How Do Men Move From Verbal Sparring and Into Encouragement?

🎢 Hi, Friend! You’re Doin’ Great! 🎢

Encouragement: To infuse another with courage.

Our hearts and heads have internal pep rallies to get us into good decisions and overcome our doubts, shame, and insecurities. Much of the self-help world is focused on teaching us to toughen up our mental capacities and “just do it.”

But humans are not made to be stand-alone units.

We are made for community and need our friends to fill us with courage. I love encouraging people and saying things that spark their souls. But I am just like you and need the courage to battle my inner critical voice.

Today we are going to look at trading the male initiation pattern of verbal sparring for deeper encouragement.

Today’s Men’s Friendship Factor Newsletter

• Two Quick FYIs

• A Study On Verbal Sparring

• The Initiation Goals of Verbal Competition

• Filling Male Goals with Encouragement

• Action Corner

• More Resources

Two FYI's

1) You will have a link and a code for a free copy of my new Friendship Audit. You, dear reader, are already thinking about better friendships—and that’s a rare and beautiful thing in this world. The final edits happen this week and I can’t wait to share it with you.

2) Next week’s issue will be about friendship with God. This past year I began surveying various gods and religions looking at the focus of power. Hundreds and thousands of gods and spirits are given names and attributes to explain what happens in the collective human consciousness.

In all of my reading and thinking I found only one figure who claims to bring friendship from the spiritual realm into the physical world.

More next week.

A Study on Verbal Sparring

Harsh joking, sarcasm, and put-downs are all part of male friendships. We know the unspoken rules (and often break them). Male verbal competition is a guarded and limited form of intimacy. It has a place in our friendships, but let’s look deeper.

Are you stunted by verbal competition? Are you stunting other men’s ability to form intimate friendships? My confession: I enjoyed verbal sparring far too much as a teenager and young man. It was my area of competent competition and it covered up my own feelings of insecurity.

Men have verbal sparring rules. It's real and intended as a form of group initiation to toughen up and accept boys and men. Gerard Williams's 2015 Ph.D. dissertation on male friendships sums up a 30-year study by J. M. O'Neil in the Journal of Counseling and Development.

Willams shared 5 Rules of Verbal Competition that made sense to me.

1) Secrets are not to be exposed

You cannot weaponize a guy's secrets. My guy gut tells me it is hard enough to share a secret with another guy. If he goes and blabs, it's a deep wound and I may not get over it.

2) Habits are fair game, but a man's heart is off-limits.

You can needle a guy for always showing up late, eating too much pizza, speaking loving words to his car, or his "smooth moves." But do not go after his honesty or a major struggle. The heart is off-limits during the competition.

3) Guys use a tone of voice to indicate they are not serious.

Of course, the dry humor guys use this for full take-down points. When you slip one in and the other guy has to do at least a double-take to know if you are serious, you scored well. We let each other know we are kidding with a look, nod, and tone of voice.

4) Only people who can defend themselves are fair game. 

Some guys stink at verbal sparring. Others are too sensitive. Some are just having a bad day. Yet others need the sparring to be focused away from themselves. The idea is to build friends, not crush them.

5) Participants have to be able to take insults and give insults.

Thinned-skinned guys are left out of this form of competition. This protects the group more than the individual. If a guy can dish it out but not take it, it brings the entire group down.

The Initiation Goals of Verbal Competition

I haven’t found an article or book on this area, so I’m sharing my own perspective. Feel free to add to the conversation. I think you can comment at the end of this article (a new Beehiv feature), if not, email me.

Let’s look at the initiation rites of verbal sparring and add ways to bring up our boys and form groups of friends.

• Having fun

• Mental strength

• Breadth of experience

• Leadership

• Having fun

• Learning and applying human psychology

• Saying “I know you” without being intimate

• Testing ideas and theories about life

• Having fun

• Finding a topic that can be discussed later in private

• Poking fun at “other” groups (this is where boys and men can get negative and veer off into racism, misogyny, and other hateful attitudes)

• Imagining the future in a guarded way

• Expressing fears

• Having fun

I am not at all against verbal competition, sparring, and thinking out loud. It’s one of my favorite things to do!

Do we have other forms of initiation that Infuse Courage?

Fulfilling Male Needs with Encouragement

Men do mature and start meeting the needs of their friends with encouragement.

I do think we need forms of initiation for boys and men. Part of being a man is rising to the occasion in a competitive environment. We do need to toughen up and be encouraged.

The world is an inherently cruel, hard place and we have to work and fight to make our way forward. The current generational shifts are reminding us that every generation must struggle to form an identity and create its own security.

Some of you readers I know well and I’ve seen you do this with younger men. Thank you!

• Youth coaches

• Boy Scout leaders

• Male classroom teachers

• Rotarians

• and many, many more…

Here’s my point.

No matter the social confusion of the day, men initiate other men through a variety of informal means.

I’m calling us to be Intentional.

Informal is perfect because we do not need permission. Our verbal sparring has its place and we can use it to open doors to other men’s hearts.

I’m calling for us to be Intentional Infusers of Courage.

Because that’s what it means to be masculine in any culture, at any point in time. Let’s do this together.

Action Corner

Two questions/assignments from one theme.

How will you encourage someone this week?

What is a regular place and space you have or need to make to be an Intentional Infuser of Courage for other boys and men?

Resources

This week, I want to recommend two podcasts that I listen to regularly.

First, This Jungian Life has changed my perspective on psychology and religion. I accidentally stumbled upon Carl Jung a few years ago through Thomas Moore and then through James Hillman. I love to read, but this podcast is a conversation between three Jungian therapists around large concepts and eavesdropping on them makes me think deeply. They engage the spiritual world regularly which many therapists and philosophers do not. https://thisjungianlife.com/

Second, The Ezra Klein Show is very interesting. Klein is a New York Times reporter and his podcast is a chance to go deeper into topics with interesting guests. Yes, it leans left, but discussions on Artificial Intelligence and the worldwide generational shifts he’s had in the past two weeks would make sense to my most conservative friends. https://www.nytimes.com/column/ezra-klein-podcast

That’s a wrap for this week!

I write a lot of bite-sized pieces about friendship on Twitter. You can join those discussions by following along. Here’s my profile.

See ‘ya next Sunday!

Jared