Hey -
New episode today.
There’s a moment every man faces, when the external armor no longer protects what’s inside. When success starts to feel like something he’s holding up rather than living.
Michael Ostrolenk wrote this, and it packs a lot of meaning for us men these days.
This week’s episode is a conversation with Michael, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who spent 10 years as a master coach with Mark Divine’s SEALFIT program. At almost 40, as a civilian, he completed Kokoro Camp. A 50-hour event modeled on Navy SEAL Hell Week. Most men half his age don’t finish it.
But the lesson he took away wasn’t about toughness. It was about something underneath toughness that many of us men in midlife have never been taught to look at.
We talk about:
The gap between how a man’s life looks and how it feels
Why willpower alone stops working in your 40s
“You can’t love deeply from a dysregulated body”
The single most common limiting belief men carry into midlife (and the first move to break it)
What Kokoro Camp at almost 40 actually taught him about what’s still possible
The simplest starting move, free, that we can do today
If you’ve ever felt like you should be doing fine but something underneath isn’t working, this conversation is for you.
Listen now:
I highly recommend checking out Michael’s work here along with his excellent podcast Resilience Redefined.
Don’t fade.
— Jonathan