Written by Jude-Martin Etuka

From as far back as I can remember, I had a very active mind. I could not stop thinking. And even when I was not actively thinking, I could hear the mind doing its thing – constantly analysing, judging, moralising, questioning incessantly. It just did not stop:

I was about 14 or 15 years old and was not fully aware of the trauma I was dealing with given the life changing experiences I was having at the time – being uprooted from everything I knew in London as an 8-year old boy to live in the heat and cultural chaos of Lagos, Nigeria; and then being sent to a boarding school at that tender age in the bushes far away from family and everything and everyone I knew. This was where my own mental health trauma and struggles began…

And I thought it was normal – until I realised it wasn’t. As I grew into a young adult, I had to do something to ‘get out of my head’, to stop the inner cyclical critical voice from playing. So, I went to the extreme. I left ‘the world’ and inserted myself into a place of complete monastic silence for seven years. It was in the solace of silence that I found ‘the space’ I needed to rediscover my equilibrium, my balance, and the ability to, ironically, step into my pain, trauma, and suffering – not to fix it, but to learn to notice it from a distance, from a background of awareness – so I could better cope with it. That was some twenty years ago now…

Looking back, my reflections are that my mental health, and the trauma I experienced was actually the very start of my leadership journey – way before I even knew what the term ‘leadership’ meant. Leadership, for me, was learning to notice, name, and navigate my inner world. The very simple act of ‘noticing’, a practice that we – men – don’t do well, kicked it off. Noticing is a monastic way of living, and one I now know to also be a core principle of emotional intelligence known as self-awareness and self-regulation practice.

For example, here is a simple 3-step self-regulation practice I learnt as an 18-year-old monk which totally transformed my own mental-emotional and spiritual health, ultimately heightening my own sense of self-awareness or ‘self’:

• Step 1 – take a normal breath and notice each iota of that breath (as best as you can – no perfectionism required) – as you inhale…
• Step 2 – notice the texture of the inhale as the air gently and gradually goes through your nostrils, noticing for example that the air feels cool…
• Step 3 – feel the air as it is being exhaled out gently through the nostrils – noticing that it feels warmer…
• Repeat…

As you do this very simple practice notice other things that you notice.

Monks sit for hours doing this same simple practice. You may quickly begin to learn that the transformation of your mental-emotional health occurs in sitting with the complexity of the absolutely simple. You may also begin to notice that your mental self is inextricable from your other ‘selves’ – emotional, embodied or physical, spiritual, etc – all of which are you, and which you bring into the workplace – and beyond.

The term ‘mental health’ is inextricably connected with emotional wellbeing. And emotions are not ‘things’ that exist by themselves either. Studies show that the mental and emotional aspects of who we are, are tied intricately to our nature as spiritual beings – having a human experience, as Teilhard de Chardin, the 19^th century mystical philosopher suggests. From this perspective, our mental health is in fact a pointer to the broader and connected aspects of who we are as human beings – physical (or embodied), mental, emotional, spiritual, etc. When one of these ‘aspects’ is out of equilibrium or balance, all other aspects suffer. My lifelong learnings as an 18-year-old monk taught me that my mental health at the time I described, signalled an imbalance occurring at a deeper level. Mental health therefore is about the overall health of all of our ‘aspects’ as human beings – and as men particularly.

From this perspective, truly sitting with your ‘self’ (mental, emotional, etc) can be painful – in several fronts. Yet, in that pain are the raw materials of our transforming and transformation. As men, we must learn to sit with our discomfort – perhaps the discomfort of how we are truly feeling, doing so with vulnerability. As a society, we are taught to avoid our trauma. Specifically, as men, we are socialised to not notice or pay attention to how we are feeling. This stereotype traceable back to the ancient Socratic philosophies that depicted men as stoic through to the industrial ages where men were defined by being productive and efficient, evolving into statements we still hear today such as ‘be a man’, ‘men don’t cry’, or ‘man up’ – all of which ought to be completely thrown out of the vocabulary of our present day lived-experience.  

Whilst there has been a noticeable shift in men liberating themselves from these intrapersonal biases and stereotypes, more still needs to be done, including the intentional use of emotional intelligence – and the application of self-regulation practices to improve one’s self-awareness:

The Question:

Therefore, my question to men reading this short article is not whether you struggle with some form of mental health challenge.

We all do, in different degrees.

The question really is – how are you coping and what practices are you using that support your struggle? It is in the answer to this question that we notice transformation occurring – at a variety of levels. Transformation is not really concerned with whether you suffer as such, but more so with how you cope with your suffering.

Men who can turn inward to notice their feelings, to join the dots and connect all aspects of themselves, model a new kind of strength, a new type and texture of leadership – one that is transforming commencing with noticing the inner world of self.

There is a very subtle texture to the quality that arises when this lens is shone on how men’s mental health is looked at and experienced from this perspective.