under them, which not only showed their favor and their investment in you, but it taught you all the requisite skills that you need to learn.
Now, we've deconditioned men.
They don't do physical things, young men especially.
Young men are not often doing physical things or many of them can extricate themselves from doing physical things by just doing work behind a screen, behind a door.
So i think we mentor young men and show them and teach them and reflect our favor and investment in them.
We take them literally out into the world, into nature, like our predecessors, and sit around and tell stories and blaze a trail and hike and climb and grab a pole and fish and engage in nature to be reacquainted with their physical wild, And we communicate with them in ways where we demonstrate what they have the capacity to do.
We teach them a skill.
We let them learn a skill.
We show them that they are capable of a thing.
And they begin to believe in themselves over time by trying new things and succeeding.
Yeah, I think, as a mentor, as a father, one thing you do for boys, teenage boys, is to expose them to as many different things as possible so that they can find Like you talk about this in the books they can find their thing.
Because a lot of young men, they might not be excited about anything.
It's just they haven't found the thing that excites them.
And they might not know they'd be excited about something until they actually try it.
So i do think as a parent, you might have to sort of nudge, kind of like hey, you're gonna do this thing, even if you don't think you want to do it, because there's a chance you might like the thing that i'm having you do.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, I saw this.
We did this.
We took some boys rock climbing at church one night.
And this one kid, he was kind of a little passive, not confident.
And he didn't think he was going to like it.
But then he ended up liking it.
He actually signed up for a membership later on.
He became like a rock climber.
That was great.
That's a perfect example of finding your wild.
You have to expose him to stuff.
You talk about relationships.
Yeah, in your book and this idea of mentorship, but also relationships between just having friends, men having friends.
And you talk about a lot of the young men you work with, they don't have any friends.
Why are young men so lonely these days?
Like what's going on there?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's really sad.
But the number one reason for referral, documented by the client coming into Causeway, is to make friends.
And we have countless kids who come through the center who set the goal of having one friend.
I'm not talking about girlfriend.
I'm not talking about boyfriend.
I'm talking one friend.
And so to me that just speaks to where we stand, like where it is difficult for young people to connect authentically with one another.
It is easy for people to remain isolated.
And so, you know, I think... we have to work to practice relationship.
And I think we see a lot of guys who are marginalized socially and who struggle socially.
Guys on the spectrum, guys who have social challenges, guys who've been bullied, guys who are depressed and anxious, guys who haven't had a lot of success in making friends.
But our message to them is to find their tribe and find their people and cultivate the relationships from there.
So you know, if it's an online community of people and those relationships are fostered predominantly online, we can start there and then potentially scale up to person to person engagement from there.
If they're kids who have a specific interest, be it in Legos or in music, or in building something out of wood, or in fishing or in whatever.
There are communities of people who can develop relationships with them with shared experience, with shared interests, which makes it a lot easier.
And so part of where I think mentorship as we do it is effective is we can model those skills that have eroded over time.
We can take Junior to grab a cup of coffee down the street and just kick it with him and get him feeling comfortable talking to someone in a public space.
We can help him go down to the town green and throw the Frisbee disc around and have him do an activity that he can then do with someone else.
We can have him just walk around the grocery store and chat with somebody and get a sense of what the body language is as we're watching him, so that we can help him read a conversation more effectively.
We're doing mentorship with guys who struggle socially.
There's a didactic component where we're teaching and we're gap filling and we're helping them understand the things that they can do differently through feedback exchange.
But there's a heavy, heavy relational component because we're leveraging the relationship and the trust that we've built with somebody to get them to do a thing that they wouldn't otherwise try, and i think that's the difference.
Parents struggle with their kids because they can't just get them off the dock.
They can't get them to try the thing.
We're typically successful because we have the quality of the relationship where we can get a kid to buy in and at least try something.
And hopefully he'll like it more than he thought he would.
I've got a friend.
He doesn't have any sons, but he has a son-in-law.
And he noticed his son-in-law didn't have a lot of male friends.
And he's like, this is a problem.
You need to have friends.
You're a young guy.
You should have friends.
And he's like well, i just i don't know how to do it, like i just i'm just so busy with work and i just don't know where to connect with guys.
And he says here's what we're gonna do i'm gonna host, we'll call the mastermind group at my place once a week yeah, and just invite some guys you know you don't have to be best friends with them invite them over and we'll just talk shop, we'll talk about work, we'll talk about life.
And he has to model like it's like this, like 50 year old guy who Basically he says I'm doing remedial work here with these young men.
I have to model what it looks like.
And it's a lot of work, but it's paying off.
These guys are starting to connect.
They're starting to form some friendships.
And it's enriching their lives.
For sure.
For sure.
And I got to be honest, Brett, I actually did it in my life.
So when I started to reevaluate the way in which I was spending my time and I really dialed back my commitment to work, I found out that I was almost spending too much time at the house.
Right.
And like, you know, started working from home more.
And, you know, me and my wife were around each other too much.
I was around the kids maybe a little too much.
And like, I felt that there was like this sort of missing piece for me.
And it was in the name of like relationship with other guys.
And so I just started asking guys to go grab coffee.
And it was something that I didn't do for like a decade.
And I just started.
Like you know, if I met a guy and I hit it off with him at the ball field or like in town, or like our wives were friendly, but we never really hung out before I would just grab coffee with somebody.
And it got to the point where four five, six hours a week I'm just like having a coffee with a friend, which is like good.
It's good balance for me as a man.
It helps me getting out into the community and meeting and talking to people.
It makes me visible.
It gives me things to talk about.
In instances, some of them, it allows me to help somebody and see a need and meet a need.
So I think male relationship as guys is something that we must continuously practice, even if we're decent at it or pretty good at it, because the force that the accountability provides is also very important, like we need to have other guys reflecting how our decisions feel to them, you know, and it makes us better versions of ourselves.
That's the whole.
Iron sharpens iron, that's right.
Yeah, that's right.
Well vincent, this has been a great conversation.
Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Yeah, I appreciate it very much.
And it's been awesome.
Thank you.
So you can check us out at our website, causewaycollaborative.com.
That's the organization.
I have a personal website, which is sharperformen.com.
My Insta is Vince underscore Benevento underscore LPC.
And obviously the book is available on Amazon and we hope you guys check it out and enjoy it.
All right.
Well, Vince and Benevento, thanks for your time.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you, Brett.
Really appreciate the time, man.
Thanks.
My guest today was Vince Benevento.
He's the author of the book, Boys Will Be Men.
It's available on amazon.com.
You can learn more information about his work at his website, sharperformen.com.
Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash boys into men.
We find links to resources.
We delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.
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This is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.
Thank you.
