Lewis Howes: I am always prepared, baby. Let’s do it.

John: Yes, Lewis is a New York Times bestselling author of the hit book, The School of Greatness. He is a lifestyle entrepreneur. He’s a high performance business coach and a keynote speaker. A former professional football and two sport all American. He’s a current USA men’s national handball team athlete, and was recognized by the White House and President Obama as one of the top 100 entrepreneurs in the country under 30, and he has an amazing podcast, Fire Nation, which I’ve appeared on twice, called The School of Greatness. So, make sure you’re tuning in, and Lewis, we never get to talk enough, but when we do, it’s always a blast. I love getting out to LA so I can just hang out with you in your amazing pad.

Lewis Howes: Yes.

John: It’s fun, and you seem to just continue to produce great pieces of art, and this latest book that you’ve created, The Mask of Masculinity is one of those. So, give Fire Nation a quick synopsis. What’s this book all about?

Lewis Howes: My first book, School of Greatness, was really distilling the key principles of all the people I’d interviewed and what made them great in every industry, whether it be sports, business relationships, whatever may be. Kind of felt like there was these patterns, and after that book I realized that I still hadn’t overcome something I was working on, and really didn’t realize what was holding me back from being great in all areas of my life, on business relationships and things like that, and that was through my own kind of definition of what it meant to be a man and what it meant to be a powerful man, and I grew up with certain beliefs about what masculinity was, what it meant to be a man, and they were very conflicting.

On one side I had my sister and my mother teaching me how to be vulnerable and open and loving and supporting, and then on the other side I was a football player and played all these other sports and just was constantly driven into me to never show emotion and to never show that you’re hurt or in pain and to man up and do all these other things, and so, I kind of always had these conflicting thoughts and beliefs throughout my relationships, business, sports, of how I was supposed to show up in the world, and so I wanted to kind of go down the journey of how can men become better men, and how can we be better men to our male friends, to our family, to our intimate partners.

And how can we truly let go of the things that hold us back so we can be successful in business and feel fulfilled. So, we can have thriving relationships and feel like they’re enough and all these other things that men and all humans go through, and that’s what it’s about.

John: Lewis, you and I have a lot of things in common, but one thing that we definitely have in common is a love of dance. I am a really good dancer. You are a really, really good dancer. I mean, you’ve actually like been trained in some scenarios to be a dancer and you just have moves that don’t lie, that don’t stop, that don’t quit. Can real men dance?

Lewis Howes: Absolutely, man. Real men can dance their asses off.

John: Fire Nation, if you follow Lewis on Instagram stories, which you should be by the way because it’s extraordinary, you had the School of Greatness summit recently and wow, let me tell you, there was a lot of dancing going on there.

Lewis Howes: Yeah, it’s a lot of fun, man. I love to dance, but it took me a while to figure out how to dance because I thought I couldn’t.

John: Right.

Lewis Howes: And it was just practice after practice with great teachers and you got to throw yourself into it just like anything. Just like people that maybe don’t think they can make money on the side or become an entrepreneur. It doesn’t just happen overnight, you’re not just born with the gift of making money and coming up with great ideas and executing them and building a business. As you know, it takes time and practice to learn anything new.

John: So, I went to this kind of small tiny country high school in Maine. We had 900 people in our high school, but it was six towns that made up the high school, and let me just tell you, this was Maine, this is the country, no guys dance there. People drove pickup trucks and tractors and there was no dancing, but then my sophomore year, a guy from Connecticut who ended up becoming my best friend in high school moved, and he just could dance, and he was a great dancer, and I was like, oh my God, guys can dance, and from that point forward, sophomore in high school, I became in love with dancing, I just fell in love with dancing.

Lewis Howes: Really?

John: And I’ve never stopped since, and it’s been huge for me. When I went to college and I was the first guy on the dance floor and I was able to make friends through that and have some fun and just really just enjoy life because men can dance, it’s okay.

