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This morning, I thought I'd engage with one of the email prompts I get, on a fairly regular basis, from James Boardman's online coaching business - I read his book, It's a State of Mind, a few years ago, then, more recently, came across the opportunity to sign up for a free PDF of his book Remember the Mission - I was fully aware that the "free PDF" was just a hook to build an email list for his income-generating courses, but that's fine; typically, people running courses as their business throw in enough occasional freebies to make it worth my while dealing with the constant "Pay me money you don't have, so I can tell you why you're struggling with your finances, health, and motivation!" emails. (Heads up: if you can afford £99 for a course, you are either not actually struggling with your finances, or your belief that you need someone else to tell you how to handle adulthood is the reason you're struggling with your finances...)
Today's freebie was about "clarifying your mission!", and started off with:
Find 10 things you want to achieve this year
I don't have 10 things I want to achieve. I was able to think of 4 things.
Boardman, the Department for Work and Pensions, and associated "employability coaching organisations", would tell me that's proof that I "lack ambition and motivation." I disagree - it's actually evidence that I've achieved a hell of a lot, that I'm organised and focused - if I want or need to do it, I'm already working on it - and that I'm relatively easily satisfied in life; something we need more of, because there are honestly more than enough rapacious, constantly-grasping malcontents in the world today to destroy it in short order, without the rest of us joining in. The ability to identify limits and sufficiency, and to be content within that, is a skill that many people very much need to work on acquiring.
What were my "four things"?
1. Getting regular clients for The Productive Pessimist
2. A better living situation (Ideally, I'd like to live in a bungalow, in a more rural, but still reasonably well-connected, area.)
3. Paid speaking gigs
4. CIPD qualification (the main requirement for HR roles, which is looking like a good option to pursue if The Productive Pessimist doesn't generate enough income.)
The next step in Boardman's process was
Identify why you haven't achieved these things yet:
Today's freebie was about "clarifying your mission!", and started off with:
Find 10 things you want to achieve this year
I don't have 10 things I want to achieve. I was able to think of 4 things.
Boardman, the Department for Work and Pensions, and associated "employability coaching organisations", would tell me that's proof that I "lack ambition and motivation." I disagree - it's actually evidence that I've achieved a hell of a lot, that I'm organised and focused - if I want or need to do it, I'm already working on it - and that I'm relatively easily satisfied in life; something we need more of, because there are honestly more than enough rapacious, constantly-grasping malcontents in the world today to destroy it in short order, without the rest of us joining in. The ability to identify limits and sufficiency, and to be content within that, is a skill that many people very much need to work on acquiring.
What were my "four things"?
1. Getting regular clients for The Productive Pessimist
2. A better living situation (Ideally, I'd like to live in a bungalow, in a more rural, but still reasonably well-connected, area.)
3. Paid speaking gigs
4. CIPD qualification (the main requirement for HR roles, which is looking like a good option to pursue if The Productive Pessimist doesn't generate enough income.)
The next step in Boardman's process was
Identify why you haven't achieved these things yet:
1. I worry about peoples' reactions if I'm too "pushy"/"forward", especially in the face of increasing hostility to men who happen to be white doing anything, and an increasing focus on centring women in terms of achievement, visibility, voices of excellence, etc.
I don't know how to make the contacts I need, and I lack the money to market the business effectively.
2. Money - I wouldn't make anything like enough selling the house I currently live in to buy anywhere else, never mind somewhere else that would be better, both objectively and for my needs, I'm not in a position to use whatever I would make from the sale of my current house as a deposit, and get a mortgage for the remainder of the cost of a better option, and I also wouldn't be accepted for a tenancy agreement, even with the chunk of cash I could make from selling my house; I don't currently have an income at all, I wouldn't pass a credit check, and I wouldn't be allowed to have my pets - which is a non-negotiable for me, as they're genuinely the only reason I haven't acted on the strong desire I've had recently to take my own life, and they are a major reason why my mental health and ability to push through a lot of life crap are as solid as they are.
