Brandon Held - Life is Crazy

Episode 39: What Does It Really Mean to Be a Man in 2025?

• Brandon Held • Season 2 • Episode 39

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Modern manhood is evolving beyond traditional provider roles to embrace emotional intelligence, vulnerability, and personal accountability. We must redefine masculinity for 2025 while maintaining core values of respect, communication, and continuous growth.

• The traditional male role as provider and protector is changing with many women out earning their partners
• Embracing vulnerability as a strength rather than weakness is essential for deeper relationships
• Emotional wellness and mental health should be priorities, not afterthoughts
• Purpose-driven living means aligning your daily actions with your personal values
• Leading by example is more effective than "do as I say, not as I do" parenting
• Healthy relationships require clear boundaries, open communication, and mutual respect
• Financial responsibility provides freedom and security for your partner to pursue their goals
• Personal growth requires staying curious, challenging biases, and expanding worldviews
• Learning from failures is crucial for becoming a better man and partner

Go to brandonheld.com and check out my life coaching services. 

Go to my website, click on the Podcast tab and subscribe and support the podcast. 

Follow me on Instagram at bh_life_is_crazy. Let's talk to each other.

Follow me on YouTube, where you can find my podcast and helpful videos. @BrandonHeld_LifeIsCrazy


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Speaker 1:

Welcome. Welcome back to Brandon Held. Life is Crazy. I just want to thank everyone that has been listening to my podcasts and I really love the trajectory of this podcast and where it's going and I'm very excited about the future. I'm doing an unscheduled podcast today. I did not have this on the calendar to do. I've been doing a lot of guests lately and I am going to continue to keep having guests to bring you everybody variety and to learn different experiences and different knowledge and add not only to your knowledge base but mine as well. Each of these guests that I have spoken with so far and have pre-interviewed for the future guests coming on the show all have something to offer that you all can learn from and I can learn from, and that has been my experience so far. I almost forgot. This is a call to action to go to my website, brandonheldcom, and check out my life coaching services. You've already found my podcast. You can go to my website and you can subscribe and support me based on whatever donation you'd like to give on a monthly basis Could be as little as $3. All of it would be helpful. If enough people sign up at $3 a month, then I can recuperate the costs of just doing this podcast. And finally, follow me on Instagram. My Instagram is bh underscore life underscore is underscore crazy. Just go there and follow me.

Speaker 1:

Let's talk to each other, but today I just felt the need to talk about a topic that is really different nowadays, and that is what it means to be a man. What does it mean to be a man in 2025? When I was young, I didn't have a dad. My dad left when I was two you all know that and then I had a stepfather and by his design, he did work and travel a lot, but when he was home, he wasn't really a father figure. To me, he was about living his life, which was drinking, partying, relaxing with my mom in the bed upstairs in the house, so I didn't really have an example of what a man should be. I didn't really have an example of what a man should be, and so I was trying to figure that out and find that out all on my own at a very early age, and when I was 17 and I went off and joined the Air Force, I had a lot to learn. I had a lot to learn about being a man and what it meant to be a man Now it used to mean that you were the provider and the protector, and you were the one that gave your wife and your children the opportunity to allow her to stay home, raise them, do what's best for them by being in their life and there for them all day, every day, because nobody loves your children like you do, and there's an old school part of me that thinks that's the way life should be.

Speaker 1:

That's what a man should do. A man should be a provider and he should be a protector, and he should also be a mentor to his kids. Those are some of the basic things a man can be, in my opinion. Now we're in an ever-changing world where maybe women or the wife makes a higher income than the husband, maybe the wife is a better financial provider than the man is. And I'm not here to crap on any man, that's true, for I'm not here to say, oh, you're a piece of shit because you're not the provider for your family. I'm not here to say that, hell, I make a great salary, more than I ever really saw myself making in life, but my wife is going to law school and she's going to get a JD and she's going to become a lawyer, and the odds are very high that she will have a salary more than I ever made with my measly little MBA a role model for my kids. That doesn't take away from all that, because someday my wife might make more money than I do.

