We’re all aware that the man has a pivotal role in a marriage and in family dynamics. When we hear about men “manning up”, it doesn’t mean they have to literally stop crying. Manning up means strengthening emotional control in order for them to have stability. In this episode, Marco Lopez of Mindtune talks about how men need to take care of their mental health in order to take care of their families. A well-rounded man leads a powerful marriage and becomes an exceptional role model for his family.
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Listen to the podcast here:
What Does It Mean to Man Up? With Marco Lopez
I can start out sharing one experience that I had in Mexico. I have done a little bit of singing throughout my life. I was traveling down to Mexico with my sister. We were performing down there and we performed for a small town in Mexico where a lot of people came out and they heard us singing. After a performance, a shorter Indian lady came up to me and she told me that she knew my grandpa and he had left a big footprint in their community and their people. These people remembered him. They loved him a lot. That experience was one of the defining moments when I was younger because it helped me.
I realized how big of an influence and an impact that my grandpa had on me. Not only me but all these other people that I know. It shows the power that a person has when they are not self-absorbed and when they’re not focused on themselves to be able to help a lot of people. A man has the potential to do good if they’re not focused on themselves and if they’re focused on helping others. When she said that, I knew it was true. I knew that that’s the person that my grandpa was and I wanted to be that person as well.
I can tell that had a profound impact on you and I agree. That is a life-changing moment when you realize what matters.
You ask me the question, what led me to fill in this program was necessary? That was one that led me to personal development in general. I started in sales. I went to BYU and I studied everything except for what I ended up going into. I studied Latin American studies. I got a minor in business and minor in music, but then I ended up doing sales and training for multiple startup companies here in this area. Meanwhile, my parents were divorced and my dad was in Mexico. He created some personal development training programs. He’d been working on those for a long time and I’d always been interested in those training programs because they helped me to be better and helped me realize my potential more.
I was interested in those but I was at the same time reading all these other books about different views on personal development as well as scripture from religion. I was into lots of different self-help materials that were helping me realize what my potential was and what my purpose was. A number of experiences in my life led me to be convinced that I wanted to be in this space of personal development. I quit my full-time job as a software trainer and I took the plunge as a coach. I had been certified as a coach under Bob Proctor who is at an International Authority on the power of the mind. How is the mind powerful? It can help us how we can use our mind to create results. I took that background in education and I became a coach under Bob Proctor.
I did that for the first year but then for some reason, I have been attracting men as my clients. I’ve been working with mostly men but I wanted to help. I was thinking about myself too, but it’s not about imagining abundance, focusing on that and focusing on growing. For a man, their greatest abundance is if they’ll focus on things in the right order or focus on their wives, their children. Everything else after that, if we do it in that order, we have the richest experience. We have our workshop, which is the home for becoming the best man that we can be.
The secret to becoming the best man is to be outwardly focused and to let goodness has to and through us without interruption. I was talking to different people as I was playing with this idea. I’m not even a researcher in this area or anything but manliness has indeed been under attack. A lot have been confused these days as to what it means to be a man and where they can find their manly strength. That is what motivated me. I felt there was a strong need. I felt many moments of insecurity myself and I’m like, “It’s uncomfortable and it’s not a good place to be when we are men and feeling weak.” Where does this strength come from? How can I access it more? How can I help others to access it more? That’s been my inspiration and starting the program.
A man has the potential to do so much good if they're not focused on themselves and if they're focused on helping others. Share on XThe numbers indicate that more and more boys are growing up without a father figure. They rely on the media to teach them and I don’t know that that’s a reliable source and the model we would want. I have seen this confusion. What is their role? How did they contribute? What’s most important? A lot is demanded of them. They’re expected to have these high-power jobs, putting in 60 to 70 hours a week. It looked to me as I look through your program that you cover all areas of a well-balanced life, home life, setting goals, and professional. Also, you cover that they’re getting in touch with your own emotions, which is important.