3. Same reasons as #1, with the addition of not being easily able to travel outside of my local area, especially at short notice, because of the whole being blind, and thus banned from driving thing, sight loss meaning I'm completely night blind, so evening events are...not always possible, and being blind meaning I'm very quickly lost in unfamiliar areas, especially if they're crowded.
4. Money - the qualification costs literally thousands. I don't even have a thousand pence to my name at this point.
Step three, the final part of Boardman's process, is:
Write down how you plan to achieve these things, and when you'll achieve them by.
We'll set aside, for the moment, the fact that the Harvard Goal-Setting Study, from whence we get an enduring insistence that "writing down your goals, and time-limiting them, makes you more likely to achieve them!" never actually happened, and pretend that our brains, which have only actually been using writing for about 10,000years - less than 10% of the time our species has actually been toodling about the place - have somehow evolved, in a very short span of biological time, relatively speaking, to only be able to really achieve things if they're written down somewhere, and that we're not actually seeing the more likely fact, that people generally have rubbish memories, and that you're only more likely to achieve things you write down because you actually get reminded of them (assuming you don't forget that you wrote them down, forget where you wrote them down, forget where you put the notebook/stored the digital document on which you wrote them down....), and run with the (inaccurate) received wisdom that goals need to be written down to be achieved:
All of my "things to achieve" are outside my control in terms of timelines; any "I will achieve X by Y" with them would literally be wild guesswork at this point. So, we'll just address the "how":
1 & 3: Market as much as I am able to, within the limitations of not having money or the ability to easily travel. Take inspiration from America - no one's actually stopping 47 & his puppet master from pulling the strokes they are, and I'm not intending to do anything illegal.
2. I actually need to focus on #4 first, because if I achieve #4, I can then work towards achieving #2, even if #1 doesn't come through.
4. Save what I can, where I can, until I can afford to take the CIPD course, whilst looking/applying for jobs I am already qualified for where the employer would pay for CIPD qualification. This latter course of action would also allow me to work towards achieving #2 sooner, and would mitigate the challenges around effective marketing for #1 and #3.
Completing this exercise made me think about how similar Boardman's coaching is to pretty much all coaching that's focused on cisgender men; they're all very military-coded, the coaches often reference an active service career, almost always in the SAS or similar elite units, and they all parrot the (outdated, proven-false) script of "Write down goals, write down when and how you'll achieve them, otherwise it's never going to happen!" They all cling desperately to an insistence that "The only barriers are ones you invent for yourself!" - which would seem to argue against their elite military background, since those units have a high attrition rate through basic training, which can't just be down to "people didn't have what it takes" - most people who actually want to be in the military know what mindset is needed, and they tend to have that mindset as a natural element of who they are; people who are more laid back, more "I'll get to it when I get to it" don't, in my experience, wake up one day and think "You know what career I'd be really good in? The military!"
More than all of this, though (although this is enough to be getting on with, honestly), all of the coaching aimed at cisgender men seems to suggest that those men are literally incapable of motivating themselves to achieve anything - they all need to have someone else tell them what to do, they all need someone else standing (metaphorically) over them, waving a big stick, and implying dire consequences for "failure."
Perhaps this is the case, and, being trans, this was a crucial element of male socialisation I missed out on. Certainly, it would explain why so many women seem to be married to men who need to be walked through how to do basic household cleaning tasks, who need to be reminded of every single appointment they have, who need to have those appointments made for them, who need to have the exact, highly-specific information on items before they can reasonably be expected to locate them on a supermarket shelf.
But it wouldn't explain the men like my father and grandfather, who, owing to their respective wives having severe mental illness, had to provide spousal care, manage the housework, grocery shopping, and cooking, on top of doing a full-time job.
It doesn't explain the men who live happily, and in clean, well-ordered houses, as lifelong bachelors or long-term widowers.
It doesn't explain the three different men I've known who were single fathers - not "separated co-parents", but entirely lone parents - in one case, because of the death of their children's mother, in the other two because the women in question just upped and left, and never made contact again. Their children have all grown up to be highly capable, emotionally intelligent, focused, hard-working adults.
