The Success Nuggets

Success Nuggets #28 - Redefining Male Empowerment through Community with David Miller

• David Abel • Season 2 • Episode 8

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Renowned men's mental health coach and former professional athlete David Miller joins us to explore a groundbreaking shift in how men can empower themselves through community. Discover how group coaching and immersive retreats are revolutionizing the way men rediscover their identities, helping them break free from limiting beliefs. By moving away from the competitive mindset ingrained since the industrial revolution, men are learning to see each other as allies, not adversaries. David shares compelling stories and expert insights on how collective accountability and shared goals are not just buzzwords but powerful tools for sustainable behavior change.

In the wake of COVID-19, the need for genuine connections has never been more vital. David explains the cultural shifts that have reignited the desire for community among men, highlighting the importance of providing spaces where they can be authentic and emotionally open. With a focus on collaboration over competition, this episode offers a refreshing challenge to societal norms that often discourage emotional vulnerability. Tune in for an inspiring conversation that promises to reshape perceptions and motivate personal growth, as we redefine what it means to be a part of a supportive male community.

Speaker 1:

Thank you about the patterns that drive progress. Get ready to dive into a world of insights and inspiration. This is the Success Nuggets podcast, with the founder of the Digital Lightbulb and your host, david Abel.

Speaker 3:

Welcome back to the Success Nuggets. Joining us today is men's mental health coach, influential innovator and former professional athlete, david Miller. Are you there, david? Yes, hello, thank you for having me. Great to see you. Great to see you For our audience.

Speaker 2:

Tell us what you do, I'm a men's coach, so I run coaching courses and immersive retreats for men to find their own sense of identity and personal empowerment and to work through any limiting beliefs and blocks that might be stopping them living the life they want to live.

Speaker 3:

Okay, so group coaching is a little bit different than just one-to-one or therapy. How does that experience play out?

Speaker 2:

It's really empowering for the people because it's actually something that as men we've missed in our culture for such a long time this sense of collaboration and shared goals and collective accountability.

Speaker 2:

For so long we've actually been competing against each other.

Speaker 2:

So since, like the industrial revolution, when we left the farm for the factory, we started seeing other men as a threat, as competition, we've stepped away from the sense, this idea of community.

Speaker 2:

But in these group coaching sessions and the retreats that I do, what we often find is that men can be like medicine.

Speaker 2:

They have medicine for each other, so we can be the medicine for each other, and what I mean by that is we can share an experience that typically can rewrite the story or perspective or perception of something for another man. So where maybe I feel like I'm lacking in something, somebody else would show up in total abundance in that thing and just share, like a banger, an insight, like a golden nugget, and actually change how I feel about something or how I viewed a certain experience, and it can shake and change and evolve and grow my understanding of something just from them telling their story. And when we do group sessions, so, whether it's in person or online, what we get, and what we see from scientific study is that behavior change is 10 times more likely to happen and to sustain itself if we do things as a group because of collective accountability and shared goals. So when we do things as men together, we're actually more likely to take on those behavioural changes and live the life that we want to live because we're doing it together.

Speaker 3:

I think I'll say something interesting in the path of time here. If we were to go back 180 years ago, there was World War, so a lot of men got together in the military and there was the industrial time, and then the only kind of time men have hung around in the last sort of 20 years is in the pub, which isn't a good habit to form for your mental health, as we've soon realized. It's covid had something to do with this. Now that we're bringing community back in, like, where's it changed after this sort of comfy men's zone we've been in?

Speaker 2:

yeah, I think when our society shifted during that time everything was altered and we kind of found a desire for community again. There was like this, real for everybody, men and women, but particularly men in this case. We we realized, you know, when something was taken away from us, you almost you don't know what you got till it's gone. Right, when that was taken away from us till we couldn't go and meet up with people in the pub, we realized, oh my god, like I need, I need a group of men around me.

Speaker 2:

And in my experience what's happened kind of subsequent years following covid lockdowns is men have really harnessed the idea of community and collaboration, moving away from this competitive mindset and seeing other men as support instead of threats. And actually now that they have in my retreats and coaching, they have permission to be themselves and realizing actually that that men aren't the threat, they aren't scary. I can share my emotions and it's counterintuitive to what we actually might believe in society. As men we're like, oh, I can't share with my pal what I'm feeling. He's going to take the mick out of me.

Speaker 2:

But then you realize, when you actually get into it and you give men the permission, every single man is dealing with a variation of the exact same thing and we're suppressing our emotions left, right and center and not being true to ourselves, not being authentic, not being honest, not being open, not being vulnerable. And when we get the permission to do it, it's so liberating and men are desperate for it. I've seen it, with thousands of men that come through the door the second they get that permission. They're so grateful for it and it's so healing and cathartic. And when we do it together and there's acceptance in that, it's a really beautiful thing.

Speaker 3:

It takes a brave person to step through the door, but I guess it takes a brave person to set up a business. Why did you step forward to champion this?

Speaker 2:

Well, I guess this was me finding myself in my own way. This is essentially who I've always been. I've always been an empathetic person that was in touch with emotions and had a certain level of emotional intelligence. And I was the guy that. I was a professional athlete for my whole life. So I grew up in the Highlands of Scotland. So it's not a place like a working class community my dad was a joiner it's not the place for emotional intelligence or emotional inquiry. It's not the place for emotional intelligence or emotional inquiry like. It's just like they kind of stuff it down, get on with it lad mentality.

