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Authentic gay conversations on personal development, life coaching, and mental health. Join Keegan Hirst, founder of Gay Man's Coaching and former professional rugby player, for weekly real talk about gay lifestyle, coming out, relationships, business, and authentic living. Deep, honest conversations that help gay men build confidence, find community, and create vibrant, unapologetic lives.
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Hello and welcome to the Gay Man's Coaching podcast, the podcast for men who want to perform better across physique, career, mindset and life in general. As always, I am your host Keegan Hurst and I am looking forward to chatting to you today about something that I think is really important. It's about not focusing too much on shame and actually building the life that we want. And I'm going to talk about what the difference between
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those two things are. Just a reminder that we have got our Massive Action Day in London on the 20th of June, that is this Saturday. There's still a few spots left. I'd love for you to be there. It's gonna be an amazing event. We also have one or two spots left for our retreat in Cornwall in August and the cutoff date for numbers being locked in for Montreal.
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is the end of June so if you are considering coming I implore you to get your deposit in and get yourself there. Now let me delve into this because something that I think I have seen over the last few years is I remember when I started GMC and before it was called GMC it was called PTIQ and I used to talk about being a coach for gay men
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and there wasn't really any around or certainly that I wasn't aware of. And then over the last few years, a load of gay coaches have popped up, which is great because there's something for everybody, right? You know, I'm not here to say that, you know, the gay coaches are poor because that's not true. And we all want to help people look better, feel better, perform better, and that's an amazing thing. But something that I have noticed is that a lot of gay coaching is built around
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healing shame and we think that that's the the floor and not the ceiling so you what I'm saying there is you don't heal your way into a good life you build your way into one and the building is what does the healing right there's a version of gay personal development that is basically a waiting room you sit in it
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healing your shame, processing your childhood, doing the inner work and you wait until a day where you are fixed enough to go and to actually live your life. But today in this episode I want to talk about why that waiting room is just a comfortable trap and what we should do instead. Now I am not saying that we shouldn't be healing shame. Please don't misunderstand me. Shame is real. Us growing up as gay men.
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Listen, everybody encounters shame but there are aspects of being gay, growing up in a straight world that forces shame on us. We learn to hide and things get wired in early that, you know, we are different and that shows up in different ways. That is not an invented thing and it is really, really important for us to acknowledge that, to understand that.
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to work through that, to challenge it, to challenge that shame, to talk about it. Shame lives in the dark, it lives in the secrets. I was, I've thought about this a lot because last week we had Cain Evans who was a rugby league player in Australia who came out and he did an interview and he talked a lot about shame and guilt and fear. And it took me back to where I was 11 years ago.
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when I first acknowledged those things and first started speaking out about them and the power of that. And it's been a process for me to build my life and become the person that I am today who isn't ashamed of who they are, who doesn't feel guilt about existing or, it's taken time, it's taken effort, and it's taken an element of processing that and for want of a better term, healing.
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So I just want to reiterate that people who focus on that aren't wrong that it's there, it exists and it is important that it is dealt with. But the thing, the way that that goes sideways is for a lot of people healing becomes the identity. People just work on themselves perpetually with no finish line.
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because you can read all the books in the world, you can listen to all the podcasts, you can know the velvet rage from cover to cover, you can have done hundreds of hours of therapy, you can spend years excavating why you are the way you are, what's the cause of it, who's to blame, what happened, and you can sit and you can go over and over and over and excavate and dissect it and you will never build a single.
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thing and you will never build the person that you want you will never build the habits the identity the relationships the career the body the life that you want because all you are doing is sitting and essentially just digging through the past over and over again and refining it and refining it and refining it and at some point the rubber has to meet the road at some point process processing that information stops being progress
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and it becomes a very sophisticated way of avoiding your life. You cannot think your way to a life that you are proud of. You cannot think your way out of a doing problem. You have to go and build one. Now, something that, you know, a way to reframe this is that confidence is not buried in your past and waiting to be dug up.
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Let me say that again, confidence is not, confidence sorry, is not buried in your past. It is not waiting to be dug up. You build confidence, you earn it, you accrue it, whatever word you want to use and you earn it by doing hard things. Building a body that you are proud of, doing work that means something to you, being involved in relationships that are actually real, that are challenging, that trigger you, that...
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have difficulties because all relationships do. Even if you have a relationship with the most amazing person, there will be something that comes up that triggers you. relationship, a good relationship is not about finding someone who doesn't trigger you, it's finding someone that you can work through those triggers with. know, building a career that you are proud of, that you are genuinely interested in, building friendships that support you and help you grow, giving back to society or community in some way that is meaningful to you, that.
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is what builds your confidence. As you build those, that old shame quietly loses its grip, it loses its hold on you. Rather than just sitting there and going, this is why, this is why, this is why, that never changes anything. um And it's not because you can't butt heads with that shame and beat it, you have to out build it by building those things, by doing.
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those things by having those conversations by building that confidence.
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And I think again, just to reiterate here, I am not saying that we should never look inward. That is something that is really, really important to do. Wounds need tending. know, things that have happened to us in the past need acknowledging, need processing, because for a lot of us, we compartmentalize things and we don't process them and we do need to go back to them. But that inner work, which is important.
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that earns its place when you pair it with specific action doing something building something challenging yourself otherwise it's just rumination with a fancy word okay it's really important to do the building work you know acknowledging things is important it serves a purpose but it does not replace
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the actual work of building a new life. Everything that we do, everything that we do, whether it is in the body, the mind, the way you show up in your life, that comes from taking action, it comes from building, it comes from doing, it comes from risk of being seen and failing and going again. And that's not because you're broken and you need fixing, it's because you are capable of more
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than just sitting and cycling through old traumas. You are capable of living, you are capable of building a life that you are proud of, looking in the mirror and loving yourself and not feeling ashamed and not feeling, you know, broken. So stop waiting to be healed. You will never be healed by just sitting and processing. Go and build the thing. Build the life you want. Build the relationships you want. Build.
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the body you want, the habit you want, the friends that you want, go build them by doing, by failing and going again. And when you get stuck, you ask for help. That is how you overcome shame. um And that is something that I think is often not talked about enough. The healing comes as a side effect of that. And that's what we do at GMC. That's something that I pride myself on is that yes, that is a
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part of what we do that's why we have the psychotherapists that's why we touch on the content that we touch on but also it's about action and moving forward you always have agency you can always take a step even if it is the tiniest smallest step you have that in you. So I just wanted to share that ahead of our event this weekend we're going to be talking about going from being someone who apologizes for who they are
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who makes themselves palatable, who shrinks themselves in a particular area, whether that's work, relationships, home life, whatever it is, and how to become unapologetically yourself and do that with pride. And I'm really, really excited about that. It's gonna be an amazing event. So I hope you've enjoyed this. If you have, please let me know, share it, whether that's on socials or in the feed or whatever. But thank you for listening and hopefully I'll see you at the event this weekend.