John Sanei is a global speaker, future strategist and trend specialist, who combines human behaviour and future studies. Here he offers his insights on why he believes courage is key for the future of mankind.
Men have ruled the world for thousands of years based on two elements. The first is connected to physical power. Men have traditionally always been stronger than women physically, and in the agricultural era, your ability to be strong was what made you successful.
Then the Industrial Revolution came along, and again, there was very much a masculine approach of logic, analytics and outcome-based actions.
When a woman comes to speak to you about her problems, she is not looking for a solution; she just wants to talk about it. In contrast, men want to find ways of solving a problem so they can move on. Women have a different approach; they don’t necessarily want a solution; they just want to talk about it.
The world we are moving into, however, is not masculine. On the contrary, it’s very feminine, and for us to understand how we need to show up in the future, we need to think about courage.
Firstly, we need to understand the word courage and where it comes from. The first half comes from the French word “cour”, meaning heart. So, if you break down the word courage, it means the rage of the heart.
We as a society have moved from a physical reality to a logical reality to a heart-based reality. In order for us to ‘rage from the heart’, as men we need to access our hearts more than ever. We know now that steam engines are stronger than our bodies, and AI is better than our logical left-brain thinking. So now what’s left is that technology isn’t competing against our hearts it’s competing against our logic and our bodies.
So, for us to show up in the future, we need to develop new types of courage, which is actually raging of the heart. So how do we do this? We have to break down courage into five different steps. This will allow us to realise if we are genuinely courageous or not.
The first type of courage is intellectual courage. This involves us asking ourselves if we are willing to think new thoughts. And the truth is, we’re not. Because science has proven that by the time we are 30 years old, we have between 60 and 70,000 thoughts a day, of which 90 per cent are the same thoughts as yesterday. Our brains are familiarity machines, not adaptability machines. They stick to what they know. Men are much worse at this than women because they are outcome-based, not creative. So, men are not courageous intellectually. They want to stick to what they already know.
Secondly, we need to think about whether we are emotionally courageous. Are we willing to deal with uncomfortable emotions? And the truth is, no, we’re not. We can see that anxiety and loneliness have drastically increased, and men suffer the most from this loneliness and disengagement from reality.