Speaker 2:

And then I moved into professional sport and I was a judo player. So I was a judo athlete. I was on the gb team and traveled the world fighting people for a living. So it's hyper competitive, really aggressive. You know there's no space for vulnerability or emotional awareness there. It's just about controlling emotions so that you can perform.

Speaker 2:

So throughout that whole experience I had kind of lost my identity and realized, finished sport, I just didn't know who I was. I didn't know what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I actually spent most of my life not being true to myself. So I experienced a really, really deep depression actually after I became a dad. So I became a dad and hit my all time low. It was supposed to be the best time of my life, but I found myself in a real pit of depression and nearly took my own life. But on the road back from that I realized that I'd suppressed this part of me, this community aspect, this empath. That was always the guy that people would behave like an arsehole in front of, in front of all the guys. But then I was the guy that came to you in private and being like oh you know, this is happening, can I speak to you about it? So it allowed me to to really look at myself and and the the most important parts of me and bring them back online. Not only bring them back online, but realize that it was much needed in society and that if anybody was going to do it, maybe I could do it. Maybe I could support people and provide a space for men to gather, men to come.

Speaker 2:

And I actually started doing it after the lockdowns finished and and I remember walking around Queen's Park with other dads that I'd met at some kid groups and they were suffering with the same sorts of things that I just worked through. So they saw me going from completely checked out to a full-time resident and wanted to know what I was doing. Like what the hell have you done? Like we saw you down there and now you're like really feeling great and looking great.

Speaker 2:

So I'd started up some men's groups and started doing like one-to-one chats and then I thought you know what bugger this? I'm going to train in this. I'm going to really apply myself and take all of this lived experience, all of this life experience of being a coach in other areas, and funnel it into this psychotherapeutic area and retrain in all these different ways of supporting people and then offer this as a space to people, because we need it, men need it and we've lost touch with it and, like I said, when men get to experience it, they're so grateful for it and so much better off for it. I've seen it thousands of times now men changing their lives around just by this one act of giving them permission to express and explore the fullness of their emotional landscape. It's beautiful. What, what?

Speaker 3:

a wonderful cause, dave. And what happens to these men. You know how quick is the transformation and what are some of the stories you hear about their wider circle of friends and family as well.

Speaker 2:

When I started off, I started doing one-day retreats, weekend retreats, and you know they were just kind of standalone events and they were great and they were wonderful and people came to them and had transformative experiences and then they went away back home. And I'm one that tends to like survey and research and, you know, seek feedback and try and refine things and make sure that I'm not just doing things for my own echo chamber. I'm always learning and changing and growing as I progress and I was finding that people were coming to these like one days and weekends and within six weeks a large percentage of them were finding themselves back where they started. You know they'd had this big experience like wow, mind opening, like cathartic experience, but what they were doing was they were leaving their environment, coming away changing, then returning to an environment that was totally unchanged. So they were hitting that brick wall of resistance from, you know, parents, partners, peers, environments, children, work like nothing was actually changing at home. But they had changed so fundamentally they felt a little bit even more out of alignment.

Speaker 2:

So I decided to evolve that into a longer program and for me that is what's actually working Having a support network that provides professional, expert guidance and coaching for a longer period of time is what actually works, and we're proving it time and time again now. So where we had the feedback of men firing themselves back where they started after six weeks, we're now running six and four month programs that are changing people's lives because they're able to apply and implement the small incremental changes that they make across the program, through all the different things that we do in it, and they're doing that over a longer period of time with the different areas or within the different areas in their life. So it's actually sustainable going forward. So our tagline for these experiences are take four months to change the rest of your life, and we really mean it and we're really doing it.

Speaker 3:

I don't know if you've got any like two-step plans or three-step plans for someone just looking to make some progress in their life. What sort of one, two, three could you give us? Oh, give me a second.

Speaker 2:

So, yeah, for me I think any advice I would give around a three-step process would be first step, first stage, is to look at your environment, look at how you can change your environment and design your environment to create how you can change your environment and design your environment to create paths of least resistance to the success you want to see, because so often we can get lost in that, essentially, if you don't want to eat chocolate, don't have chocolate in your house. So stuff like that. Like really look at your environment and how you can change it to support your growth, your routines, your morning routine and your nighttime routine. A good morning routine is supported by a good nighttime routine, so make sure both are on point and that can be designed through your environment.

Speaker 2:

The next is starting to learn how to notice and regulate your own emotions, making sure that you can respond rather than react. There's a famous book called Man's Search for Meaning, written by Viktor Frankl, and he speaks about this gap in time between stimulus and response and if you can hold on to that gap of time, that is the gateway to your growth and your freedom. So if you can essentially be able to regulate your nervous system, your emotions, so that you don't react and do something out of a reaction. Instead, you lengthen that time so that you can stay calm and respond in a good way. The third one would be to seek out community, to seek out people who really care, to seek out people who are interested in talking about things more or deeper than just the surface level chit chat that you might get in the pub. And to like stay away from environments that promote gossip and complaining. Instead, move towards positive spaces where people can really celebrate you for your growth absolutely.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, we've got to get rid of those toxic spaces. David, it's been a pleasure having you on. Like I say, it's only a short podcast. For anyone out there looking for david, what's your handle for the audience?

Speaker 2:

two handles. Mine is david ross, miller, spelt with an a m-i-l-l-a-r, but my company is called mantra men's work, so check me out there.

Speaker 3:

Check him out, guys, and we shall see you again on the next Success Nuggets podcast.

Speaker 1:

Join David and his incredible guests next time on the Success Nuggets podcast and to find out more, visit one golden nuggetcom. Thank you for listening.