The more logical explanation is that men only actually know how to direct others - they don't know how to coach them. Where men do know how to coach, they are likely to be less assertively masculine, and therefore less likely to achieve the level of dominance that is required to succeed in a self-employed capacity; these men are more likely to express their talents in employed positions, as advocates, guidance counsellors, therapists, and educators, for example.
Since a core element of Western masculinity is typically held to be a rugged, almost pathological, individualism, the focus of "I don't need anyone else", and any acknowledgement that collaboration achieves more than competitiveness ever can is seen as "weakness", and therefore inherently "unmanly", the question arises of how men who are only capable of directing others, and who focus their business exclusively on men, are actually getting enough clients to sustain that business - because it's not very "individualistic" of you to need someone else to tell you what to do, is it?
Maybe these men aren't running viable businesses. That's an entirely feasible explanation. Maybe they're married, their wives are working (they are always heterosexual men, so the use of 'wife' is intentional), and it's the income from these women that's keeping everything going; I know several men, both cis and trans, for whom that's the case, and, as long as it's a consensual agreement between marriage partners, and the men are easing their spouses' load in some way on the home front, I don't have a problem with it. Everyone has to start from somewhere; most of us do not benefit from "generational wealth", so that "somewhere" is often very scrappy, very dependent on others, very precarious.
An alternative explanation is that men are actually incredibly anxious, and, just as anxious animals which are socially orientated will seek out more dominant animals, to be in proximity with (but, importantly, not in direct contact with), and will gain confidence and an ability to self-regulate through the presence of these calmer animals, who have been around enough to know what they need to be bothered about, and what they can ignore, so men seek out men who present a dominant masculinity - which, in the West, unfortunately, is often identified by toxic attitudes, and/or militaristic phraseology.
Men who are not anxious don't need proximity to dominant males. They may very well appreciate the opportunity to be in loose, low-key social settings with other men, just as calm, self-assured dogs and horses will appreciate the opportunity to be around other horses or dogs, whilst ignoring those others, and contentedly grazing, dozing, self-initiating individual play, etc, but, like those calm horses and dogs, they can tolerate solitude well, too; it's not a threat, simply another state of being, which they can alter if and when they wish.
These non-anxious men won't have a list of things they "want to achieve this year" - they'll have things they have achieved, things they are actively working on, but which will take time to achieve, and they will have a very short list of things they have genuine barriers to achieving. They'll occasionally revisit this short list, to consider if there are new potential solutions to the barriers, or if a change in life circumstances means that the barrier is no longer as fixed as it once was, but they don't allow their focus to be dominated by things that have a lot of complexity attached to them; addressing these "wicked problems" is background work, something to do in genuine downtime; it isn't allowed to become all-consuming, and prevent forward movement in other areas of life.
This, I feel, is what dominant masculinity should look like; the calm, unhurried ease of an Alpha predator from the non-human animal kingdom. A relaxed confidence which isn't distracted by every other news item, by every frantic demand from everyone else. A confident voice which says "Okay; so it's raining. Getting wet isn't the end of the world. If you'd prefer not to get wet, go and find shelter." A focused attention which is able to distinguish "normal disorganised dysfunction of the surrounding world, and its dysregulated inhabitants" from actual threats.
But this kind of masculinity isn't something that can be condensed into a book, or a £99 online course. It can't be taught, it can only ever be modelled.
It's also not the kind of masculinity most heterosexual women have been raised to appreciate - a lot of women have been socialised into dysregulation, and the inherent "normative narcissism" of human attraction means that most of us look for people who are "Us, but in our preferred gender and aesthetic expression." If we are dysregulated, our brains will only alert us to attractive-to-us, relevantly-gendered people who are also dysregulated. If we are calm and grounded, our brain's repulsion instinct is triggered by anyone who is not also calm and grounded. (This is why sudden dislike for a longterm spouse or partner does not "come out of nowhere", and equally why, contrary to my religious upbringing, I believe it is necessary for people to live together for at least a year before they consider marriage. A "sudden" dislike will be an unconscious recognition that the other person's equilibrium, or our own, has shifted; living together allows the time and space for that emotional attentiveness to happen, for us to identify someone's default state - because we can all become dysregulated at times, when we are normally calm, and we can all present calmness for short periods when we are actually chronically dysregulated.)