Lewis Howes: I honestly feel like when you can learn how to dance, you can have confidence in any area of life. When I mastered salsa dancing and was able to – and I still have a long way to go to where I want to be as a salsa dancer, but when I was able to be fluent in the art of dance with top dancers in the world, and be able to dance with top professional women in the world, it changed my perspective on life. It changed my ability of how I communicated. My level of confidence went through the roof, but it wasn’t this cocky confidence, it was just like, yeah, I know I can do anything. I don’t know, I think it was a big fear to feel embarrassed on the dance floor all the time –

John: Yeah –

Lewis Howes: – until I did that, and now I can go anywhere in the world and find a salsa club and dance with people that I don’t know and feel confident about myself. Even if I don’t speak the language, I can still feel good about myself. So, it’s a great skill to have.

John: Well, and it’s skills that you use in other areas too, like I can tell Lewis, like when you walk into a room just how you carry yourself. You’re not dancing at that moment, but you’re moving in a way, you’re flowing through the crowd and you’re kind of taking that confidence, kind of sway from the salsa, and it just kind of embodies this overall confidence that you have, but the thing that I do have a question about specifically with this book is there have been some other people that have written about this topic already, so what made you decide to add your voice in this conversation?

Lewis Howes: I think vulnerability, masculine vulnerability has been talked about by Brené Brown and Oprah and Deepak Chopra. They talk about the power of vulnerability and when we reveal ourselves to who we are, all our flaws or just our insecurities, we actually create more connection with other people and more intimacy and more trust when we show that we are not these perfect unattainable humans to connect to, but when we share our vulnerabilities is actually when we have the most power, from my experience, and I love Oprah and Brené Brown. I just had Brené actually on my show last weekend –

John: Yeah, that was great.

Lewis Howes: And it was amazing, but the challenges most – I don’t want to say most, but I’ll say a lot of men who are like me growing up, would never listen to a Brené Brown or an Oprah. The general jock sports guy who kind of grew up the way I did would just never even – would laugh about it if someone said, hey, you should watch this TED talk on vulnerability by Brené Brown. They would make fun of it, they would laugh about it, they would brush it off, they would never even embrace it because they would think that was weak, that was soft, and that’s not what a man is.

So, I think the reason why I wanted to do this, 1.) Is because it was scary for me to continue to open up and reveal certain things that I was ashamed of in my past that I’ve been talking about letting go of, and the more I talk about it, the less it has power over me, and the more I feel comfortable with everything in my past, and I feel like I can just be myself when people know more about me. That’s No. 1. No. 2, I don’t see any jock white athlete successful, like financially successful men talking about this subject, and my vision is to really be a catalyst for people.

And I’m not coming from a place of like I have the answers, but I interviewed a lot of people that I feel like are way more credible and do have the answers, and through that process of kind of revealing all my shortcomings as a man, to hopefully connect with people about how they can let go of stuff that doesn’t work for them so that they can create bigger and better results in their life, and my goal is hopefully some men will start to listen, some men will start to read it and hear a little bit because maybe they’ll be able to relate to me and hopefully women will buy it and give it to their men as well. So, that’s my vision.

John: It’s a great vision and one thing that I’ve recognized over and over again, Fire Nation, having interviewed over 1800 entrepreneurs is that we recognize the fact that there are people that have been out there that have done great works of art, great content, production, whatever it might be, written great books, but your audience wants to hear from you. I mean, let’s rewind it back to 2013, like what if I was, well, Cliff Ravenscraft is already doing a podcast, so I’m not doing a podcast as paradise. Now fast forward 3,000 members, $4 million of revenue. People wanted to learn from me, my audience, and guess what? Three months ago, Pat Flynn launched a podcasting course –

Lewis Howes: Yes, he did.

John: And he reached out to me first because we’re close friends. He’s like John, is there going to be a problem with this because I don’t want to challenge our friendship. I’m like, Pat, your audience wants to hear from you. Create this podcasting course, get it out to the world, and he’s crushing it with it, and guess what –

Lewis Howes: Crushing it, right –

John: – I’m still crushing it, and guess what, Cliff is still crushing it. There’s abundance –

Lewis Howes: There’s abundance, yeah.