Speaker 1:

So we're in an area where we have to reevaluate what it means to be a man, and so what I would say is you have to do things like redefined masculinity, so you have to move beyond the traditional stereotypes of strength and stoicism that I just talked about. You have to start to embrace vulnerability and use it as a source of power and authenticity, because you can be vulnerable. Even if you're with a woman that likes a man to be a man, she still likes that he can be vulnerable with her sometimes, not all the time. You don't want to be the woman in the relationship. You want to be the woman in the relationship. You want to be the man, but you also want to be vulnerable to the person that can see you vulnerable and hopefully not judge you, and love you and respect you more for showing that vulnerability, and you want to be open to self-reflection and emotional intelligence. That hasn't changed as far as I'm concerned. That's nothing new. If you're striving to be a better man, a better person, then you should be self-reflecting, you should have emotional intelligence and you should be striving to grow and be a better man pretty much daily. So that hasn't changed.

Speaker 1:

You want to stay on top of your emotional wellness and mental health, so you need to prioritize self-care, which men are pretty good at right. Men are much better at stepping aside or putting aside time for us to recharge our batteries and get support when we need it, from buddies or whatever. Most men probably don't like therapy. I'm a big fan of therapy or life coaching. They're not the same. One is to help someone that's broken. That's a therapist. I'll say, quote unquote broken. And a life coach is to help you get through ruts and get you through difficult times in life where you feel stuck. So there's a difference. So you need to know which kind of support you need and you need to build a support network of trusted friends and mentors, and that support network shouldn't be huge.

Speaker 1:

We can only be really close to so many people and maintain that level. Have a small circle of people you trust, really trust, and like you could go out of town and you would let them stay at your house with your wife. Trust that's not. That's trusting your wife too, yes, of course, but also you have to trust your friend wouldn't make that kind of move on your wife. I have a few friends that I feel that way about. I have a few friends that I trust them 100% that if they were with my wife overnight in a house and I wasn't there, they wouldn't try a thing. I believe that with all my heart in those friendships and I would bet my life on it, so that's why they're my close friends.

Speaker 1:

And also for wellness and mental health, you should practice meditation and stress management. Maybe you're not into meditation Not everyone is but if you can find a way to get into meditation or some type of mindfulness practice and manage stress, you're going to be a better man, not only for yourself but for your family. The days of the men being this closed off grunt who just goes to work and comes home and grabs a beer and sits on the couch and watches TV the rest of the night and is disengaged from his family, those days are over. Those days are over. You can't be that man anymore. That man is gone. Women don't put up with that man, at least not good. Women that have value, women that know their worth. They're not going to put up with a man that does that kind of behavior.

Speaker 1:

And you need to be purpose-driven. So you need to find personal values and align your daily actions with them. So you don't want to just talk the talk, you want to walk the walk. You want to lead by example, and I cannot stress how important that is. I literally grew up on the book of do as I say, not as I do, because I was being told I could or couldn't do certain things. And then when I would point out to my mother, or even say my uncles or something, how they're telling me to behave a certain way and they're behaving the opposite, their response was always do as I say, not as I do. Nobody respects that, nobody. Don't give someone advice that you can't follow yourself. So make sure your actions align with your personal values.

Speaker 1:

Make sure you treat others the way you want to be treated. If you want your wife to be faithful to you and honor you and be open with you, you have to give her that same respect. You have to give her that same respect Just because you could go hook up with a woman and potentially never get caught. That doesn't matter. Life is full of karma and whether you get caught or not, it will come back to bite you in the ass one way or the other. So treat others the way you'd want to be treated, even when no one's around, nobody's looking. You can get away with something, or you think you can get away with something. Don't do it great for you, because having personal value and self-worth is just phenomenal for self-esteem and independence and your value in this world to yourself. It's also valuable to your loved ones, your wife, your kids.

Speaker 1:

Everyone respects someone who is working towards something or is providing something that they have worked hard to get to and are continuing to work hard to keep providing. And you want to be that guy. Everyone sees these beautiful models and beautiful women who are strong and independent and know how to do things in life, and every Joe thinks they can have a woman like that, and you have to be an equal. So your partner, if you want someone who, a woman, who is of value, who has value, who knows her value, who knows her worth, she doesn't want a man who's less than that. She wants a man who's the same, has value, knows his value, knows his worth and he provides all that to her. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this doesn't go the other way. I'm not saying I haven't come across women who think that they deserve things they don't deserve because I have. But I'm not talking about them today. I'm talking about men and what we need to do to be better, live better, do better.

