#1039 - Connor Beaton - Why Successful Men Always Self-Destruct

Why do so many high functioning men self destruct in private? It's like you're, like, describing my my clients. Oh, boy. I think there's a number of different reasons. There's there's trying to maintain this image externally, and part of that image is the perfectionist. So there's never any room for downfall. There's never any room for weakness. There's never any room for problems, or issues. And so for a lot of men, that becomes it becomes something that they start to medicate. And, usually, that has rooting in childhood. Right? That they had to be a certain way in order to garner love, to garner attention. So for a lot of super high performing men, they're you know, they grew up in an environment where they kinda had to be perfect. And if they were perfect enough, then they would get affection. Then they would get love. They would get praise. They get validation. And so for a lot of young guys, it's like a lot of men in general. It's if I can be perfect enough and I can perform well enough, then everything will be okay. But if that starts to falter just a little bit, then it says something about me personally. It means that something's wrong with me and then shame starts to creep in and they don't want anybody to know that that's happening. And so slowly over time because they can't admit that there's something wrong, they can't admit that there's an issue, they can't sort of vocalize it. They start to medicate that shame or they start to medicate the perceived weakness, the insecurity, the anxiety, with booze or weed or women or hookers or whatever it is, right? Whatever their sort of drug choices could be gambling or whatever. And slowly over time, that becomes the method that they need in order to just maintain homeostasis. And it's almost like there's a debt building in the background that's building over time. Every little mess up, every little screw up is just sort of accruing this this massive debt inside of them. And eventually, it just craters. And so, you know, in a lot of ways, they need to be able to bring forward some of those weaknesses or insecurities or anxieties or, you know, the the trauma that they've just been holding on for fucking decades. Mhmm. You know? So I think that's a huge part of it. And and I think for a lot of men, it's correlated to how it's correlated to their sense of masculinity and their sense of manhood. Mhmm. So it's like, well, if I admit this weakness, if I admit that I'm struggling, then it means that there's something wrong with me as a man, that I'm less masculine. And I don't think that that's necessarily something that we think about top of mind. It's more performance at all costs. And so I don't want to admit that there's something going on behind the scenes. …