John: That’s why Lewis, getting his voice out there about masculinity, is so critical, and this kind of does all get back, Lewis, to fear, and you and I both talk about this a lot in our respective podcasts about how it’s part of the entrepreneurial journey. It’s just part of being a human is to be nervous and to fear and have doubts.

Lewis Howes: Yeah.

John: What part of writing this book specifically scared you the most?

Lewis Howes: In my last book I started out putting up about kind of the sexual abuse, the trauma, things like that, towards the end of my book, and I started doing that more in my podcast years ago. So, I felt like I kind of was like okay, what are all the other things that I’m ashamed of that I – what are all the masks that I’ve worn as a man that really hurt people when I put them on and that didn’t support my business or my business partnerships or my intimate relationships or my family relationships. What are those things that I’ve done for years that I’m ashamed of and guilty of?

So, it was kind of like first off revealing all of it in one place, and just saying, I suck as a man. It was kind of just like, well, here’s another example of how I fell short, here’s another example of how I sucked, here’s another example, and so it’s like each chapter, I try to use myself as the example in a different time of my life of where I fell short of really creating powerful loving results in the world. That was one of the fears. The second fear is really who am I to talk about these things, and I’m already kind of getting backlash from a lot of the, let’s say, radical feminist groups without them even looking into reading anything, they’re just like white male privilege, you have no clue, you never went through anything hard in your life, you have no right to share any of this stuff.

White male privilege is like all I’m hearing from this whole group of women. So, that’s hard to – anytime someone puts themselves out there in a vulnerable way, it’s hard when someone won’t even at least give them a chance to listen to something or read a page and just see what’s available for them. So, that’s challenging, but I understand where they’re coming from and so it’s okay. What I’m really grateful for is like even though I have a lot of kind of just negativity already around it, so many of the female leaders in the space like Brené Brown, Gabby Bernstein, Glennon Doyle, the ones actually creating this movement have endorsed and supported it and are like shouting from the rooftops.

So, for me it’s all evening out and balancing out, and I’m more – I think my fear is that I’m going to get attacked and people aren’t going to understand me and all these other things, but I’m actually – I’ve kind of gotten through that already in the last month and a half from it already happening and the books not even out yet, and I’m kind of actually glad because what it’s doing is it’s just starting a conversation which I think we need to have more conversations around humanity topics. How to become better humans. I wrote this book for men to learn how we can become better men in the world, and then I realized that, wow, women actually probably are going to read this more than men because it’s actually teaching every woman how to understand why men are the way they are.

Why they wear specific masks and at specific times in their life, and so I started sharing exercises and examples for women on how to understand and see it in a moment when their man, their boyfriend, their husband, their father, brother, is wearing the mask and how to get them to take it off without making them wrong, and I realized like, wow, this is actually going to be like the secret code for women to understanding men and connecting to them on the deepest levels possible, and I was like it may be more of a book for women than men at the end of the day. I have no clue what it’s going to do.

John: Wow, that’s exiting, that’s a cool revelation, and guess what, Fire Nation? Lewis not writing this book would be him staying in his comfort zone –

Lewis Howes: Exactly.

John: And guess what? All the magic happens outside of your comfort zone, all the magic. So, Lewis is getting outside of his comfort zone, and he’s going to be making magic with this stuff –

Lewis Howes: That’s the key, that’s the key.

John: So, Lewis, I’m sure Fire Nation is assuming that since you and I are such good friends, you know, we’re going to be hanging out in Puerto Rico in a couple weeks here if everything is able to be fixed on that island. You’re coming to speak at Puerto Rico Masterminds which is going to be amazing, so I’m excited to welcome you to my island. I mean, we’re great friends so I’m sure that they’re assuming I’m just going to lobby softballs this entire interview, but guess what, it’s not going to happen.

Lewis Howes: Perfect.

John: Almost half of Fire Nation are female, so I have to ask this question: You only have two interviews, I think, with women in this book. Why didn’t you focus more on their perspective of masculinity?