Speaker 1:

So you want to embrace your failures as learning opportunities? Failure hurts, nobody likes to fail. It sucks, but do you want to keep doing it? Do you want to keep failing, but do you want to keep doing it? Do you want to keep failing? Every time you fail at something, no matter what it is, you get fired from a job. You try to start a business and it flops. Your marriage fails. You learn from those opportunities.

Speaker 1:

I'm a slow learner. I've been divorced three times and every time I approached marriage I tried to pick a different type of partner and I try to be a better man based off of what I learned from that previous marriage. The problem is is I was picking a different partner and the partner had different expectations and different values for me and different things they wanted to be. And here I was trying to learn and change from what I failed before. So I didn't really learn well enough. I was stubborn, frankly, that I thought that the lessons I had learned from my recent failure was making me who I needed to be then. And it wasn't enough alone. I needed to take that information and then I also needed to take the present information and combine the two. Yes, I was a better man, but I wasn't as good as I needed to be.

Speaker 1:

So make sure you're doing that. Make sure you're learning from your failures and still continuing to learn in everyday life by your environment and your surroundings and what you need to be, not only for you but for your family. So you have to respect your relationships. You got to understand boundaries and actively practice consent. What does that mean? That means you need to define what works and doesn't work for your relationship. You do, your wife does.

Speaker 1:

Nobody else can tell you that. Everyone wants to chime in, give advice, say, oh, this is right, this is wrong, this is controlling, this isn't controlling. That's not cool to do. Whatever it is, everyone always has something to say. Who cares what everyone else says? Who cares? I'm telling you straight up who cares. I don't care what a psychologist says. I don't care what a marriage counselor says, I don't care what anyone says. You and your wife have to get together and decide what works best for you or your partner.

Speaker 1:

If it's your girlfriend and don't just shit on girlfriends like she's just my girlfriend, she's not important. But if she's serious about you and she's in a monogamous relationship with you and you're in a monogamous relationship with her and she wants a future and you want a future, you need to give her that respect that you would give her as a husband and don't just call her just a girlfriend. That's not an out that allows you to behave any type of way because you're not married yet. It's not how that works. You to behave any type of way because you're not married yet, it's not how that works. If she's serious about you and she wants a future, she's not your future. Don't keep dragging her around. Be a man, cut it off, let her go, because in the long run you'll be saving her a lot of pain and you'll be doing her a huge favor. And hell, she may hate you forever after that, so be it. That's the way it goes.

Speaker 1:

I have some exes that hate me. Fine, hate me. If that makes you feel better, then so be it. I don't hate anyone one. There's no one in this world I hate, because no one is worth that kind of poison that hatred does to myself. So I'm just not going to do that. And you need to treat women like you would want to be treated. Need to treat women like you would want to be treated, period.

Speaker 1:

So you have to openly communicate. You can't do almost all of this stuff I'm talking about if you don't communicate. And I'm not saying every relationship is a winner. I had an ex-wife that as soon as I brought up any kind of uncomfortable topic, it turned into her crying and screaming and running out of the room. Okay, not everyone you can communicate with, you just can't. And so that's a killer of a relationship. It kills relationships when you can't openly communicate with each other and keep your cool and talk about what you need to talk about and work things out. So just make sure you're not that person. And if you're with someone who can't communicate, then maybe that's not the right person for you. You know you can wait for them to change, you can hope they'll change and maybe they'll change, but also maybe they won't. Maybe that's who they will always be and your relationship will struggle because you can't communicate. Just don't let it be your fault, don't let you be the reason you can't communicate, you can't communicate. So back to financial and personal responsibility.

Speaker 1:

I wanted to look this up because, if you notice the trend in our world, at least in America, here I'm seeing a lot of younger women with older men and younger men with older women, and while to some degree the older men with younger women makes sense to me because women are more emotionally mature than men typically generally not everyone. This isn't true for everyone. Nothing is true for everyone. This isn't true for everyone. Nothing is true for everyone.