It's also why I believe no one should be considering involvement with a partner who hasn't lived completely alone (assuming there is no disability element which would render living alone unsafe or unattainable for the individual) for at least 5yrs - no roommates, no parents, no situationships, no friends with benefits - just them, and their income, paying their bills, and maintaining their home and health. That period of time reveals someone's consistent nature, between calmness and dysregulation. I made an exception in my wife's case; she had lived alone, but in supported housing, for a matter of months when we met; however, she had also been a young carer, and my experience has consistently been that care responsibilities in childhood have a similar effect to living alone for a significant period of time; they shape the brain towards the person's default state, just as the self-dependence of living and managing alone does. (Morgana, my wife, is exceptional in many ways, and there is so much in our story that "shouldn't have" happened, but did anyway...I don't believe soulmates are always intended to be romantic partners, but we clearly were.)
Can you be calm and ambitious? Yes; in fact, it's highly desirable for ambition to come from a calm mindset, because the calmness boundaries and sets limits for the ambition, and, as we are seeing in the West, and with Russia, ambition without limits is a threat to everyone except the ambitious person.
Ambitions which come from a place of calm are also more likely to be achieved - dysregulation causes the kind of nervous excitation which jumps at every off-stage noise, responds to every news alert, is constantly spinning in the breeze of shifting opinions, changing tastes, and novel trends. Calmness breeds consistency, and consistency is the basis of all achievement.
Maybe that's the reason we want to believe that writing down your goals means you're more likely to achieve them - subconsciously, we're connecting the act of writing with the fact of being in a calm state of mind.
I don't know how to make the contacts I need, and I lack the money to market the business effectively.
2. Money - I wouldn't make anything like enough selling the house I currently live in to buy anywhere else, never mind somewhere else that would be better, both objectively and for my needs, I'm not in a position to use whatever I would make from the sale of my current house as a deposit, and get a mortgage for the remainder of the cost of a better option, and I also wouldn't be accepted for a tenancy agreement, even with the chunk of cash I could make from selling my house; I don't currently have an income at all, I wouldn't pass a credit check, and I wouldn't be allowed to have my pets - which is a non-negotiable for me, as they're genuinely the only reason I haven't acted on the strong desire I've had recently to take my own life, and they are a major reason why my mental health and ability to push through a lot of life crap are as solid as they are.
3. Same reasons as #1, with the addition of not being easily able to travel outside of my local area, especially at short notice, because of the whole being blind, and thus banned from driving thing, sight loss meaning I'm completely night blind, so evening events are...not always possible, and being blind meaning I'm very quickly lost in unfamiliar areas, especially if they're crowded.
4. Money - the qualification costs literally thousands. I don't even have a thousand pence to my name at this point.
Step three, the final part of Boardman's process, is:
Write down how you plan to achieve these things, and when you'll achieve them by.
We'll set aside, for the moment, the fact that the Harvard Goal-Setting Study, from whence we get an enduring insistence that "writing down your goals, and time-limiting them, makes you more likely to achieve them!" never actually happened, and pretend that our brains, which have only actually been using writing for about 10,000years - less than 10% of the time our species has actually been toodling about the place - have somehow evolved, in a very short span of biological time, relatively speaking, to only be able to really achieve things if they're written down somewhere, and that we're not actually seeing the more likely fact, that people generally have rubbish memories, and that you're only more likely to achieve things you write down because you actually get reminded of them (assuming you don't forget that you wrote them down, forget where you wrote them down, forget where you put the notebook/stored the digital document on which you wrote them down....), and run with the (inaccurate) received wisdom that goals need to be written down to be achieved:
All of my "things to achieve" are outside my control in terms of timelines; any "I will achieve X by Y" with them would literally be wild guesswork at this point. So, we'll just address the "how":
1 & 3: Market as much as I am able to, within the limitations of not having money or the ability to easily travel. Take inspiration from America - no one's actually stopping 47 & his puppet master from pulling the strokes they are, and I'm not intending to do anything illegal.
2. I actually need to focus on #4 first, because if I achieve #4, I can then work towards achieving #2, even if #1 doesn't come through.
