Breaking the Mold: Redefining Masculinity and Cultivating Vulnerability with Jem Fuller

:: 00:00

So welcome to this edition of the The Mindful Coach Association podcast. I'm your host, Brettt Hill, and this week we have an amazing opportunity to talk with Jem Fuller. Jem bursting into my attention because of a specialization that's near and dear to my heart, which is mindful communications. And so once I looked into Jem's expertise and the offerings, that felt like, I gotta have this guy on the show. So let me tell you a little bit about him. Jem Fuller has lived a colorful global life, from barefoot backpacker to corporate leader, fire dancer, and a traditional tattooist, kindergarten teacher, to motorcycle courier, masseuse and reflexologist, to labor and travel consultant. So that's a lot of hats. That's a lot of roles to play in life. But for the last decade, he's run his own executive leadership coaching practice and international retreat company in the Himalayas, Bali, and Australia. He is a dedicated partner and father who loves surfing and meditation and the author of the award winning book no less than The Mindful Coach Association. You can also see him delivering a TEDx talk on that topic on YouTube. So welcome to the show, Jem.

:: 01:17

Brettt, thank you so much for having me as a guest on your show.

:: 01:21

Absolutely. I couldn't avoid it as a compelling topic because my heart and soul has been around The Mindful Coach Association and mindful communication specifically for quite a while. How did you. I mean, all of these roles, you sound like you're quite the adventurer in a certain way. Like, let's try this and let's try this and all of that. Kind of like, you're the kind of person who tries on lots of things that somewhere, maybe there's a thread here that where mindfulness and the ability to just be present with people is a thread that potentially weaves all this together, or how did that light up for you in your life?

:: 02:00

Yeah, it's a big question. And initially, back in those days where I ended up wearing all the different hats, I was just following my passion for travel, really, and to immerse myself into foreign know. Yes, I was very adventurous. I was driven to make sure I didn't walk the standard path, the standard program that we get taught here in Australia. I'm guessing it's the same in America because we've adopted a lot of our Western culture from the States, which is go to school. If you can get into university, go to university, get a job, get the career, climb the ladder, build the house, and you will have happiness. And I never subscribed to that. In fact, I ran the opposite direction from that program, and I lived a.

:: 02:49

Very alternative life going, no, thank you, please.

:: 02:52

Yeah, no, that is not me. So, yes, look, I spent a lot of time and I became very enamored with the Indian subcontinent. And it feels like my second home now after first traveling there in the early ninety s, and then spending a lot of time there throughout the. Going back each year. And so in India, meditation, contemplation practices like yoga, introspection, these are part for the course. This is quite well accepted and practiced a lot. So I was exposed to these sorts of things in my twenty s. I didn't have a dedicated practice to mindfulness per se, but I was certainly aware of it. It wasn't until my 40s, actually my early 40s, when I decided to actually create a dedicated mindfulness meditation practice. And so now, ten years down the track, am really starting to enjoy the benefits of cultivating that aspect of mind.

:: 03:59

So in the Indian traditions of mindful of meditation, and I'm. No just transparency here. I'm no expert on this topic, but I have studied with and been part of groups who have been inspired by and led by those from lineages of that era, of that area. And so a lot of that is a meditation sort that's fairly transcendental in nature. I would describe it in the sense of connecting up to the cosmic goodness of the world and all that that opens up to us. Was that the kind of thing you were doing at first, or was that related to the kind of thing you were exposed to? Because there's also another more Buddhist contemplative practice, which is still celestial in some ways, but not quite as focused. I don't know if I'm making any sense or not understand the histories as well as I should, Probably.