Speaker 1:

The reverse is a little confusing to me. When and we don't want anyone else and this is our person for the rest of our life, we'll always have one eye open, and I'm guilty of that too, even as being a married man, of that too. Even as being a married man, I never had the feeling with women before, until my wife now, that if this is the last woman I'm with for the rest of my life, I'm happy with that. That's good by me, I'm okay with that. I never felt that way before until this marriage that I'm currently in, and that was unfair, that was a disservice to the women that I was married to before and I was trying to convince them to have threesomes and do other things because, yes, maybe they were attracted to women, but also it was my own selfish intent. But also it was my own selfish intent. And so if you're not committed to this woman, don't string her along.

Speaker 1:

And older women generally again, we're talking in generalities here. Nothing is 100% true for everybody. Older women generally know they're older and they want to find someone to grow old with and spend the rest of their life with. They don't want to play with someone that is just going to use them for a little while and move on. So that's why that baffles me. That's why those relationships Initially Didn't make sense to me. But I looked up some information and what I've learned is, in our current era, men from Ages 20 to 34. 20 to 34. 11% of them don't even work. They don't even have an income. No job and Period.

Speaker 1:

The older woman thing makes sense to me because she's established, she probably has a home and a good income and you can still be young and senseless because she doesn't need you to take care of her, of her. So that's where it really started to make sense for me. And, conversely, younger women that want security and protection and want to be taken care of as well not really necessarily taken care of, but want to know they have that security with someone. It makes sense to be with an older man because, a an older man is more established, b an older man probably generates a better income and, c an older man most likely is going to cherish and value his younger woman and he doesn't want to do anything that's going to throw that away and you lose this value that you have with a younger woman and I know that probably makes some people mad. If you're a younger man that maybe you desire a girl around your age, a woman around your age, and she likes older men, that probably doesn't sit well with you. And if you're an older woman and you want a man around your age and men around your age dating younger women, it doesn't sit well with you either. But it makes sense to me why things happen that way. But it makes sense to me why things happen that way.

Speaker 1:

The average median income from men ages 20 to 30 range between $28,000 and $66,000 a year. That's the median income. But once you start getting with a man in his 40s, between 40 and 50, it's between $79,000 and $90,000 a year on average, and so that's just an unfair advantage that an older man has. Not only is he more established financially, he also has been through some things and realized that he's need to make some changes. He's needed to change his ways and he needs to be a better man and do some better things for the woman that he's with, things for the woman that he's with, and that's what is appealing to younger women. That financial responsibility is something that men give to the relationship and that allows the woman to grow and become successful in her own right. It gives her freedom to do the things that she wants to do to become successful on her own. And so, finally, the last thing I'm going to talk about is personal growth and continue learning.

Speaker 1:

Seek out male mentors or life coaches and or self-development courses. Genuinely became a life coach, so this is a service I could provide to young men, so I could help young men work through the issues that they have to deal with and get to where they're trying to be in life, whether it's your personal life or your professional life. That is why I became a life coach. I didn't have that. No one was there for me and I would have paid for it. It wasn't available. I didn't know how to find it. So I'm here, ready to mentor and coach and help young men who need help, and help young men who need help. I'm very passionate about this. That's why I did this podcast off the cuff, without even deciding that I was going to do this today. I wasn't really preparing for it, it wasn't on my agenda. It's just something I'm passionate about and I wanted to talk about it. So that's why I'm here talking about it with you today.

Speaker 1:

Stay curious and open to new perspectives and experiences, because your wife and your kids will value and appreciate you more when you are open. You're not closed minded. You don't think you have all the answers, because none of us have all the answers and things that I used to think when I was young and I was so sure I was right about that thought process. I look back now as an older man and think how insane I was like, how ridiculous I was to think some of those things, how uninformed and immature that thought process was. So keep growing, keep learning, keep staying open, keep an open mind, challenge your personal biases and expand your view of the world.

Speaker 1:

Continue to grow and you continue to learn and you continue to be better, even if life isn't going your way right now, just stay on that path. Do the right things and the chips will fall in your favor. I hope this information helped you today. If you need any kind of help, reach out to me. Go to brandonheldcom, sign up for my life coaching. I can help you. I want to help you. So until next time, have a good day and I'll talk to you then.

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