COMUNICACIÓN ESCRITA: LEER Y ESCRIBIR OBJETIVOS CRITERIOS DE EVALUACIÓN

Your father is your original source of the masculine energy which makes you a hot item in the women's department of life's variety store. One way of getting in touch with this masculine en-

ergy is to develop a powerful, mean- ingful relationship with your father if you haven't already done so.

If you don't already have close rela- tionship with your father, it will help if he's still alive and living nearby. Start by taking him out to dinner, for a drink at the pub, out fishing, or to any activity where he's likely to feel comfortable opening up to you and you to him. This may take time so a little persistence could be required. Don't give up if the barrier between you doesn't disintegrate on the first attempt; you've both had a lifetime of learning to relate the way you do now so don't worry if that doesn't change instantly. Start sharing how you feel about relatively safe topics like sport, politics or global finance, and then get more personal gradually as you both feel comfortable.

Chances are your father has been waiting for the opportunity to have a closer relationship with you, but hasn't known how to get through to you because you're always so damn busy working, socializing or chasing skirts all the time. Take some time out to

What To Do

•Call your Father •Read And When Did

You Last See Your Father? by Blake Morrison and Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson

STEP 7: CONNECT WITH YOUR FATHER 56

connect with the guy responsible for your male existence and you'll be amazed what you might find.

If your father is anything like mine, and there's a good chance that he is since you're reading this book, this step may be fraught with as much pain as progress. By his own definition my father is “timid”. He married a dominant woman who bossed him around whenever she felt like it, and knew exactly how to push all his hot buttons. He was so out of touch with his feelings and unable to express them that he bottled up his frustration until he would explode with rage, and sometimes violence towards other people, especially my mother. He was not the picture of a man living powerfully, nor did he have powerful relationships with women.

Despite the way they my parents treat each other, my father still considers my mother to be the best thing that ever happened to him. This made me wonder what on earth had happened to him before. Now you wouldn't expect a 76 year old to be pulling the hot babes or anything, but what every man needs is power over his own destiny and a sense of competence and mastery when it comes to relating to women. A retired man with this kind of mindset would have powerful relationships with his wife, his adult children and his grandchildren. He would be a master of all things in his life.

This isn't how I see my father, and frankly when I got to know him better as an adult I questioned whether I had it in my genes to be the sort of man I wanted to be at all. If this was what I had inherited, what hope did I possibly have? My family background is one of dominant women and submissive men, and that means that the lifeblood of masculine energy has been squeezed out of

STEP 7: CONNECT WITH YOUR FATHER 57

us guys for a couple of generations. What was I to gain from con- necting with my father then?

Well, for one thing, I realized how much further I had come than my father. All that hard work dealing with my emotional bag- gage (Step 12) meant I was actually able to talk about how I felt; something my father never learned to do until I began to teach

him. He's an ex-Mechanical Engineer with no grasp of feelings

whatsoever, and that made him hard to relate to. So I had my work cut out for me but it seemed worth a shot.

By asking him about his life before meeting my mother, I learned about my father's relationships with other women; something I previously knew nothing about whatsoever. It turned out he'd had a few girlfriends, none of whom I'd heard spoken of. He sounded like a naive little kid when he spoke about them; again, his relationships with girls was characterized by timidity and not really seeming to know what to do with them. He'd go to pick up a girl for a date, and end up remembering more about the con- versation with her father about trains than about the girl herself. His head was somewhere else and although it was a somewhere that he was pretty happy with, it wasn't the sort of life I wanted. My father wasn't in touch with his masculine strength, because his father before him wasn't in touch with it either. His father hadn't taught him anything much about how to be a man so my father's older sister tried to fill the gap; but a woman can't really fill that role completely. It takes a man to teach you how to be a man.

Given that my father had very little to teach me with regards to mastery in my relationships with women, the main thing I got from connecting with him was the real sense of how much he al-

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ways appreciated seeing me, and how deeply he loved me; even if he couldn't express it directly. Taking the effort to get to know him better meant that he valued having me around even more. One of the certainties in my life is knowing that my father is al- ways glad to see me. I even taught him to say “I love you” to me, which helped tremendously with learning to love myself (Step 17).

If your father lives a long way away, you can still do this via tele- phone, letters, email, and the occasional visit. If your father-fig- ure isn't your biological father, that doesn't matter: the mindset you want is mostly a learned thing rather than genetic. Try to connect with whoever you saw as a father figure during your ad- olescence. If you have ceased contact over some dispute, now could be the time to reconcile and start to heal the pain associ- ated with that too.

If your father or father-figure is deceased see what you can dig up about them in terms of journals, letters, diaries, and stories from other family members who still remember them. Visit their grave, favorite place, your old family home, or any other place where you can visualize yourself having a conversation with them, imagining what they would say to you about their experi- ence of being a man.

I can't say, in the end, that I got in touch with a great deal of powerful masculine energy within my father, but I did learn some valuable things about myself and where I'd come from. I ended up deciding that I didn't have to follow in my father's footsteps when it came to relationships and that if he couldn't pass on what I needed, I would find it from other men and devel- op it in myself instead.

STEP 7: CONNECT WITH YOUR FATHER 59

Find other men you respect and can learn from. Seek out other adult male role models who embody the qualities that you want to learn for yourself and enlist them as mentors formally or in- formally.

Read autobiographies of powerful, successful men whose values you admire like Richard Branson's Losing My Virginity. Pay close attention to their mindset: successful men go after what they want in life without hesitation; they aren't afraid of failure, or worried about what other people

think of them. When they fail, they pick up the pieces and move on without dwelling on it; failure is just a learning exercise for them. They have their flaws but they aren't ashamed of them, nor do they use them as an excuse for not living powerfully.

If your father didn't have this mindset to pass on to you it's up to you to develop it for yourself. Delve deep inside to find your in- ner wellspring of masculine energy which may have been dormant for several generations. But it's there, waiting to be un- tapped.

Beware of not expecting too much from your father. After all, he's already had your whole life to teach you how to be a confident man. If he knew how to do it, this would all have happened by now without you even thinking about it. Having a better under- standing of where your father was coming from may help you to unlock your own inner confidence even more powerfully than he ever could. Your job is to evolve beyond where your father got to

What To Avoid

•Blaming your Dad for your shitty childhood

•Making all the same mistakes he did

STEP 7: CONNECT WITH YOUR FATHER 60

in his life, while also being kind to yourself in terms of how well you're doing given where you've come from. You are a man and you have the goods that women want; a billion years of evolu- tionary biology guarantees it.

The other obvious reason to connect with your father now if he's still alive is that you won't be able to do it so easily once he's dead. Ask any guy whose father has died, and they'll tell you “I wish I'd gotten around to really talking with my father earlier... while I still had the chance”. Connecting with your father can help you get in touch with the magnetism that already lies with- in you, so it's worth picking up the phone and saying “Hi Dad, it's me. What are you up to this evening?”

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