The Exact Episode You Need to Hear Today if You Feel Overwhelmed, Stressed, or Stuck

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And trust me, you're going to be so happy you're here because this conversation is extraordinary. Kier Gaines, it is an absolute pleasure to welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast.

 

Kier Gaines (00:01:05):

Absolutely crazy. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me and your beautiful staff welcome me in. And it feels like a very warm place. It's warm and inviting.

 

Mel Robbins (00:01:14):

It is.

 

Kier Gaines (00:01:14):

Yeah, I like that.

 

Mel Robbins (00:01:15):

Yeah, it is. That's how I roll through life. I think that there's a lot of people, or at least I used to be this way, I would wake up in a bad mood. And at times in my life, there was a particular reason why, but I think it became a habit to wake up and be in a bad mood for no particular reason. And so I decided that I would just become the kind of person that went through life with an optimistic, warm, and positive outlook. And it really started to shift everything.

 

Kier Gaines (00:01:48):

Yeah. I feel like when you project that out into the world, you also invite it into your life. I'm not quite where you are yet.

 

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I'm still a little, I'm getting into my old curmudgeon guy where I wake up some mornings, I'm like, "Eh, I don't want to talk to anyone. Don't look at me." But just taking a moment and being grateful and understanding that I can hold two complex things at one time. I can be grateful for the life that I have and all the amazing things that are going on. And I can also be frustrated by some of the BS that comes along with it. It just gives me a little bit more harmony. I don't know if I believe in balance, but it gives me a little bit more harmony in my life. It's a more authentic way for me to live.

 

Mel Robbins (00:02:28):

I think that's the best way for all of us to live.

 

Kier Gaines (00:02:31):

Oh, I agree.

 

Mel Robbins (00:02:32):

And it's a really hard skill to hold space for those two things. It

 

Kier Gaines (00:02:35):

Is.

 

Mel Robbins (00:02:36):

You're already starting to drop life-changing, small little things. I

 

Kier Gaines (00:02:41):

Speak from the heart Mel Robbins.

 

Mel Robbins (00:02:43):

Yes, you do. And here's how I want you to start. I want to start by having you just prepare the person who's listening. Buckle up. What is it that could change about their life or their relationships if they truly lean in and take to heart everything that you are about to drop in this episode today?

 

Kier Gaines (00:03:04):

If you lean in and take to heart everything we're going to share, what I believe will change for you is the way you manage your stress, the way you manage your relationships, the way you manage the things that are happening in your life, because it'll go from just you reacting to things, just bouncing off of every single thing that's happening in your life like a pinball, just bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. It'll go from that to you moving with more intentionality, clarity, and way more awareness. The world will have you believe that everything falls into the category of this insatiable desire for hurry. You have to hurry up and do it. You're always in a rush. There's always another thing. There's always a to-do list to check off. No. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to pause. And that's counterintuitive because we don't pause.

 

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I don't have time to pause. I don't have time to break. I don't have time to think about it. I just have to do, do, do. But when you pause, you're able to gain more control over what's going on with you. You're able to sit and just be. You're able to look at things from a thousand mile view. When you're on the dance floor, Mill, it's hard to tell what's going on around you. You just see motion in bodies, but from the balcony you get a different perspective. But you can't get that view and you can't get that perspective. If you're constantly reactive, if you're not responding to things, if you're not accumulating any intel and information, if you don't have any wherewithal, if you're just on go. I get why you think you need to be on go all the time, but give me a chance to prove you wrong because I don't think that's the case and I do not think that's beneficial for you.

Kier Gaines (00:04:54):

Oh my goodness. For a million reasons. What a crazy world we live in. The world isn't really designed to support your peace and happiness. That's not how the world is designed. The world is designed for your productivity and for your attention. And that's it. It's meant to absorb your attention and churn productivity out of you. And works for the world. That's how we get buildings and how we have infrastructure and how we have all these beautiful creature comforts around us. Sucks for the individual though. It zaps you of almost everything that you hold dear, everything that's warm and fuzzy about you. But if you just take a look at where we spend the majority of our time, social media, watching the news, being subject to marketing. Well, how do these things make you feel? What are they designed to do? Social media is designed to make you feel like you're behind.