4. Save what I can, where I can, until I can afford to take the CIPD course, whilst looking/applying for jobs I am already qualified for where the employer would pay for CIPD qualification. This latter course of action would also allow me to work towards achieving #2 sooner, and would mitigate the challenges around effective marketing for #1 and #3.
Completing this exercise made me think about how similar Boardman's coaching is to pretty much all coaching that's focused on cisgender men; they're all very military-coded, the coaches often reference an active service career, almost always in the SAS or similar elite units, and they all parrot the (outdated, proven-false) script of "Write down goals, write down when and how you'll achieve them, otherwise it's never going to happen!" They all cling desperately to an insistence that "The only barriers are ones you invent for yourself!" - which would seem to argue against their elite military background, since those units have a high attrition rate through basic training, which can't just be down to "people didn't have what it takes" - most people who actually want to be in the military know what mindset is needed, and they tend to have that mindset as a natural element of who they are; people who are more laid back, more "I'll get to it when I get to it" don't, in my experience, wake up one day and think "You know what career I'd be really good in? The military!"
More than all of this, though (although this is enough to be getting on with, honestly), all of the coaching aimed at cisgender men seems to suggest that those men are literally incapable of motivating themselves to achieve anything - they all need to have someone else tell them what to do, they all need someone else standing (metaphorically) over them, waving a big stick, and implying dire consequences for "failure."
Perhaps this is the case, and, being trans, this was a crucial element of male socialisation I missed out on. Certainly, it would explain why so many women seem to be married to men who need to be walked through how to do basic household cleaning tasks, who need to be reminded of every single appointment they have, who need to have those appointments made for them, who need to have the exact, highly-specific information on items before they can reasonably be expected to locate them on a supermarket shelf.
But it wouldn't explain the men like my father and grandfather, who, owing to their respective wives having severe mental illness, had to provide spousal care, manage the housework, grocery shopping, and cooking, on top of doing a full-time job.
It doesn't explain the men who live happily, and in clean, well-ordered houses, as lifelong bachelors or long-term widowers.
It doesn't explain the three different men I've known who were single fathers - not "separated co-parents", but entirely lone parents - in one case, because of the death of their children's mother, in the other two because the women in question just upped and left, and never made contact again. Their children have all grown up to be highly capable, emotionally intelligent, focused, hard-working adults.
The more logical explanation is that men only actually know how to direct others - they don't know how to coach them. Where men do know how to coach, they are likely to be less assertively masculine, and therefore less likely to achieve the level of dominance that is required to succeed in a self-employed capacity; these men are more likely to express their talents in employed positions, as advocates, guidance counsellors, therapists, and educators, for example.
Since a core element of Western masculinity is typically held to be a rugged, almost pathological, individualism, the focus of "I don't need anyone else", and any acknowledgement that collaboration achieves more than competitiveness ever can is seen as "weakness", and therefore inherently "unmanly", the question arises of how men who are only capable of directing others, and who focus their business exclusively on men, are actually getting enough clients to sustain that business - because it's not very "individualistic" of you to need someone else to tell you what to do, is it?
Maybe these men aren't running viable businesses. That's an entirely feasible explanation. Maybe they're married, their wives are working (they are always heterosexual men, so the use of 'wife' is intentional), and it's the income from these women that's keeping everything going; I know several men, both cis and trans, for whom that's the case, and, as long as it's a consensual agreement between marriage partners, and the men are easing their spouses' load in some way on the home front, I don't have a problem with it. Everyone has to start from somewhere; most of us do not benefit from "generational wealth", so that "somewhere" is often very scrappy, very dependent on others, very precarious.
An alternative explanation is that men are actually incredibly anxious, and, just as anxious animals which are socially orientated will seek out more dominant animals, to be in proximity with (but, importantly, not in direct contact with), and will gain confidence and an ability to self-regulate through the presence of these calmer animals, who have been around enough to know what they need to be bothered about, and what they can ignore, so men seek out men who present a dominant masculinity - which, in the West, unfortunately, is often identified by toxic attitudes, and/or militaristic phraseology.