:: 05:06

YEah, no, you are making Sense. Yes. The transcendental forms of meditation, which can also include what they call A BaJan and A BAjan is a Song, very repetitive Song. And quite often you just repeat the same lyric over and over again. And when done, especially in a group Setting, which I've been lucky enough to sit in some very special ritualistic and holy and respected circles of priests. We would call them priests, but they're sadus with top quality musicians sitting in circles and in temples, at festivals, singing these Bajans long enough that you literally do transcend. And what you're actually transcending is the sense of ego, the sense of self, the sense of being separate from, which is arguably an illusion anyway. This idea that the ego is an illusion, it's a necessary one. We need it to function, but it's an illusion nonetheless. And so through those traditional bhajans and transcendental meditations, then you can escape that sense of separation, and you feel like you're one with everything, which is quite a beautiful experience. And then you have the more traditional Buddhist mindfulness meditation, which is the practice of simply observing whatever you can notice showing up in conscious Buddha found enlightenment actually sitting under a tree in northern India, just outside Varanasi. I've been to that spot as well, and you can go and see the tree that he would sit under in the later years of him starting to formulate and then be able to communicate his understandings from introspection and meditation. So, yeah, there's both different styles of meditation. They both have their benefits. And then there's the more Zen form of focused attention, which is a form of meditation where they will focus attention to certain energy centers, energy locations in the body, the chakras, or like this. And the idea of being able to move energy with your visual, imaginative powers.

:: 07:43

I spent a lot of years working with that specifically and was kind of walked away from a path where I was supposed to be leading those kinds of things, but with a preference towards being more focused interpersonally. And I feel like, from what you all described, that somehow you've managed to do something similar because there's all this inner work to become connected up and down. I call it up and down the stack using a technology phrase, up and down. And then there's in and out. Right. And so when I read your work and about the retreats and your offerings and your focus on communications, that's very interpersonal as opposed to intrapersonal focused. So how is it that that aspect of these. So you've got these skills where you've connected up with these other cultures, and you've done this work inside to wire up a fairly skillfully resolved inner network, so to speak, a neural network. And now you're taking that and you're saying, now let's make this work interpersonally. Because when I read the work that you're doing, a lot of it's about how to help people integrate and give voice to and act out or act in alignment with their own inner knowing, in a way. Am I making that up, or does that describe what you do?

:: 09:15

No. Yeah, you've described really well the journey, and the journey continues. The introspection, the intra communication, the intra work is fundamental to the interpersonal. The two of them are a symbiotic relationship that improve each other. And so communication, I believe the place to start improving and becoming more conscious in our communication is in our communication with ourself, which is our communication with our internal communication in our mind and body, which is our communication with life. So the quality of our mind is the quality of our version of reality, our relationship with life itself. So if you want to improve your relationship with life, you must be improving your relationship with yourself, which is your internal communication, and communication with our environment. Learning to listen to our environment and also communicate with our environment. And then obviously, the interpersonal communication and our ability to communicate with others is largely affected by the quality of our state of mind.

:: 10:43

Exactly.

:: 10:44

If you imagine, just in a very practical term, if somebody is very unhappy, generally in their life, very unhappy, maybe they're caught in anger quite often, or they're frustrated, or they're experiencing negative emotions a lot in their life. Wherever they go, whoever they're speaking to, whichever context they're in, they're the common denominator. So the quality of their internal world is this right? Their ability to be able to see you clearly, to be able to seek to understand your point of view, or to be curious about where you're coming from, or to communicate effectively with you, which means to understand you. Their ability to do that is very limited because there's so much noise going on in their eternal world, so much suffering. So the work that we do on ourselves to smooth out the creases, to create a foundation of equanimity, this calm centeredness actually enables us to be able to listen much more effectively and communicate more effectively with others as well.

:: 12:00

That was beautifully said. Whenever someone comes to you, they want to be a more effective communicator. And you start saying, well, in order to do that, you have to start working on yourself. Do you get people going, wait, I want the skills, I want the communication hacks, as opposed to, oh, I'm going to have to go digging through the chaos of my own inner world.

:: 12:30

Yeah, and we can get to some hacks straight away as well. This is what I would say to these people. And at the same time, if you would like to work with me, and if you would like to engage my services and have me help you, then I'll be showing you how you can do some work on improving your relationship with self as well. The two need to be happening consequentially, concurrently. And so we'll do both of those. And it's the same thing. It's the same thing. My relationship with self is my relationship with life is my relationship with you.