Lewis Howes: I think I have maybe more than two, but maybe you’re right, I have to double check that, but I interviewed a few psychiatrists and psychologists who were female, and to really get their perspective from research and from kind of this research background of decades of them working with young boys, teen boys, adult men, so I could really have more of a clearer backing as opposed to just, well, this is my opinion. It was like, no, here’s the research. Now, I interviewed men to be examples in each chapter of a man who wears a specific mask, and I did that because I feel like, again, initially going into the journey, this was for me and my self-discovery and for all men.

And then I realized, okay, I needed to – and then I started interviewing trans people and started interviewing transgender athletes and drag queens and I just was like I wanted to learn more. I interviewed gender non-conformant, people that they don’t consider themselves men or women, and I just wanted to learn more about this as I was kind of going down the rabbit hole. I was like, wow, I’m so ignorant to this whole topic of gender in general. So, I think it just started to evolve over time, and there’s so much more I would love to go down the rabbit hole with, but I had a deadline and wanted to make sure I packaged it together and completed the book in time, but there’s a lot more interviews that I did that are going to be coming out later in my podcast that didn’t make it in the book from women.

John: Well, maybe the mask of femininity is gonna be a future –

Lewis Howes: Oh, yes.

John: That would be outside of your comfort zone, right?

Lewis Howes: Exactly, exactly.

John: Fire Nation, value bombs have been dropped. More coming up when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

So, Lewis, we’re back and I want to just right hook right off the bat here: Which mask has been the hardest for you to take off as an individual?

Lewis Howes: Well, it depends on the time of my life that we’re talking about, but I would say, if I was going to be talking about in the last couple of years, I would say the aggression mask. I think my entire life has been challenging for me to be not defensive when I feel attacked, whether it be physical attacks from sports or in life. Whether it be kind of emotional attacks, verbal attacks, you know, when someone attacks me online or attacking my manhood or my intelligence, whatever it may be, I have a tendency and a trigger to get easily reactive when I feel attacked.

And over the last couple years, through this process, I have been able to create better habits and practices in place, tools to where I’m not reacting as quickly, and it’s really helped me to have those tools and habits in place, but it’s still a challenge. Like even still today, like last week I got really reactive and upset about things, and it’s just like when I reflect on it at the end of the day I realize like, wow, that doesn’t support me. When I have that mask on of aggressiveness, it doesn’t support the moment, it doesn’t get me bigger results, it doesn’t help me with my relationships, it doesn’t support me.

It supports me in feeling protected, it supports me in feeling like I’m going to defend myself and defend my worth or my manhood in the moment, but afterwards it doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t feel right and I feel like I let myself down. So, that’s one of the things right now is the aggression, the aggressive mask.

John: So, it’s interesting how you describe that because I read a fascinating book recently called The Chimp Paradox, and it talks about that so much where our brains have evolved as homo sapiens over the years, but we still have this initial cortex in our brain that our initial reaction is to protect ourselves, it’s for survival, so we have this –

Lewis Howes: Yeah –

John: – gut reaction of like, okay, where am I being attacked, where is the harm, how do I protect myself from that, but then you follow that by saying, upon reflection. That’s the human, that’s the homo sapien brain when we actually give it a chance, so for me, what I really took away from that book which is powerful, which was, of course, I’m going to react defensively and try to protect myself when I first get attacked by something, whether it be verbal or physical or something because that’s why we’re still alive as human beings, like that’s the survival instincts.

Lewis Howes: Yeah.

John: But I need to try to get to that reflection point as quick as possible, to get there to actually think about, okay, why did that happen and what’s the reality here now that I can think about as a human being. So, great, great feedback on that, Lewis, as far as how you’re going through that process –

Lewis Howes: Yeah –

John: – because for me that’s something I’m struggling with as well and that’s what men struggle with, and through this research that you’ve been doing and you’ve been really kind of diving deep and down this rabbit hole, what has been the most destructive mask that you’ve seen that men seem to wear?