My perspective is supporting families of children with special needs. Being a parent is hard and is challenging enough. When you have a child with special needs, statistics indicate that it is three to four times more expensive to care for a child with special needs. The hours are longer and some of them don’t sleep. It’s time-intensive and emotionally draining. I see more cases in a family where there is a child with special needs that the mother will often find herself alone. Either the man leaves or he becomes emotionally distant and leaves it up to her. This is a great concern. That’s a heavy burden for one parent to carry.
What is that problem? What your addressing here is the problem and this is why we, men, need help. I grew up in a home where I didn’t see my dad providing. A lot of men are growing up in homes where their moms raise them. They don’t have that role model. They don’t have that support where they see someone carrying out that role effectively. Either boys don’t have a father in the home or they don’t have a good father in the home. That is where the issue starts. We don’t have that role model in the home. We’ve got to discover for ourselves what it means to be a good man, what it means to be a powerful man and how we find that strength to be able to carry out our role effectively.
The problem comes when we are faced with these challenges. Especially these fathers of children with special needs are faced with an even bigger challenge where their kids need a lot from them. Their family requires a lot from them. When they don’t have all the training and all the skills, sometimes, they’ll shrink. What happens in cases of men regardless of what situation is when we face that, oftentimes, we turn to distractions that aren’t helpful at all. It could be from addictions to time-wasters, video games, going out and spending a lot of time with friends, and doing everything except for those things that would be helpful for their families. It’s giving their families what they need.
That comes from lack of skills, lack of being in touch with their own emotions, knowing how to handle these feelings that they’re having of anxiety, lack of capability, and insecurity in the different roles that they’re facing. That is the purpose of this program is to help them to be able to get in touch with that, understand themselves, know how to man up, know how to process these challenges, and overcome these hurdles that they’re facing. A lot of it is mental skills because the challenges and the roadblocks that we face are mental. If we don’t know how to process those, get to know what we’re feeling, and know how to respond when we’re feeling certain ways then we can be lost. We take the only road we know, which is to skate to something that we do know.
I was intrigued with your use of that expression, man up. For some, it means don’t cry and don’t show your emotions. It sounds like you are suggesting, man up means to own your emotions, to take control of them, and to be in touch.
It’s knowing how to control your mind. Your mind is like an instrument and you got to know how to manage it. You’ve got to know how not to let your mind go wild on you with every emotion that comes up. You can’t let yourself go there and go to all these places. For example, an idea pops into your mind that you’re not capable or you don’t have what it takes. If you let yourself go down that downward spiral, it gets harder and harder to manage. A lot of the mental mechanics that I teach is how to maintain your mind in a powerful state where you don’t let it go there where it becomes difficult.
When you have let it go, then you have to learn how to come back out of that. Get your mind to this clear state where you can handle your challenges effectively. You can communicate with other people and express needs when you have the needs of health. I’m sure wives want to help their husbands and others are there to help as well. If we don’t communicate these things and these needs that we have as men, and we aren’t working together with our spouses and with other resources that we have, then we can’t access the solutions to our problems.
That’s true. Communication is key in a marriage, in a family and when you’re communicating with your child’s school. I’ve talked to a lot of women who are frustrated because they don’t feel that their husband communicates with them. He’s not opening up to them. They probably stressed at work but they don’t know what’s going on. That’s a heartache.
There’s so much power when a man can unite with his wife. I’ve experienced this. It makes me a little bit emotional. There’s much power that comes when the husband and wife can unite, they can understand each other and they can be there to support each other. When he can communicate openly about what’s going on with him, she communicates about her challenges. Both are empathizing with each other and there to help. You’ve got a power team that can handle the needs of a family. That’s incredibly powerful. Marriage is important and it can be such a powerful tool when there is that communication.
Also, effective parenting. Especially if your child has oppositional defiant disorder or mood disorder, it is critical for the parents to be united in their approach on how they’re going to handle that. To be in control so they’re proactively dealing with their child’s behavior not just reacting to it. You have one parent trying to give the child everything they want and the other one is trying to instill some discipline.