:: 13:16

And so when you show, how did you then get to a situation where you decided to do these retreats, because you have several retreats that you offer and they look fabulous reading the descriptions on your website. And I'm just curious as to how you came about or made the business decision to go ahead and do that. I mean, there could be a significant risk in putting yourself in a situation just from dollars and cents point of view, and also considering other coaches out there who could be also looking at potentially doing something like that or maybe even haven't thought about it, what would you have to say to them about that? Kind of a business motion?

:: 14:00

Yeah. The first retreat was the Himalayan, the mindful leader retreat in the Himalaya. And it was the manifestation of a calling which first. The first seeds were sown within me. In 1998, I had found this family in a Himalayan above of a Himalayan village on the side of a mountain, and I ended up living with them and falling in love with this family and this village. They're my family to this day. They're my Himalayan family to this day. And when I was there, I connected with their son. We became brothers. And when I was there, I said to him, I've got this feeling I'm going to bring people here. I don't know what that looks like, but I just feel. I have a strong feeling. I want to bring people here and I want to get them away from their microwaves and computers and cars and buildings, and I want to get them here in this stunning nature and get them cooking on a fire and get their hands in the dirt, so to speak, and sleeping in a tent out here in these mountains. And Papu, my brother said to me at the time, he said, he's a conservationist and also a trekking guide. And he said, well, let's take them trekking in the mountains. We'll take them walking in the mountains and we'll pick up rubbish. Let's pick up trash.

:: 15:29

That is such a beautiful metaphor. I can't believe it.

:: 15:33

And I said. I said, that's amazing. And I went home. And that was in 1998? Yeah, then in then in 2013, ten years ago, I was studying coaching and I was in the room and I was actually crewing for the speaker. I'd already done the course, but I was volunteering to be up the back and be crew. So I was filming the facilitator, she was speaking, and I had this light bulb moment. I just literally downloaded the whole idea. So this was from 1998 to 2013, that many years later, and I went, it's a leadership retreat. I'm going to take leaders to the Himalayan mountains, and we're going to. And I downloaded all the content and the name. It was leaders in life. And I was like, oh, wow, I almost dropped the camera. I was meant to be filming and we'll go and we can pick up rubbish and we can do the whole thing, right? And so I went home to my then wife and I was all excited and I said, I'm going to run a retreat in the Himalaya. And she looked at me, she went, you're going to do this, aren't you? And I'm like, yeah, I have to do this. So then I went to my accountant and I said, I'm going to run this retreat. This is what it is. And I told him all about it and he said, that's amazing. And he said, I can't believe. Why are you going to do this? And I said, because it scares me. The idea of doing it scares me, so therefore I have to do it right. Anyway, he said to me, he said, look, the risk is significant and so you need to set up a company. You shouldn't do it under your name. You should set up a company, because for legal and logistical reasons, it'll mitigate the risk against you personally, et cetera. And I said, okay, well, how do I do that? And what will that cost? At the time, I had maybe two pennies to rub together. And he said to me, it's going to cost you $1,300 to form a company. And I said, all right, well, that idea is going to have to get car parked because I don't have $1,300. And he looked at me, he's still a friend of mine today. And he came on the first one, my accountant, and he looked at me and he said, I believe in you. I'll pay to set the company up. And I said to him, oh, wow, man, like, I'll pay you back. And he said, no, I don't want you to pay me back. He said, I want to pay to form the company and I'll come on the first retreat with you. And that was in 2013. And since then, we've run the retreat nine times now and changed lives. And not only did we pick up rubbish, not only did we pick up rubbish, but one of the clients one year decided to invest some money to donate some money to set up rubbish bins in the village and a rubbish collection program, and then some years after that. So we've got an education program and rubbish bins in the village and a collection service that we paid for. And then a philanthropist got in touch with me and wanted to donate money. And we built a school in this village as well. And there's a couple of school children that we sponsor to go to school there as well. And so, look, it's a beautiful story that is continuing. We had to pause over COVID, and we're going to be resuming again next year in October 2024, if anyone's interested in coming.