Lewis Howes: I would say – I mean, I think they’re all destructive in their own right, but I think the most common that I see is the material mask. Right now with social media and everyone posting their fancy houses and watches and lifestyle –

John: The $30,000.00 millionaire.

Lewis Howes: Exactly, yeah, exactly, their private jets or whatever they’re taking photos in front of. It’s creating this sense of, oh, I’m worthy when I have this type of money and these type of fancy things or whatever it may be, and so it kind of creates this desire for so many men to say, oh, in order to be like this rock star, this rapper, this athlete, this whatever, billionaire CEO who’s got it all, I need to make a lot of money, and I need to be flashy with it and I need to show people how worthy of a man that I am by having this money and posting about it.

Now, for me, you know, me and you, we love money. We want to make –

John: Yeah –

Lewis Howes: – as much money as we possibly can, and I think there’s a – and we’re also documenting our lifestyle with what we do. So, I think there’s a dance and an art and a way to do it, to share your life with your audience if you have an audience and you’re looking to promote your personal brand, but also do it with some tact and with some class. So, it’s not just like every day posting about the Rolex that you wear or about the Ferrari you drive or whatever it may be or the fake stuff that you don’t even have that you’re just pretending to have because you’re taking photos in front of it.

So, that’s one thing is the material mask. I think a lot of like young millennials are trapped in this thing of like, well, once I have the money, then I’m going to get the girl, and I need to get more money so I can get more girls as well, so, the material mask. The sexual mask is also something I think a lot of guys face, which is a challenge. 1.) I think it’s just in our DNA to kind of be driven that way. For a lot of men I believe it’s just kind of in them to be – the testosterone, it’s just like it drives your body. The chemicals in your body just drive you. When you see something or an attractive woman, it drives you in ways that it’s hard to just say, you know what, I don’t need that right now, I don’t want that right now –

John: It’s true.

Lewis Howes: I’m good with the one relationship that I have and I’m going to be happy and satisfied in this one relationship, and I’m not going to go conquer all the women in the world mentality. So, I think it’s a challenge, and again, with social media and options, the sexual mask is a challenge for a lot of men as well, but those are a couple, and I think also the stoic mask is one that I think women talk about a lot is the men that show no emotion. The men that don’t open up. They never share their vulnerabilities, they never share what’s on their mind, they always feel like they’re hiding something.

Those are the ones you got to be afraid of the most I think because when we bottle up our emotions and we show no emotion, at some point it’s going to come out in ways of cancer that we’re doing to ourselves. We’re creating this disease within ourselves because it’s just bottled up or we’re going to go and freaking shoot up a whole church because we’ve just like finally let go of all of our rage at one point and it just kind of bottles up and explodes. So, I think those are the ones you want to be aware of the most is when someone is unable to share anything or unable to be vulnerable to all or show any emotion whatsoever. So, be worried about that person even if they seem calm and quiet. Just be aware, so those are a few.

John: Big time, and again, for le femme Fire Nation, I want to bring it back to the ladies and ask you: Do women wear any of these masks?

Lewis Howes: Oh, they wear all of them. Yeah, women wear – you know, it’s funny because as women are starting to read the book, early copies, I’m like you wear these masks as well. Women wear stoic masks, they wear material masks, they’re wearing sexual masks, they’re aggressive and they’re wearing these different things as well, and they have their own masks separate of what men wear, but I think these are human masks. I was just trying to learn from the male perspective since men commit more suicide than women. One in six men have been sexually abused and yet they have no outlet, and it’s not safe to share about these things like it is safer to share with women.

They have more support groups around these things. So, there’s these challenges that men face. Obviously, men have a lot of advantages in society right now as well, so I’m not trying to say like whoa is the man, but there are challenges that men face and the pressures and the weight they face as well that I think it’s important for men to understand it and for women to understand it so they can have deeper and more meaningful relationships with all human beings.