Parents have to be on the same team. That’s for sure. They have to communicate about the way that they handle their children’s situations and they have to back each other up. They have to be on the same team and the children are on a different level. These children that have these mood disorders and different disorders where they’re acting up, they are verbally abusive and they’ll say things that somebody without a mature mind could get could take personally. They react rather than respond. Part of what this program teaches and part of the advice that I want to give on this program is that we all need to learn how to be emotionally and mentally mature. We can see these situations and what we see is someone who has needs. Somebody who’s hurting or a little child who doesn’t have the training or their brain isn’t developed the way that ours is.
We need to see that with empathy rather than as a competition and taking these words that are coming out of their mouths personally and letting it drain us emotionally. We are the ones in charge and we’ve got somebody comes and attacks us verbally. No matter who they are, we can respond in one of two ways. We can take those offensively and we can get all angry or we can see them in an empathetic way and see, “This is my child who needs help from me. He needs my understanding. He needs my concern and he needs me to understand what his world is like.” That person is going to listen more and they’re going to view a lot more empathetically. They’re going to see that person in a lot more empathy and they’ll ultimately be a lot more helpful to that child.
A lot of times, what that child needs is structure. They need consistency and it takes that strong mind to provide that structure to know that, “I can count on this. My parents aren’t going to let me do anything dangerous or wrong. They will always love me. Even if I lose my temper, my parents will still love me. These are the rules and I know I can count on this.” The structure is critical and it takes self-discipline to provide that. You covered not only teaching that taking control of your mind and communication has strengthened marriage. Do you also talk about parenting?
Your mind is like an instrument and you got to know how to manage it and how to not let it go wild on you with every emotion that comes up. Share on XYes, we do. We’re helping a man to be stronger. The return on investment is that it’s going to help them be a better professional as well. Of course, there are emotional benefits. There are many other benefits, but one clear return on investment is they’re going to be better as providers for their family. They’re going to be better professionals when they learn how to have this outward focus in their mind where they’re focused on other people and they have a more mature approach to life. They don’t live from a reactive state, but they respond maturely. When things happen, they can see it from a more mature place. All of those things contribute to helping the man be stronger and we use the workshop of the home as the teaching place.
First of all, you focus on being outwardly focused towards your wife or your relationship that you’re in. You focus on treating her the way she needs to be treated and then you treat your children the way they need to be treated. As you learn to do it there, that’s your more your most core area and these are your most core relationships. You’re going to more naturally do it in every other aspect of your life. It isn’t a business service. If you’re running a business, it’s all about giving service. If you learned how to be a service in your home, that’s going to translate to better service outside the home. By the law of cause and effect, when you improve your service, you’re going to improve your earnings as well.
You see that in the world of business all the time.
These are all principles of manning up but it’s not always what we think. When someone says, “Man up,” they may think to stop crying and all that. What we’re talking about is stronger emotional intelligence and see the world more clearly so that we can come from a much stronger place. When we improve our understanding, we improve our power. When we have this lack of clarity in our mind or we see the world as a bad or scary place because of all this stuff that this extra noise is going on in our mind. We aren’t coming from a place of power. This idea of quieting that mental noise is taken throughout this whole program to help men quiet that noise so they can see things clearly and then the principles that we go through lesson by lesson. The first one is we focus on connection, teamwork and helping people to gain a clearer vision of the journey that you’ve been starting.
Learning how to set goals that you’ve got to start with a vision and you’ve got to be able to visualize it before you ever get there. Focusing the lens, we teach them to prioritize and simplify. Sometimes, we can’t do everything, so we’ve got to learn how to prioritize things and focus on the most important things. Productivity and efficiency, that’s where we focus on understanding the way the mind works and learning how to quiet the mind. We’re focused on where power comes from. When we as people, in general, think of ourselves as the source of our power. We are placing ourselves in a weak spot where a lot more powerful when we realize that we are not the source that if we can open ourselves up and quiet our minds, power can come to and through us.
