Design the Man Within: Becoming a Man the World Needs

By Johnny Elsasser

Have you ever wondered why many men feel alone and unfulfilled in their lives? Like they haven't seen the greatest version of themselves yet and haven't put it all on the line to have a life of happiness, tranquility, exhilaration, and joy?

The majority of men feel this pain deep within and have no clue how to understand it, co

• Language: English
• Publisher: Johnny Elsasser LLC
• Release date: May 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218170301

Book preview

Introduction

We all have a beginning, and we all have an end. For the most part, in both cases, we don’t have a choice on how they take place. What we have control over and what matters is what we do in between; that is life. How we show up in this world creates the impact we have and the legacy that stands long after. Men aren’t struggling today because some external force caused the conflict. The conflict was already there because men weren’t strong in their understanding of masculinity and their individual authenticity with it. All it took was a small push, and men within society were in disarray.

Masculinity in all of us was built on a shaky foundation, one that could not stand up to pressure. It disassociated us from our emotions, it took away our belief in ourselves, and it forced conformance to a way of life that fed the machine of the societal beast, not the well-being of the individual or their relationships. We were taught not to question this, as to be inquisitive meant that you were going against the establishment. Some men took this unaware version of masculinity to the ultimate extent, giving the world the villain of man that is being painted today. The house of cards was easily toppled because we, as men, did not collectively come together and unite. We allowed the uninitiated to dictate the path of men, and for that transgression, we have paid dearly. As society spirals in today’s highly toxic and divisive narratives, men don’t know how to stand in strength and understanding. The next generation is being left behind because we are choosing not to end the cycle for them; we just perpetuate it. We continue to pass on the judgmental and negative mindsets that were handed to us. Despite all of this, no, men, we are not the victims, we are the heroes, but we need to find him in all of us. Even heroes fall from grace and rise from the ashes; this is where we find ourselves.

Men are lost because the old ways don’t fit anymore; even we as men have identified this. We have witnessed it, questioned it, yet we haven’t taken action to change it. We have commented, struggled, made fun of, and criticized it, but have not challenged it. My belief on why is because it first takes us to look internally to make the change. It takes questioning our current foundations, ones that we have held for so long, and assessing what no longer serves us and what no longer serves a healthy collective environment. It takes being aware of your own perceptions and shifting them. It takes initiative on the individual level before global impact can be made. We have to lead by example individually, and there are very few men willing to do that. I believe this failure to be the result of a mixture between men who do not know how to be leaders and men protecting their own insecurities. It would mean that many of us need to start from the ground up, even those at more advanced years in their lives. It would mean that everything we have built up to this point may need to be torn down so that we can go back to learning and being fluid. It is this that terrifies us as men, yet it is the first place we need to go.

The aware and initiated man is the next generation we can champion or let fall to the wayside, only to allow antiquated versions of masculinity to tear down the good that men have built. The false alphas believe they rule, and the untrained believe they are experts. Good men sit quietly because they have not found their source of power within yet. They have not found the confidence to stand up and combat with intellect, leadership, and presence. It is time for all men to change course. To show the world that the villain is not men or women but untrained, unaware, and hurt individuals. It’s time for men to stop playing the victim and cease running from our own growth. We can only change the trajectory and influence of men by being aware of who we are internally and then reflecting that authenticity outward to the world, influencing those around us in a way that shows integrity, honor, respect, empathy, and strength.

The world is looking for these men, desperately searching for what they believe does not exist. The world needs these men in order to create equilibrium within a society that finds itself more lost and divided than it has ever been. The world yearns for men to evolve. The time for evolution is now. The time for awareness is now. The time for healthy and honorable men to rise again is now.

Chapter 1

Every Story Has an Origin

We’re all put to the test…but it never comes in the form or at the point we would prefer, does it?

The Edge, 2003

I grew up in a very blue-collar family. We weren’t rich, we weren’t poor, and we had enough to not feel the extreme pressure of poverty, but we weren’t buying brand-name food or clothes that often. In all honesty, it was a time of happiness in my life and, like many who were born in the mid-’80s and early ’90s, a time for being outdoors. Gaming had not grabbed root quite yet in our youth, and my brother and I spent many days (until the streetlights came on) outside playing with our friends and our cousins, who were just a mere two blocks away. We were raised under the philosophy of boys don’t cry, and if you had a problem with someone, you took it outside and saw what was what. It was an era of boys still conditioned by the hardships of WWII, Vietnam, and Korea. We were being trained and guided by men who were still from those times, and inside of that, we mimicked their expectations and mindsets. I grew up in a world where if you backed down, you got it worse from the adults than you did from the kids. It wasn’t bad, it was what they knew, and many of the adults at the time didn’t know how to change that or how that was conditioning the next generation.