John: So, Lewis, I know you have Dan Millman coming into the studio soon, you’re going to have a great interview with him, no doubt, and by the way Fire Nation, Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Dan Millman’s book, is incredible. I interviewed him on my podcast some time ago and great book, great dude. So, definitely follow up and see this interview that Lewis is going to be doing with him. So, Lewis, that was just kind of my way of saying, let me know when you need to go because we’ve taken up a lot of your time here.

Lewis Howes: Yeah, I got about seven more minutes.

John: Ah sweet because I really want to ask this question.

Lewis Howes: Yeah.

John: You interviewed so many well-known men. What surprised you the most while interviewing these well-known men about their definition of masculinity?

Lewis Howes: I was grateful to hear a lot of the responses because I wasn’t sure what I was going to get, and so many of the men that I interviewed made me really proud of them because a lot of them came back to – I would ask them, what does it mean to be a great man and what’s the definition of masculinity, and so many of them came back with a similar answer about service. A lot of them were like, you know, to be a great man is to be a man of service, and to live in service, to give back to humanity, to make a contribution to your family, your community, and the world, and to be loving, helping, powerful men.

And I was so impressed that a lot of these men – and maybe it’s because a lot of the men I’m attracting, who knows, but a lot of these men from all walks of life talked about being of service and it made me realize like yes, that’s what it means to be a man today, and I think a human being should be about service, not just a female, male, gender nonconforming topic, but this is what we should all be striving for is to live a life of service and to give back, and it doesn’t mean we have to give back to the whole world and try to change the world, but just like imagine going about your day to day.

There might be one person that you walk by who might be going through a challenging time, and you can be in service by just simply smiling at them, and that could literally change the trajectory of their day by smiling at someone. Being in service when you’re around other human beings can be as simple as that. So, for me that’s why it was really cool to see the answers.

John: That’s so cool. Now, Lewis, you did say that there’s going to be a lot of ladies that read this book. So, what can they do to support their men in taking off the men mask of masculinity?

Lewis Howes: Yeah, well, at the end of each chapter, I give a section for women.

John: Oh, wow.

Lewis Howes: Yeah because I realized as I was writing it, I was like huh, I was writing it for men and then I was writing men how they can remove the mask and still feel safe, protected, powerful, and all the things that men want to feel without having this layer of protection, this fake layer of protection, and then I was like, huh, women could really benefit from understanding how to not make men wrong by doing things they’re doing.

So, if a man in your life is upsetting you because he’s constantly focused on money or he’s constantly aggressive or he’s constantly not showing his emotions or he’s constantly doing one of these masks, the worst thing you can do is make them wrong for it because the man is going to want to keep that mask on to protect himself because he’s going to say, my woman or the woman in my life is doing this, doesn’t get me, doesn’t understand me, will never understand me.

So, I’m going to keep the mask, the wall up, and protect myself. So, for women, we give exercises on things they can say, things they can do to get men to disarm the mask without making them wrong, so that you can actually have an intimate conversation with, or a more open conversation with, and progress in that relationship or that conversation so there’s less conflict between you, so there’s more understanding, more love and more harmony, and that’s what women can expect.

John: Okay, to close things strong, The Mask of Masculinity, what is the one thing that you want men to understand about this book that you know is going to motivate the crap out of them to read it?

Lewis Howes: If you want to make the most money, if you want to have the most successful business, if you want to have the most powerfully intimate and sexual relationship with your partner, if you want to have the biggest impact in the world that you can possibly have, then this book is for you. It’s designed to help you achieve everything you’ve ever wanted at the highest levels, and it’s going to show you exactly the things that are holding you back in order to make that happen.

John: And where is the best place that Fire Nation can go to make this happen?

Lewis Howes: Maskofmasculinity.com.

John: Fire Nation, you heard it from Lewis Howes, this is a book that I know man, woman, whoever you are listening out there, this has got to be on your 2017 or very latest early 2018 reading list. So, let’s make this happen, Fire Nation, and Lewis, thank you again for sharing your journey, for being open, for being vulnerable with us, Fire Nation. For that, brother, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side.

Lewis Howes: Love you, man, thank you.