That is what was screaming back inside my head as I was showering one morning not too long ago. After 10 years of coaching executives in the fed and in private companies, I was thinking of starting a new business: Working with men to get greater peace in their lives. Why change a good thing?

Several years ago, I started seeing a theme with my male clients. They seemed restless and uneasy in their skin. Most were very successful and had all the trappings (2+ houses, family, cars, lots of money, lots of expenses), but they had no joy from it. They were starting to ask the big questions like, “what’s it all for anyway?’, or, “What’s next?”, or even, “I’m bored with it all”. At first I thought they were just burned out.

Then, I had a few clients who were very different. They were men who were on the outside looking in. They seemed out of step with the world. Zombies in their jobs, yet outside of work they were full of life and ideas of what they wanted to do. They were jazzed up wanting to do something else for work but they were held hostage to jobs they hated to support their family’s way of life.

There were some common elements to these men. They felt like they were failures, even the successful rich executives. Because the key role in their life – their work was dead for them, they felt like failures as men. The second piece of evidence was they kept silent about their suffering. They felt alone in it.

And finally, I was seeing how many weren’t handling the uneasiness well – some changed jobs or marriages, some many times. Others got caught up in unhealthy past times to avoid dealing with it.

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Tags: The Disquiet, men feeling their failures, zombies at work

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