Men who are not anxious don't need proximity to dominant males. They may very well appreciate the opportunity to be in loose, low-key social settings with other men, just as calm, self-assured dogs and horses will appreciate the opportunity to be around other horses or dogs, whilst ignoring those others, and contentedly grazing, dozing, self-initiating individual play, etc, but, like those calm horses and dogs, they can tolerate solitude well, too; it's not a threat, simply another state of being, which they can alter if and when they wish.
These non-anxious men won't have a list of things they "want to achieve this year" - they'll have things they have achieved, things they are actively working on, but which will take time to achieve, and they will have a very short list of things they have genuine barriers to achieving. They'll occasionally revisit this short list, to consider if there are new potential solutions to the barriers, or if a change in life circumstances means that the barrier is no longer as fixed as it once was, but they don't allow their focus to be dominated by things that have a lot of complexity attached to them; addressing these "wicked problems" is background work, something to do in genuine downtime; it isn't allowed to become all-consuming, and prevent forward movement in other areas of life.
This, I feel, is what dominant masculinity should look like; the calm, unhurried ease of an Alpha predator from the non-human animal kingdom. A relaxed confidence which isn't distracted by every other news item, by every frantic demand from everyone else. A confident voice which says "Okay; so it's raining. Getting wet isn't the end of the world. If you'd prefer not to get wet, go and find shelter." A focused attention which is able to distinguish "normal disorganised dysfunction of the surrounding world, and its dysregulated inhabitants" from actual threats.
But this kind of masculinity isn't something that can be condensed into a book, or a £99 online course. It can't be taught, it can only ever be modelled.
It's also not the kind of masculinity most heterosexual women have been raised to appreciate - a lot of women have been socialised into dysregulation, and the inherent "normative narcissism" of human attraction means that most of us look for people who are "Us, but in our preferred gender and aesthetic expression." If we are dysregulated, our brains will only alert us to attractive-to-us, relevantly-gendered people who are also dysregulated. If we are calm and grounded, our brain's repulsion instinct is triggered by anyone who is not also calm and grounded. (This is why sudden dislike for a longterm spouse or partner does not "come out of nowhere", and equally why, contrary to my religious upbringing, I believe it is necessary for people to live together for at least a year before they consider marriage. A "sudden" dislike will be an unconscious recognition that the other person's equilibrium, or our own, has shifted; living together allows the time and space for that emotional attentiveness to happen, for us to identify someone's default state - because we can all become dysregulated at times, when we are normally calm, and we can all present calmness for short periods when we are actually chronically dysregulated.)
It's also why I believe no one should be considering involvement with a partner who hasn't lived completely alone (assuming there is no disability element which would render living alone unsafe or unattainable for the individual) for at least 5yrs - no roommates, no parents, no situationships, no friends with benefits - just them, and their income, paying their bills, and maintaining their home and health. That period of time reveals someone's consistent nature, between calmness and dysregulation. I made an exception in my wife's case; she had lived alone, but in supported housing, for a matter of months when we met; however, she had also been a young carer, and my experience has consistently been that care responsibilities in childhood have a similar effect to living alone for a significant period of time; they shape the brain towards the person's default state, just as the self-dependence of living and managing alone does. (Morgana, my wife, is exceptional in many ways, and there is so much in our story that "shouldn't have" happened, but did anyway...I don't believe soulmates are always intended to be romantic partners, but we clearly were.)
Can you be calm and ambitious? Yes; in fact, it's highly desirable for ambition to come from a calm mindset, because the calmness boundaries and sets limits for the ambition, and, as we are seeing in the West, and with Russia, ambition without limits is a threat to everyone except the ambitious person.
Ambitions which come from a place of calm are also more likely to be achieved - dysregulation causes the kind of nervous excitation which jumps at every off-stage noise, responds to every news alert, is constantly spinning in the breeze of shifting opinions, changing tastes, and novel trends. Calmness breeds consistency, and consistency is the basis of all achievement.
Maybe that's the reason we want to believe that writing down your goals means you're more likely to achieve them - subconsciously, we're connecting the act of writing with the fact of being in a calm state of mind.
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