He was watching a Goggins podcast.

By the end of it, he’d decided. No more excuses. No more half measures. Time to step up.

He kept it up for a while. And he felt incredible about himself.

Then one evening he had to stay late at work and missed what he’d planned. It happened again that week. Then again.

He felt like a loser. Nothing like Goggins.

Then a quieter thought arrived. Goggins doesn’t have kids. Goggins doesn’t have his life.

He sat with that for a while.

The identity that wasn’t his

He realised he’d been trying to match an identity that wasn’t even what he wanted. Sure, he wanted the body. The discipline. But more than that, more than anything, actually, he wanted to be a present father. That was the thing. That was always the thing.

So he asked himself a different question. Not why can’t I do it like Goggins,  but what was Goggins actually showing him? Not to give up on what matters. His health mattered. He’d let it go, quietly, over time. That part was true.

What wasn’t true was the version of discipline he’d borrowed.

What he built instead

He found a coach. He built a routine around his actual life, not an imagined one. He prepared for the weeks that would derail him, because they always came. He stopped measuring progress in perfection and started measuring it in showing up, even late, even half.

He joined a men’s training group. And something shifted there that he hadn’t expected. Discipline still mattered. But showing up mattered more. The group held him in a way a personal standard alone never had.

He found freedom in that. Real freedom, not the kind that comes from having no constraints, but from choosing the right ones.

The wrong question

I have journal entries full of the wrong question.

Why am I not there yet. Why can’t I do it like that person.

The right question, the one I eventually found, was different.

What is this person showing me that’s already in me? What does their path point to, and how do I adapt it to the life I’m actually living?

That question leads somewhere. The other one just loops.

If this landed , a discovery call is a good place to start.

This is part of the Rewritten for Men series

Next: Self-nurture — what it looks like when a man tends to himself without an audience.