 

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Marketing is designed to make you feel like you're being left out. The news is designed. I don't know what the news was originally designed for, but now it's designed to scare the hell out of you. This is billions and billions and billions of dollars engineered against your own wellness. And a lot of us don't even have a counter strategy. We have nothing to combat that whatsoever. So in my work, what I do in what I call an emotional readiness architecture, ERA, which is just a really sexy, fancy therapist way of saying your emotional fitness, how prepared you are to deal with the slings and arrows of life, how well you can traverse and navigate the things that are happening to you every single day.

 

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It's never too late to gain those tools. It's just a matter of how you go about doing it. What's your guidance and what's your instruction? That's why I'm such a fan of therapy. I don't know where you are person who's listening to this with therapy. You may think therapy's amazing. You may think therapy is okay, but you haven't found the right therapist. Trust me, I get it. Or you may think that therapy is complete BS, which I understand if you've had a bad experience. But that guidance piece is so important because it's hard to protect ourselves from messages that we don't have any control over. Again, when you open up your social media feed, you are being subjected to tens and millions of bad takes and have chewed ideas unsolicited and without your consent. And it's like you're drinking from a fire hose. If you drink from a water fountain, it quenches your thirst.

 

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If you drink from a fire hose, it breaks your teeth. And every single day we're getting our teeth broken by opinions and views that we don't necessarily care for or jive with. How do you protect yourself? What do you have to secure your ability to move through guilt and shame and blame and to build self-awareness and to secure self-honesty? And I realize that there's a gap where people don't have that. And Mel, that's been my life's work.

 

Mel Robbins (00:08:12):

Well, I loved what you said about emotional fitness. And the reason why is some of the words that have been. First of all, I don't like the word mental health because I feel - Oh, give it to

 

Kier Gaines (00:08:26):

Me. Why do you

 

Mel Robbins (00:08:26):

Don't like it? I don't like it because it feels like there's something wrong with you.

 

Kier Gaines (00:08:31):

That's the way a lot of people feel actually.

 

Mel Robbins (00:08:33):

You know what I mean? If we're talking about mental health, there's something wrong with my brain and the way I think and depressed and anxiety and all this stuff that I'm. And I love the idea of emotional fitness because what I immediately think is strength, because I'm constantly saying to my kids, it's not about mental health. Mental health means happiness. Don't you want that? Mental health means you can bounce back. Mental health means you're self-aware enough to know that something on the outside is getting on the inside. It's time to step.This is about power. This isn't about weakness. And so I love what you said about emotional fitness because I want that. I want that kind of strength. I want the ability to dodge the arrows that are being shot at me. I want the ability to be strategic and to be stronger, especially in the world today and not so reactive.

 

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I'm not talking numb. I'm just talking able to catch myself and strategically respond to what's happening versus constantly breaking my teeth from the fire hose.

Kier Gaines (00:09:56):

What you're hinting towards is what a lot of people think about mental health, but I think we're moving towards more resilience. And resilience is one of the tools that you use within emotional fitness.

 

Mel Robbins (00:10:08):

Now resilience sounds kind of cushy. So how do you define? What does it mean if you are somebody that has built the skill of resilience?

 

Kier Gaines (00:10:18):

It means that you're able to bounce back. It means that bad things happen to you, but bad things happen to you and. The bad thing that happened to you is not the punctuation on the sentence. You still have work to do. Things are hard. Things are hard and. I'm sad. I'm sad. And you're able to still move through. I'm a big football fan. I'm a huge football fan. And I don't know person who's listening. I don't know if you're a football fan, but just indulge me for a second, please. In football, there's a position called a running back, and I'm pretty sure this ain't going to be my last football reference for today. So forgive me if you hate the sport. But when you're running back, you're the person in the backfield who takes the ball

 

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And you're supposed to run up the field and get a touchdown. That's your job. The problem is there are 300 pound dudes trying to kill you in between you and the touchdown. And sometimes one of these guys stops you and you don't always immediately get tackled. You don't always immediately get tackled, but any good running back coach is going to tell you, even when you get stood up, even when you have five people piling on your back, you never stop chopping your feet. You never stop your feet from moving. You're always supposed to keep those feet going. That's resilience. Even when you hit the 300 pound obstacle, even when you can't see what the end zone is like, even when you feel hopeless, even when you feel down, even when you feel unsupported, you keep chopping your feet and progressively moving forward. But that takes self-honesty.