My father was a mechanic and not much involved with us outside of dinners and us joining him in the garage when we wanted to help with cars. My mother was a manager at a tile store and then a branch manager for an accounting group, amongst being a sports chauffeur and rearing three children. I grew up working on cars in the garage with my dad as he made side money on top of working for Toyota. When I wasn’t working on cars, we were either playing or maintaining the front and back yards. My dad did his best to show us that hard work was rewarded and had the philosophy that we needed to work to receive money, and so we did. I still remember making $7 every Sunday for shoveling dog poop, sweeping, and ensuring the gardens were free of weeds while my brother had the fun jobs of mowing and edging (bastard). It didn’t seem like a fair tradeoff then, but what did I know?

As I grew older, I worked summers at a Texaco Xpress Lube that my dad was part owner in with his friend, and let me tell you, those summers in Fresno being in 105 to 115 degrees and under blazing hot cars was not fun (however, it definitely conditioned me for the hot days I would spend in and out of the Middle East for ten years). I can’t tell you how many times I was burned by mufflers and hot oil. Not cool at all.

On the side of that, I made more money by working with my uncle Mike, who was also my godfather. He owned his own small company (by small I mean me, my two cousins, and my uncle) where we went out and detailed airplanes. These weren’t your commercial airplanes, they were smaller but still airplanes, and it took a lot of time to detail something to my uncle’s standard for these private planes.

So when I say we were blue collar, we were blue collar. We worked hard for every cent, and that was how I thought money was to be made my whole life. I thought everyone was working like that to make ends meet, and those who weren’t must have had some rich parent or grandparent who handed them money. This all being said, I wouldn’t change it for the world. I grew up learning the value of hard work, never being scared of it, having grit, and having integrity in my work. I grew up understanding that the people who make this world go round aren’t the rich and famous, it’s those out there every day, doing the functions that keep society operating.

As I went through high school, I continued to work hard, not on schoolwork, but on living life. I was a year-round soccer player, a part-time mechanic, an airplane detailer, and a full-time partier with my friends every weekend when we weren’t camping or four-wheeling in the mountains or on the dunes of Pismo Beach as a family. However, I didn’t care much about school and knew how to do enough to keep everyone off my back. If I could maintain Bs and maybe a couple of high Cs, then I was golden. I didn’t need to be smart, I needed to be crafty. Ensuring I could get answers to tests and making sure I showed up enough to class to stay relevant, I was able to skate by. What I didn’t learn was the importance of planning for my future. I was from a family who didn’t have degrees, and we worked hard to make money, so college was not even an afterthought for me, it wasn’t a thought at all. I soon found out that while all my friends were planning for their departure to the next phase of life, I was sitting there with nothing.

Earlier in my senior year, I had a conversation with one of my best friends, and he mentioned all of these special operations groups, from SEALs to Special Forces. I had no knowledge of what any of these people did other than seeing Rambo or Con Air. After looking into them, I remember saying, Those Rangers look cool. Little did I know the arduous path it took to become a Ranger, but if there was one thing I was good at, it was living in the present moment.

Following my graduation from high school at age seventeen, I signed up for the US Army and went to the Medical Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) out of San Jose, where I was bussed up to the Army recruiting office. It was my first experience being completely away from anyone I knew, and with no support or guidance, I was truly on my own. I went through the process, and I will never forget when I sat down with the recruiter (this is the ACTUAL place where you sign your contract, not what the recruiting office tells you). He was a former Green Beret and basically told me that I was heading to the regular Army. At the time, we were hot in Iraq and Afghanistan; in Iraq, we were currently fighting a major battle in Fallujah. Both the Marines and Army were taking the fight to the enemy there, and to the recruiter’s eyes, I was fresh to join the fight. I didn’t know how to negotiate, I didn’t know I could have walked out, I knew I was there, and I knew what I was dealing with at that moment. Being present has been my strength and sometimes my Achilles’ heel, and in this case, it wasn’t serving me. I didn’t think too much about how I was going to get to be an Army Ranger, I just knew that was where I wanted to go if I was going to be in the military, but the recruiter told me the path that I could take to perform this task, and I believed that was the way I had to go (which was and wasn’t true, but hey, what did I know?). So I signed the contract, swore into the military, and a short month or so later, I was in basic training.

