I asked a good friend of mine to sum up in her words what it is that I do so that others can understand. She knows me well, and I trust her completely. Her name is, Patti, and she also happens to be the woman who designed the book cover for “Man School.” To get her started I told her a story about my dog, Jedediah, and how one morning during our walk, I unleashed him and watched him stand there, nearly frozen with fear in the middle of the street. His ears were pinned back, his tail between his legs, his eyes barely able to look up, as he moved forward one painful step at a time.

I explained to Patti that this struck me because it’s how I see most humans behave. They cringe at their moment of freedom, and they retreat back to the very things that are keeping them captive. Here is what Patti wrote:

The story about the dog is about learning to trust your instincts. He fears the punishment of his master more than the punishment of being restrained for life, and so he freezes instead of escaping when he has the chance. He’s domesticated. And so are most of us, in a rather similar fashion. We choose to give up our own instinct for fighting, inventing, even thinking for ourselves, because we fear the consequences of going against the group. But we are weakened by submitting to this fear. It emasculates us. It kills our souls. And most of us are unaware of it, except for the underlying yearning we have for something, something we don’t have, no matter what we buy or where we go or who we sleep with or how rich we get. It is our primal instincts, leashed, with our tacit agreement. And this is what Michael is trying to awaken inside the modern man.

There are two urges most men once possessed, but now ignore, in their pursuit of successful lives: the urge to make things and use tools, and the urge to engage in physically strenuous, competitive activities. Both of these talents have been sacrificed for desk jobs and fifty-plus-hour workweeks. Mike’s been a personal trainer and a master craftsman, so he can teach those things with the expertise of any professional in either trade. But what he’s really teaching is not how to make a tongue and groove joint or how to do a correct lunge – he’s teaching men how to feel the urge to want to do these things themselves, because they have lost that part of their primal self. He doesn’t care if they build well or poorly, or whether they can do five pushups or fifty. He just wants them to want to do all of those things instinctively, because they’re men. That primal reclamation of the masculine roles is what he teaches, no matter if it’s a training video or an instructional video on how to wire a light. It’s all the same idea: you are a man. You can do this.

This is wise because it cuts straight to the core of masculinity without any judgments. If he teaches a man how to build a go-kart for his kid, he’s giving that guy the tools to step into a good, positive father role without any psychobabble. If he teaches a man how to train for a triathlon when that guy was the class nerd in high school, he’s undoing years of low self-esteem without prescribing a single anti-depressant tablet. And when he chooses to build things like tomahawks, fishing poles and wood flutes, he’s reminding all of us that we don’t need to always go to the store to buy things that are truly useful ( meaningful) in fact, we CANT buy things as meaningful in the store– not when we can make our own. All of these things stir our primal memories: the ones that remind us that we are, instinctively, warriors, builders, fathers, athletes, and inventors. And when we remember that, we remember our true humanity. We slip free of the leash. Free to be men.