 

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You got to be honest about the circumstances that you're surrounded in. You got to be honest, not just about your strengths, but about your deficits too. And not allow that to sink you, sink you into a hole of self-deprecation where you only say negative things about yourself. No. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses. What makes you immune to that? I'm not afraid of my weaknesses. I hold them tight. And then that allows me to say, Mel, I'm not very good at this thing. You think you can come in and help me with this? You think you could tell me what you did as opposed to me trying to just do a solo? That's how I keep my feet chopping. That's how I build resilience. That's one of thousands and thousands of tools that we use in order to make sure that our wellness is intact.

 

Mel Robbins (00:12:23):

And we're going to talk about a bunch of them today. And I had the honor of getting an advanced copy of your book. It all starts when you do. This is going to be a blockbuster. I read a lot of books. This one is fantastic.

 

Kier Gaines (00:12:39):

Thank you, Mel Robbins.

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Can you talk a little bit about that and this sense of, I just don't believe in myself. I feel insecure.

 

Kier Gaines (00:13:53):

Yeah. I don't believe in myself as one of the uncomfortable truths that I talk about in the very beginning of the book. And what an uncomfortable truth is, it's a part of our lived reality that we are afraid to accept. We either think it's some type of indictment on our strength and capabilities. We think that it's a statement that we lost, that we're waving the white flag. We try to avoid it at all costs. And we're very good at avoiding things. We have a lot of fancy psycho language now for avoidance, but the uncomfortable truth isn't something that you run from. It's something that you walk towards

 

Mel Robbins (00:14:26):

Because

 

Kier Gaines (00:14:27):

You can't overcome something that you refuse to acknowledge is true. So with insecurities in my practice, I find that they come from a lot of different places, two consistent places that I find. Either one is some type of striving for perfection that you fall short of. By the way, perfection is not a thing. And even if you hit your idea of perfection now, it won't be your idea of perfection in five years. It's a frivolous journey. Or two, it comes from a recent failure or some type of loss that you've taken that was significant to you. It was meaningful. But yeah, insecurities, the way that we walk out of them, one of the tools that I like to use are I'm statements. I'm sure you've heard a lot of times about I statements when you're having a disagreement with your partner instead of saying, "You never washed the dishes." You say, "I would like to have a house where the dishes are washed and I don't feel like I have enough support in that." Because you take the blame off of the person, you make the problem the problem.

 

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You don't make the person the problem. But these are I'm statements. And I'm statements, I am, really help you identify where the soil is the most fertile for your insecurities to grow.

 

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So I'm blank or I'm always blank. Whatever's in that blank is going to be a good indication of where your roof is leaking. So if you say, "I'm always finding a way." Or are you saying, "I'm always messing this up." Are you saying I'm such a smart person or I'm such a dummy? That's going to tell you where your internal dialogue is and where some of those leaks are coming from because you don't always find your insecurities. Sometimes your insecurities find you.

 

Mel Robbins (00:16:18):

Give me an example.

 

Kier Gaines (00:16:19):

Oh my goodness. Okay. I'll use myself as an example. I don't get to do this in my sessions a lot because it's not about me, it's about the person. All right. So I have insecurities around parenthood.

 

Mel Robbins (00:16:34):

You do?

 

Kier Gaines (00:16:35):

See, look.

 

Mel Robbins (00:16:38):

Well, you want to know why I react like that?

 

Kier Gaines (00:16:40):

Why?

 

Mel Robbins (00:16:40):

Because I first bumped into your content and it was so jaw droppingly profound. And I can't remember if you were brushing your daughter's hair or you're doing something about a bike and you were in a garage and you were calmly talking about something that went down because you have two young daughters and kids tend to act up.

 

Kier Gaines (00:17:05):

All the time.

 

Mel Robbins (00:17:06):

And then you were very calmly explaining. And I can't even quite remember what it was, but as I watched you and you were explaining something about how your daughter reacting was appropriate for her age, you reacting to your daughter being upset, even though you had a busy day at work, even though you had a lot going on. I can see you in the garage and you were like, "Yeah, I don't want to be clean in the garage." But you choosing not to react to her and modeling something different. I watched this. I sent it to my husband, Chris. I said, "This explains everything I did wrong as a parent. I now know why I pay for my adult kids to have therapy because of all the things that I was completely reactive about that would've showed that I was emotionally immature." And it was so powerful what you were modeling that you have become somebody that I believe is leading the way in modeling the way to parent extremely effectively because you're managing yourself while also building up strength and independence in your children.

 

Kier Gaines (00:18:22):

Yeah. But let's

 

Mel Robbins (00:18:23):

Go - Can you receive that?

 

Kier Gaines (00:18:24):

I receive that.

 

Mel Robbins (00:18:25):

Okay.

 

Kier Gaines (00:18:25):

And that's the absurdity of insecurity sometimes. Going back to what I originally said, the insecurities come from two things. One, a recent failure, and this is me catastrophizing catastrophe. I suck at that word. Me too. Making the catastrophe out of a failure. And the other thing is some strike of perfection that I'm trying to reach. I have this idea of what parenthood looks like in my mind that is not realistic. And I think a lot of us have that. It doesn't take into account your own lived experience, the fact that you're tired, the fact that you have complex adult stuff going on. Me, and thank you for the compliment. I really do receive that and I hear you, but it doesn't take away my insecurities about parenthood. And sometimes I really have to check myself. This is where the resilience comes in. I really have to check myself and realize that I'm allowed to be human.

 

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If I'm feeling insecure because my daughter isn't doing the best in math, I automatically take her failures and make them my personal failures. But that's not happening to me. It's not happening to me. And it's not something that's necessarily formed against me.

 

Mel Robbins (00:19:37):

What do you mean it's not happening to you?

 

Kier Gaines (00:19:39):

Well, it's her not being the best that she can be in math is just a circumstance of something that needs to change. It's not necessarily something that's happening to me. It's more of an indicator that perhaps we need to adjust something.

 

Mel Robbins (00:19:52):

Okay. I want to stop right there.

 

Kier Gaines (00:19:54):

Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (00:19:55):

Because as you're listening to Kier, I want you to stop and think about a situation in your life because we all have it where we - Break it down to a

 

Kier Gaines (00:20:04):

Male.

 

Mel Robbins (00:20:04):

Yeah. Where we literally, because of what your either kid is doing or what's happening with your parents or what's happening with your partner, that you think that the fact that your partner is out of shape or put on weight, or you think because your adult kid is struggling in their 20s, that it is a reflection on you.

 

Kier Gaines (00:20:29):

No, not always.

 

Mel Robbins (00:20:30):

But you just said something I think is really important as a tool. And I'd love to have you unpack it, which is how do you catch yourself when you recognize that your nitpicking on your spouse isn't actually about them losing weight. It's you managing what you think other people think about. You see what I' saying? Oh no, I see what you're saying. And because you were just exposing that if your daughter's not doing well in math, you immediate collapse of like, "I'm not doing a good job as a parent." And you said very quickly, which is why I want to expand this a little bit. No, no, no, no. There's a different way to look at this. We have a circumstance. We have a situation that needs attention, but this is not a reflection on me. What I do about this is.

 

Kier Gaines (00:21:15):

Yeah. Yeah. I think that goes back to resilience and greater awareness. It's easy. You're the easiest person to blame in your life. If you blame someone else, you run the risk of rupturing and losing that relationship of them being mad at you. Man, what you want to leave yourself? No. Where are you going to go? It's very easy for you to make yourself the little whipping boy of all of the negative experiences that are happening in your life. So what I ask myself is, okay, what else can this be attributed to? My first car was this car called a 1992 Buick Roadmaster. I was in love with it, but it's basically a refrigerator on wheels. I paid $1,400 from it from an auto auction and it broke down every other week. And sometimes I would try to cut the car on and it wouldn't work or there'd just be steam popping up out of the hood.

 

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And my first thing, it was such a catastrophic way of thinking. The engine's dead. The engine's messed up. But when something breaks on your car, the cheapest and most effective way to try to problem solve is to deal with the easiest to fix option first. Is there a tube that may be leaking? Because that's a $10 fix. Replacing the engine is a $2,500 fix. Okay, maybe a tool's not leaking. Is there a seal that's leaking? Is my water pump okay? Is my radiator okay? I walk back to easier, more simpler fixes. What else can this problem be attributed to that isn't necessarily something that I did? And also you have to understand that blame, it grabs all of our awareness. It is a brilliant awareness grabber, but it's not helpful. It's not a helpful tool in your relationship. It's not a helpful tool in your self-messaging.

 

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Blame is not helpful. Accountability is helpful because accountability says, these things are my responsibility and I'm going to be empowered to actually do something about it. Blame is just looking for somebody to pin it all on. And it makes you feel better a little bit in the short term, but in the long term, what does it accomplish? What does it change? What does it transform?

Kier Gaines (00:23:57):

If you're listening to audio, her head is shaking while

 

Mel Robbins (00:23:59):

She's doing it. It's like bobblehead right now. Because that's kind of how I feel. That's the intention. When I'm sending that link to my brother or to my husband or my son, you need to listen to this. And it's typically an episode with a guy. Okay. I would love to have you speak to the guy who actually hit planned this because somebody loves them and thinks you can make a difference. What is available to a guy that is so powerful if you build mental fitness and you have more peace in your life?

 

Kier Gaines (00:24:34):

One thing that I need you to understand is that in a boy's maturation, and I said this before in an interview -

 

Mel Robbins (00:24:44):

That's a big word.

 

Kier Gaines (00:24:45):

Maturation. So maturation is just the state of your maturity. As you were growing up, in your upbringing, in your development, as you were becoming a full person, every single stop along the way is designed to separate you from your emotions. And I already said it. You're really, really good at the things that you practice. So when you are a little teeny boy and you cry and you just want your mom to pick you up and hug you, somebody's probably going to say, "Hey, stop holding that boy like that. You're going to make him soft." Separating you from your emotions. When you become a little kid and you fall off of your bike and you cry because your knee hurts, it's bleeding. Somebody's going to tell you, "Hey, get up, get back on that bike. Stop crying." When you become a young man, when you're a teenager and the person you love broke up with you, they say, "Hey, hey, it's other fishing to see what you crying over another person for.

 

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Why are you crying?" And then you get married or you have a long-term partner and you begin to express your displeasure or you begin to express your frustration or they say something that's hurtful or inflammatory or just makes you not feel very good. And they say, "This is a new word that you sassy. Oh, now you being a sassy man. What are you in your feelings?" And all of these are designed to separate you from your emotions. And what happens is your internal sense of being gets thrown off and off whack where now you can't access those emotions when you need to. And then you don't have the ability to know the complexity of what you feel. So there'll be an emotion that happens, you'll be angry. There'll be something that happens, the evoking angry emotion. And most people say anger is a secondary emotion.

 

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I think it's a primary emotion.

 

Mel Robbins (00:26:29):

What does that even mean, secondary

 

Kier Gaines (00:26:31):

Primary? Secondary emotion. When they say anger is a secondary emotion, what they're saying is there's something under the anger that's causing the anger, which is true, but I have a different interpretation.

 

Mel Robbins (00:26:42):

Tell me.

 

Kier Gaines (00:26:42):

I think it's primary, which means it comes first. The anger is the first feeling that you feel. But when you sit with that anger for a little bit and you realize what else may be attached to it, you realize that you're angry because you're disappointed. Oh, so you're not just angry, bro, you're also disappointed. And that disappointment is what we call a secondary emotion, which is the second emotion. Why are you disappointed? And then when you sit with that disappointment and you process it enough, you feel disappointed because you feel hopeless. Oh, so you feel hopeless. And you're trying to solve for anger, but what you really feel is also hopelessness. If you have a migraine, I don't think allergy medicine is going to fix that. So now you have a prescription for a feeling that's not working and you remain angry. And when you're angry out in the world, anger does multiple things.

 

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It gets attention. Because I know men have all the power in the world. Absolutely. I get it. All the power in society and infrastructure. Patriarchy is a real thing. But in men's individual lives, men don't feel powerful. They don't feel powerful. So what happens is when you get angry, you get attention. You can regain some of your power and control, but it's at the expense of your relationships. So if you don't hear anything else I say, just know that men have been designed to rebrand their emotions into something that's way more palatable socially, way more acceptable socially. It's a man being sad. Who cares? Cry Man River Builder Bridge and get over it. You have all the power. Who cares? But that sadness permeates not only into your family, but into the deepest parts of your life and your being. And if you don't have enough practice accepting that sadness without making yourself feel bad about it, you won't know how to fix and solve it.

 

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You won't know what medicine to take in order to remedy the wound. The manliest thing you can do isn't to ignore your emotions. That's been the motif for the past 30, 40 years. I get it. Maybe when we were out West and the Marlboro Man was a thing and you lose your kid to some type of illness at the age of five when life was hard on the frontier. Maybe that was true. We live in a different society. I have a phone and I can get a sandwich right now if I want it. I can listen to whatever song I want. I don't even eat fish with a head on anymore because I don't have to. Okay? We're not those people anymore. That time is done. And we need to adapt with the time. And I think just masculinity is having a really tough time adapting, but you don't have to.

 

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And instead of rebranding and avoiding your feelings, actually understanding them and having words to them and controlling them is how you become, as my mentor, Jason Wilson says, a comprehensive man.

 

Mel Robbins (00:29:39):

You said that while men may express anger, that's actually not what they're feeling. So as a therapist and with the global reach that you have, what do you want us to know about what the typical man is actually feeling underneath the pressure of life Yeah. Given that you've had a lifetime of being separated from your emotion. Just so we can start with a little bit of compassion, because this is an area that I think is really important for women to understand too.

 

Kier Gaines (00:30:14):

Yeah. Yeah, it is. And it's also important that women understand that men are not women's problems to solve. We'll

 

Mel Robbins (00:30:21):

Come back to that.

 

Kier Gaines (00:30:22):

Yeah, that's a whole nother thing. I believe that underneath everything is a sense of fear. And it's a sense of fear that doesn't have the faculties or the momentum, the understanding, the touch points, the fingers on it. That fear doesn't have a place to go and doesn't have a place to be processed. It doesn't have a safe place to be expressed. And I typically say there's two types of men. There are men who are afraid and there are men who are terrified of being afraid.

 

Mel Robbins (00:30:58):

What's the difference?

 

Kier Gaines (00:31:00):

The men who are terrified of being afraid put up a bigger front. That's where we get the machise mode, that's where we get a lot of red pill content. That's where we get a lot of men not indulging in masculinity or not executing masculinity, but performing it. And when you perform something, it's not authentic. It's not authentic to who you are. It's not going to be helpful to the people around you in the same capacity. It's a performance. And I would love if we just take a step back from performing and focus on actually being. Be the thing, don't perform it. Be the thing. But to be the thing is a lot harder than to perform it because you could put up a facade. I can lie to you. I can act tough like I'm a million feet tall in this interview and then I go cry in a car.

 

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What is the point of having all of these social wins and being some big giant socially, but being a personal failure? What matters most to you? Is it how you appear in the world to everyone else or how you appear to yourself in the quiet moments? Because that's who you really are.

Kier Gaines (00:32:15):

Let's do it. How about this? Let's do a heavy lift and a light lift.

 

Mel Robbins (00:32:18):

Great.

 

Kier Gaines (00:32:18):

Because everybody ain't in the same place with

 

Mel Robbins (00:32:20):

This. No kidding.

 

Kier Gaines (00:32:20):

Different readiness. All right. So let's do light lift first. I want you to pick up the phone and I want you to call a friend that you have not talked to in more than two weeks. You don't have to have something to talk about. There might be some weirdness because you feel like you have to have a meeting agenda. I want you to call them. I don't want you to talk about business. I don't want you to talk about work. I want you to just talk about yourselves. It could be a three-minute phone call, but I want you to pick up the phone and just tap in. And if you need a template for something to say - Yes,

 

Mel Robbins (00:32:49):

I do. Tell me what to say here.

 

Kier Gaines (00:32:52):

I got you. I got

 

Mel Robbins (00:32:52):

You. Because I've not called somebody in two years. I keep texting people.

 

Kier Gaines (00:32:55):

Hey, no problem. And that's one of the points. That's why I feel so empty because we need those real life touch points. "Hey bro, I haven't heard your voice in a while or I haven't heard from you in a minute, man. I was just thinking about you, bro. Just calling to check up. How you been? "And they may hit you with something. "Oh man, men love to hit you with the, hey, I can't complain." Push it a little bit.

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:14):

What do I say?

 

Kier Gaines (00:33:16):

When they say you can't complain, what's been going on good in your life? What's good in your life right now? What are you excited about? What's coming up next for you? And then that's how you start the conversation. You share a little bit about yourself. Bro, you can get the hell off the phone if you're not comfortable. That's the light lift. Call somebody and check in on them. Heavier lift. Schedule breakfast with one of your bros. Go out to breakfast or

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:37):

Go out and lunch here. Breakfast. Why

 

Kier Gaines (00:33:38):

Breakfast? Because one of the problems with therapy is it's not really oriented the way that men externalize and talk about their problems. Men don't even have face-to-face conversations. We prefer shoulder to shoulder. And a lot of my therapy sessions, we toss the football back and forth because it's easy to do something. It's easier to talk about something that's hard when you're doing something that's easy and physical. We toss football back and forth, but we toss the ball back and forth. We may play connect four. With my female clients, oh, we can just go sit down and boom, we're off to the races. We're having a great session. With men, it's a lot harder to kind of get that pump prime. So breakfast is talking over food takes away a lot of the angst and awkwardness of having a face-to-face conversation. It also allows you to share space without words.

 

(00:34:27):

Some people feel awkward when there pauses in the conversation, but when you stuff in your face full of cheese fries, it takes away the awkwardness. It's giving yourself a lower barrier to entry. It's bringing that branch down to pick the fruit off. It's making it easy, low hanging fruit. Go out to breakfast.

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:43):

I wanted to ask you about something you said just a couple minutes ago. Men are not women's problem to solve. Let's unpack that. All right. Because when you talk about holding you clothes, holding you accountable, I think we tend to fall to the accountable side and solving lots of problems for you, whether it's your weight or it's your motivation or it's your drinking or it's your tone of voice or it's your anger. So as a therapist here, what do you want us to know about what we're doing wrong in our relationships with men and what we can start doing right?

 

Kier Gaines (00:35:21):

You cannot want something for someone more than they want it for themselves. If you do, when the novelty or the newness or the excitement of this change wears off, you will be stuck holding all the baggage. And in our society, and this is something I didn't know about women until I became a therapist and started having a lot of female clients. In our society, women are praised and rewarded for over-functioning.

 

Mel Robbins (00:35:48):

What does that mean?

 

Kier Gaines (00:35:49):

Over-functioning is when you do way more than what's necessary in order to meet the goal. And we will clap women out of the building for over-functioning to their own detriment. And a lot of times we don't have a mechanism that says, "Hey, I'm going to take some of this off of you because it's too much." And you get good at the things you practice. When you are a woman in, especially in Western civilization, if you are a woman who's practicing taking on too much, taking on too much, taking on too much, your button that tells you, "Hey, your bucket is not only full, but it's overflowing and flooding your apartment," that button gets broken. So now you are a person holding everybody else's stuff. And a romantic relationship doesn't work when you are taking an inordinate or an unfair amount of the stuff, putting it on your back.

 

(00:36:40):

It's supposed to be equity there. You all are supposed to take and give from each other. But when you make it your responsibility to take, take, take, take, take, take, take, and then you don't have that mechanism that says, "Hey, I'm going to give you a little bit of this because it's too much," or you don't have a partner that you trust to accept the thing that you're going to give them that's too much, it bogs you down.