At the time, as many boys during high school do, I had my first long-term girlfriend and was experiencing the first love of my life. Instead of her having a boyfriend who may go off to college with her, she was instead staring at a boyfriend whom she quite possibly could never see again. We decided that we would make it work long distance. However, think about this for a second; there was literally about four months when you combined basic training and infantry school, in which I would have little to no time to really talk with her because it was the military. We had payphones, which we needed to have phone cards for, not to mention the time limits when we did get on the phone. If you were lucky, you could go back to the end of the line, and when everyone else was through, you could make another call before time was up and maybe have a longer phone call, but that wasn’t common. Ultimately, she was amazing and did her best for being a beautiful eighteen-year-old girl and in college while I was this seventeen-year-old looking to get shot at and blown up. I could not imagine what went through her mind every day, and honestly, for all the women who were back home while their men were serving in extreme combat environments, I commend you for what you gave and how you supported us. In the end, typical for many of us in life, my first love turned out to be my first heartbreak, but that is a story for another day.

Presence was the key to my life early on. I wasn’t good at planning, predicting, or plotting a path, but I was great at being and doing (we will get to more of this later). Being and doing were my superpowers. I had worked hard since I was a kid, and I didn’t even believe that what I did was hard work, it was simply work. To others, this was something many people would not have done well growing up with, and for many adults, they couldn’t imagine doing that kind of work even now. While I didn’t know what was going to happen as I headed off to basic training, I did know one thing: I was going to take life one single step at a time.

While I was in basic training, my physicality was what set me apart. Drill Sergeant Paul noticed me soon after I started basic training because of how fast I could run for long distances, and I suppose that was due to my experience as a soccer player. This dude was awesome. He wasn’t a former Ranger, but he had gone to Ranger School and passed (big difference between graduating school and being an actual Special Operations Ranger) and was a former sniper. He was a slender black man from North Carolina (NC) and had a couple of teeth that were gold (if I remember all of this correctly). He had this thick NC accent and could yell at you like no other. Also, when he was pissed and tearing into you, it was something to behold, and I definitely made sure I was not on the wrong side of that as much as possible. Drill Sergeant Paul was tough and frightening at times. He would punish you worse than pretty much any other drill sergeant we had, but he was fair. See, he wasn’t someone who punished just to punish; there was always a real lesson in his punishment. In basic training, it would have been okay for him to punish us and not have a lesson behind it, as that was expected of a man in his position, but he didn’t do that. He believed in equilibrium, the punishment fit the crime, and you were going to learn.

On top of being present, I took notice of my surroundings pretty well, and I noticed Drill Sergeant Paul was kind of his own man. He didn’t really hang out with many people, and he was constantly putting us through the wringer. He wanted to develop the best recruits he could because he knew what we were all heading into. Additionally, he wanted to see if he could ferret out the top guys and push them to be better.

When he noticed me, it was terrifying. We came out from chow (mealtime) one evening, and he yelled at me to come over. Anyone who has been in the military knows that when any superior noncommissioned officer (NCO) yells at you, you’re just thinking about all the things you could potentially be punished for that day.

I headed over to him, and once I was in front of him, he asked me, What type of contract do you want?

I said, Excuse me, Drill Sergeant? with an inquisitive and confused look.

He said, You want Special Forces? Rangers? Snipers? What do you want? I don’t have all fucking day!

I told him I would like to have a Ranger contract.

He proceeded to tell me to, Get the fuck upstairs, and to be completely honest, it had left my mind after I went upstairs. I was just happy I hadn’t done anything to get smoked (smoked is essentially when you are pushed to physically work out at the direction of an NCO, typically in place, and anything in your vicinity could be used as weights or resistance).

The next day came, and again, after evening chow, Drill Sergeant Paul yelled at me to come over to him. All I was thinking, again, was what I did wrong and how long this punishment would last. As I got up to him, he pulled out a packet of papers, handed me a pen, and told me to sign it on his back. He then proceeded to tell me to, Get the fuck upstairs, once more, and the next thing I knew, basic training was complete, and I was off to Airborne School and then to the Ranger Indoctrination Program (RIP at the time), where the real pain was going to begin.

When I finally got to RIP, I realized, Oh, this is what it means to get into special operations. It was a day-in-and-day-out effort of simply trying to make every single one of us quit. See, they didn’t need you, and they didn’t want you if you couldn’t make it. Similar to all other special operations indoctrination programs, it was designed to have a high attrition rate because they seriously only wanted the best. Fun fact here, there are fewer Army Rangers than there are Navy SEALs. When I was going through