:: 19:09

Sure. I'll be sure to put a link to the show notes for people to take a look because it sounds amazing. Now, you also do retreats in other places besides, there. Are there some other stories around connecting to those locations as well? Yeah.

:: 19:25

The Himalayan retreat is not for everybody. It's very adventurous. We walk off the beaten track. We have pack horses and guards. Yes, walking. In fact, one of the days, we walk the whole day in silence, and we walk very, very slowly. I mean, like, if you flew over us in a helicopter, it would look like we were stationary. That's how slowly we walk. Right. And it's a mindfulness day. It's a mindfulness meditation. Walking meditation. Anyway, it's rough and ready. We're camping in tents, we're cooking on a fire, et cetera. So there was a client of mine here in Australia, and she said to me, Jem, I've heard wonderful stories about this retreat, but it's not for know. I like my creature comforts. I don't want to be up there. She said, would you consider running a similar retreat, but in a five star villa in Bali with spa treatments and cocktails? I said, that sounds like a good idea.

:: 20:24

Actually, I just might.

:: 20:27

Yeah. So I did. So I found a property in Bali and I started running that, and she said to me, actually, I think a good niche. I think niche. You say niche over there, we say niche here. A good market for you would be women if you run a woman's only retreat. And I didn't even think about the fact that I'm a man and I was running a woman's retreat. I just put it on. I just did it. For five years, I ran a woman's only retreat, and I felt very honored to be able to hold space for these women.

:: 20:58

Retreat for women. What was your theme for the women?

:: 21:03

Well, the content is similar to the content in the Indian retreat. We look at a reconnection to self, sense of functional, sense of who am I? A reconnection to being part of the greater system. So how do I access flow, et cetera. A reconnection to purpose, a sense of purpose or meaning to my life and a reconnection to others. How do I more effectively understand, have compassion and empathy for and connect with and communicate with other people, especially people who are not like me? So they're the four conversations that we have. And that's the same in Bali as specifically. The content wasn't specifically written for women, but by having a woman's only retreat, it was creating a safe space for these people to drop into their own vulnerabilities, drop into their own space and explore. Because it's quite a deep program, the conversations get quite profound. So that was that. But we've opened up Bali now. Bali is for everybody because I had men saying to me, why can't I come? And so we've opened that one up.

:: 22:11

Well, that's great that you explored that territory. And now you do have some content that you've written. You said the content wasn't written for women, but you do have some content that you've written for men. Is that right? Did I read that?

:: 22:26

Yeah. Yeah. My first book, which I wrote during COVID I started out writing The Mindful Coach Association. Just that. And I had a book writing mentor and she said to me, Jem, you need to pick an audience. If you're writing too broadly, the book won't sell, so you need to pick an audience. And I went, oh, OK. And she suggested to me, she said, I think you should write this book for men. So I thought, yeah, great, because similar to over there in the States, here in Australia, we have, over the generations gone by, we have created this cultural stereotype of man where we tell our boys, don't cry like a girl. We tell our boys to suck it up and harden up and toughen up. And we teach our boys that it's not okay to be emotional, right? So we excommunicate these boys from their emotional selves and then we wonder why we then have these generations of men who can't express their feelings and then it ends up in violence, sometimes quite often. So, anyway, I thought, yeah, look, there is a lot of reparation we could be doing as communities there, and I think that it's time for us to rewrite those old, outdated stereotypes of what it is to be a man. I think we need to do that. And so I wrote the book for men. But interestingly enough, but interestingly enough, it's mainly women who buy the book. And I get emails from women saying, thanks for writing the book. Now I've got to try and get my husband or my brother or my son to read it.

