140. Men's Mental Health Work with Elise Micheals

I’m so pumped to have Elise, a men's mental health coach, on today all the way from Mexico!
A lot of us go through a hamster wheel phase where we just kind of do what society tells us, and then we get to a point where that’s no longer working. It isn't allowing us to reach our full potential, passion, or purpose. Men reach out to Elise wanting to really see who they are for the first time.

How can family systems affect mental health as an adult?
When you’re a baby you have no idea how the world works, so we rely on our caregivers to show us how we become validated, gain success, love, affection, and attention. Unless you can accept that everything was created in childhood you’re not going to be able to change things because you’re not addressing the root cause of it.

What are attachment styles?
Secure  - We feel safe to go out into the world and explore things and we know that we have a secure base to come back to.
Anxious  - You don’t trust that your parent is going to come back to you. Your parent has displayed inadequate amounts of support for you. 
Avoidant - The parent is absent. The child becomes void of responding because they don’t know how to process that emotion and they don’t allow. A lot of men struggle with this because society has shamed them from feeling emotions or vulnerability.
Disorganized - Basically Anxious and Avoidant. You push and push people away, and the second you let someone get close you attach to them and become very anxious they’re going to leave you.
Generally, there is a main theme with your attachment style and how you respond to other people’s actions.

How does a man find what their purpose or their why is?
So many men start staying their why or purpose is their partner.  No one wants the burden of being someone’s why. they did not ask for that. You are placing your happiness, and success on a human being which is the most unpredictable source in the universe. Why would you do that to yourself or your partner?
Your family or partner can be a component of your why or a support system of it, but your why has to come internally, not externally. It can change, it can grow, it can shrink without that having an impact on how you feel about yourself, happiness and success because you are in power of that. The second you place your purpose on an external thing getting done or succeeding you’ve given away your power.
It doesn’t matter about the thing that we land on, it matters about focusing on giving you the internal power to give purpose to whatever you’re doing in life.

What does it look like to work with Elise?
She starts asking them why they’re there, and to tell her all the problems. If you had a magic wand, what would you life look like?
Then she reverse engineers, she brings them back to the root cause so they understand why their beliefs are what they are. Your beliefs inspire your actions, your actions are how you show up in the world, that’s how people perceive you, that’s how you perceive yourself. We fix the beliefs, the actions, and the behaviors and then your entire life changes.

It is okay to be vulnerable, it does not make you any less of a man, it actually enhances your ability to be a man. So many men desire what you desire, they want camaraderie with other men, they're just afraid to be the first one to step up. So if you’re the first one to step up you might find you have a closer brotherhood than ever before.

Connect with Elise
Instagram: @elisemicheals_
Website: