The Men’s Corner Pub

In my younger single years, I used to frequent a particular neighborhood bar to meet my buddies, check out the women, and watch the town’s sports teams on TV screens spread throughout the building. There are still many ethnic neighborhood watering holes where men, young and old, hang out to mingle and share their lives.

Most of the time we stayed on “safe subjects” — sports, politics, which women looked hottest in their revealing outfits. Occasionally talk would shift to more serious topics — relationships with wives and girl friends, sickness within our families, financial debts, or even problems with jobs. However, these subjects were raised infrequently and often with great reluctance.

The truth is that when national surveys take the pulse of American job holders, as many as 80 percent complain about some aspect of their work. These people are employed, not jobless. Eighty percent! That figure includes an awful lot of men.

According to a 2006 Stress and Anxiety Disorders Survey, stress plays a key role in how Americans feel about their work and their lives. “Although commonplace, regular stress and anxiety is not without impact. For the four in five working adults who say they experience it daily, job stress often takes its toll on performance, quality of work, relationships with bosses, and interactions with coworkers.

“And work stress isn’t clocking out at 5 p.m. American workers who say stress affects their work also claim it extends to their personal life, with 81 percent saying it interferes with their relationship with their spouse/significant other and more than a third saying it affects their relationship with their children.”

Let’s face it. We men pride ourselves on managing our lives and careers. We don’t want to open ourselves up to our buddies to talk about stress, fear of downsizing, worry whether we’ve chosen the right career, and other job problems, lest we seem weak and inadequate. We imagine most of our guy friends as all “doing well,” their careers well established, promotions assured, with lots of “bling, bling” in their checking accounts.

For many men our self-image is intimately tied to our job and career. When misfortune strikes and we are downsized, we often lose our identity and our way. We grieve our loss, often without acknowledging our grief to others.

The bottom line is that a high percentage of men, employed or not, resist seeking out a mentor, career consultant or coach who could help them identify and find more fulfilling and rewarding work. They have no problem paying a personal trainer for their gym workout, or a coach to straighten out their golf swing, but they resist exploring a relationship with a certified career guidance professional.

The fact is that most of us, male and female, were never trained to identify and find meaningful work. Fortunately, the successful Life-Work Discovery model can draw upon a man’s innate skills and abilities and guide him to master three key strategies: envisioning, building true self-esteem, and connecting him with key decision-makers who can hire him, give him a consulting contract, or fund a business of his own.

When identifying and seeking fulfilling, rewarding work, why not identify with the image of the Ronin. The Ronin were samurai warriors in medieval Japan. They received rigorous training to become warriors which in turn provided them with confidence in their abilities and equanimity to deal with rapid change. They served their feudal lords with unquestioned loyalty. However, if their lord died of old age or was killed in battle, the samurai found himself dispossessed and thrown into the unknown. To survive, ronin were forced to ride the winds of change.

In generations past, men lived their entire lives working for a big corporation, serving in a steel mill, or laboring in a coal mine. The security of a lifetime job is long gone. Change today is both rapid and inevitable. Every man will need a career insurance plan. Do you have yours? Contact me today to learn how you, too, can become a successful career ronin.