That’s where the source of power comes. It’s by quieting our minds so that we can access that power. You can think of it as light, goodness or whatever they can come to a man and through a man. He’s got to serve for that to take full circle. Otherwise, it’s like water that flows into the Dead Sea and it stays there and becomes murky. That’s not what we want either. We want goodness to flow to us that inspires that good thought and for that to pass through us and channel it in service towards other people. We focus on being yourself. Learning how to value who you are valuing, what things you enjoy doing, and what things you’re passionate about. Those things are given to us as gifts.
When we use that, we can access our higher power as well. We live much more fulfilled lives when we are much more in tune with those things that make us unique and individual. Being grateful is the next one’s and being able to see beyond our self. That’s where love comes in. We learned how to see beyond our own needs and we can empathize with our wives, with our children or with the people at work. Understand and see them as people like we are. See that their worlds matter like our worlds matters to us. As a man, we have the opportunity to be leaders in our home and it’s sad when a man doesn’t have high aspirations.
I like to inspire men to always be looking at and always be thinking of how they can grow, how they can be better every day, and how they can inspire their families to be better every day. Otherwise, there’s no inspiration and staying the same. We always want to be looking up and thinking about how we can be better. The goals are based on a deeper purpose. Clarifying their purpose first is important because the purpose never changes. It’s powerful to get in touch with what our purpose is, but then our goals can change. That’s the way I see it.
As you go, there are different stages in life that will change. You’ll have that focus when you’re focused on raising your children and then as they leave home, you’ve maintained that communication with your wife. When your children leave and it’s just the two of you, you have that bond and that strong companionship. Is this material presented as my understanding of small groups?
We have a group. There are a couple of modules. The first one that we’re going to launch is an online program. There’s going to be an online program that has courses for men and they can take that wherever they want. There is a local program and that’s a program where people meet face to face. It’s better when men want to share things that they wouldn’t want to share in an online environment. It provides more of a confidential space where men can share things. There is also going to be an online program that people can be a part of from anywhere in the United States and anywhere in the world. All these modules are taught in small groups. There’s also an aspect of individual coaching that goes along with it. There are specific commitments and specific invitations that we give every week to help men man up. It’s personalized based on what unique challenges are of each man.
There’s an accountability piece to it. It’s not anything they passively listen to. Full engagement is the most beneficial approach. Tell us your website. For those who are reading, how do they find you?
I would go to Mindtune. You can go to @MindTuneNow on Facebook. That’s where my pages. You’ll see that’s a more personal development site in general and we’re launching this. We’re working on our website. We’re working on finalizing all the content for online courses and everything. We’re still fine-tuning some of those things, but you can contact me through Facebook.
That’s where they’ll know the latest news updates.
Yes, we’re ready to get started. We’ve got groups that will be starting here. We’re doing that and we’re fine-tuning some things but if anyone is interested, reach out and we would love to have you be a part of this. Not only for what you can gain as a man but also for what you can give. It’s powerful being a part of this group because you realize that those challenges that you face as a man, other man face it but we wouldn’t know it because we don’t talk about it as much. You’ll realize that you’re not alone. We all are facing these challenges and my goal is for this program to be able to help men. I know that it will help them reach much higher levels in their performance as husbands, fathers, and professionals.
It would be empowering to come to that realization that you have something to contribute. I’m part of this group and I have learned something from every person I have met. I believe everyone has something to contribute. I can see how beneficial this would be for the family of a child with special needs to have the man fully engaged, supporting his wife, involved in the decisions, and on the same page. That would make all the difference, my experience working as a Special Ed teacher, to see that unity and the strength of the support the child brings from their home make the difference in how they progress academically. Marco, thank you so much for joining us.
You’re so welcome. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Important Links:
- Bob Proctor
- @MindTuneNow – Mindtune’s Facebook page