:: 24:07

Well, that's interesting. I find that quite interesting because I agree completely. And I think the damage done is astronomical, immeasurable. And that's why I'm not joking when I say this is past due, I think, and urgently needed. So I'm very interested in this topic. And also, like you say, the resistance in a certain way to that. So the men who are open to. There's also a class of. I'm just going to put in quotes, male and finger quotes, men who don't identify that way and are actually kind of. I'm going to overstate this. Victims of their own sensitivity and are too harsh of a culture. And so there's kind of all sides of this. But I would like to ask you a question. It's like if you were to say to a male audience for a second, if you were to say to a male audience, I'm going to pause here so I can edit that out. If you were to say to a male audience, like, here are some things about communication that can help you connect, embody your masculinity and also be connected. What might you say? Are there things you can say about that in specific or in general that would resonate with the people who can hear it?

:: 25:43

Yeah, there's lots to say. And even whether you're choosing to speak to males or females or people who identify as either within that, there are still subcategories of different behavioral styles. And then there's the multitudes of different versions of personalities due to experience and story making up and how we become who we are. So we can have broad stroke generalizations, which can be helpful still. And also respecting the fact that there are always exceptions and idiosyncrasies and anomalies, obviously, but in a broad stroke generalized fashion. I encourage men, anyone, but in the case of this conversation, men to start to explore some time, to sit and practice some introspection, practice some contemplation, to sit and just explore perhaps, what might I be feeling right now? Rather than what am I thinking and what are my goals? What's the result I'm trying to get? What am I trying to fix? Because quite often the masculine is results focused and wanting to fix problems, which has its place. It's also nice to sometimes just sit and observe. And if you're somebody who doesn't normally communicate in terms of how you feel about things, perhaps just to sit and practice, a mindfulness practice of observing your physical body, your mental and physical body. See if you can notice any sensations that might be akin to feelings. And if you could give language to them, you don't have to, but if you could give language to them, what might you be feeling? And it can be anything. There's no right or wrong, so that's the first step. And then with someone that you Trust, someone that you have an intimate relationship with, where you feel safe, ask them, do you mind if I start practicing trying to express my feelings with you? I'd like to start exploring what that might look like. Because a lot of us, the result of that cultural indoctrination we were talking about before is that a lot of men, they only know calm, switched off, excited, like, let's go get the Goal. Or angry. That's the only language they've got around their emotional states. But there's this beautiful palette of every variation of emotion in between. Those to explore, and then to explore the vocabulary with, and then to explore the communication of that with the people that you love, that are around you, that are close to you.

:: 28:38

That was so well said. I love the framing of the calm or excited or angry because those are the things that are culturally okay. And you also said there's a whole spectrum of experience that can happen and all of the above and stuff in between ambiguity and guilt and disappointment and shame, as well as, on the positive Side, curiosity and enthusiasm. And then, in a deeper Way, the urge to be helpful and nurturing. I love that aspect in anyone. But in, particularly in men who I see that in a well grounded way, they just want to take care of every hurt creature on the planet. And I really like that. I'm projecting, of course, but still, it's a beautiful Thing to see when it comes out.

:: 29:41

Yeah, I agree. I agree with you. I think that more people than not, in fact, most people, underneath their insecurities or their confusions or their dysfunction, underneath it all, are good people. YOu Imagine THis Scenario. There's the workman standing on the building site, and they're having a smoko. We call it here in Australia, a smoko. Right? When they're having a break and a woman walks past and one of the guys, wolf whistles, objectifies the womAn, and one of the other guys might call out and Go, yOu're BeautIful, beautiful womAn. Hey, Look over here, or wHatever. So they're behaving in a way that's not okay, right? But they're doing it with each other because they kind of feel like that's what they should do. And none of them speak up and say, hey, we shouldn't whistle at that woman in a rude way. None of them say that to each other because they're too scared to say that to each other. But do you know what? I reckon if you got them individually and sat them down and asked them and they felt safe, to be completely honest, each of them would say, no, that didn't feel right. Each of them would say, it doesn't feel right to objectify women. They know deep down inside that it's not quite right. But just culturally, we haven't given our men the tools or the ability or the courage or the permission to start calling things out like this and say, hey, that's not okay. Also, another scenario. Imagine there's a few guys and they're going out for beers together, and one of them suffers anxiety. But his friends don't know that because he can't say that. He suffers social anxiety because that's a weakness. So they don't know. And so his friend says, come out for a beer. And he says, oh, no, I think I'm just going to go home. I don't feel well. I'm feeling a bit sick in the stomach or something. I'm not feeling well. And his friend goes, oh, come on, don't be a pussy. Come out for a beer. Come on. Yeah, right, man up. Come and have a beer, mate. Stop whinging. And he goes, no, I'm really not feeling well. Right, so that's the scenario. A imagine if it could be like this. Hey, we're going for a beer. Would you like to come? Nah, man, I'm feeling. Not feeling too well. And his friend goes, oh, I've noticed that a bit with you lately. Are you okay? What's going on? Oh, nothing. I'm okay, really. Talk to me, man. You can talk to me. I'm your brother. What's going on? And he goes, look, I suffer from anxiety. Oh, wow. Really, man? Oh, jeez. I've had that too. Hey, I've been seeing this psychologist. She's really great. She's been really helping me with anxiety. Can I give you her Number? Can I introduce you? Oh, that'd be lovely. Or, hey, do you want to just come home and watch a movie or like, we could order some pizza or something, or do you want to talk about it? Imagine that, right? When male friends could actually lean in and be there for each other and be vulnerable with each other. But so many men don't even conceive that as an idea.

:: 33:00

I really resonate with this in a profound way, I sometimes imagine, and this is truly a fiction, but I imagine a culture. What would it be like to grow up in a culture where people having each other's back was normal?

:: 33:19

Yeah.

:: 33:20

What would that be like? And I think about that sometimes because it's so completely the opposite in the United States and in other places. But it's very much like, well, you're on your own and you need to duke it out and you need to show up and persevere. And these days, there's this Superman mentality, superhero mentality, where if you don't show up and do the work, 47 jobs, 80,000 hours, and suffer and lay yourself down so that you can obtain and perform, then you don't deserve success. And if you get ill, well, that's just because you're weak and you made the wrong decisions longer. I'm kind of getting wrapped up in my own story here, the point here being that we don't know what it's like to be in a culture, like you just said, where instead of someone saying, well, you need to do all that, you need to lay down your health for your work. You need to lay down your mental health for your culture, so you can do the cat calls and the objectification and not being in the relationship or the husband or the father that you want to be or should be, because your job demands too much of you. And that's just the way that it is. Versus a culture where your job is supportive of the fact of you're going to be a better employee if you have a happier home life and the.

:: 34:53

Way to happier home life and a healthier state of mind and more well being. Absolutely. Look, there are those of us that are trying to affect that change. That's what my book is about. And the work that I do and the work you do. And we're not alone. I'm meeting more and more people who are singing from the same song sheet as us and doing what we can to affect this change. And change is inevitable. And if you only watched mainstream news, if your only source of the outside world was mainstream news, then you would be completely depressed with humanity, because that just feeds all of the terrible stuff. But I actually make an effort to go and look for positive news, global news, real news, but positive news that doesn't sell, sure, but it's curated and it's there if you want to go look for it. And so that gives me hope, because there are lots of people out there doing wonderful things, and there's lots of wonderful improvements in humanity that are happening so we can rest assured.

:: 36:03

Absolutely true. And I have to say that that is exactly the reason that the The Mindful Coach Association association was created, was to bring us together, because there is a lot of fabulous work. There are a lot of people like you out there doing really powerful, important work. And that's the exact reason for this podcast, is to get that message out there. So I want to thank you for doing the work that you're doing and for being a guest on the show. It's been really great having you here. And so those of you who are hearing this, check out Jem Fuller, Jemfuller, Jemfuler.com. Go visit, see what he's up to. Check out the book, check out the TED Talk. Look at the offers he's got there. He's doing some amazing work in an important way, and you can tell he really embodies the message and the meaning and the connection to a deeper place. And Lord knows that's exactly what we need these days. So thank you for being a guest on the show and for all the great work that you're doing.

:: 37:10

Thank you again, Brett. It's been an honor to be a guest on your show.

:: 37:14

I appreciate it. And so that's it for this episode of the The Mindful Coach Association podcast, and we'll talk soon. Thank you.