You’re lazy.

You keep talking about changing your life, but you don’t do anything about it. You don’t take care of your body. You’re stuck in the same mental loops, carrying around the same trauma from ten or twenty years ago, telling the same stories about why you are the way you are.

And look at you. You’re in your 30s. Maybe your 40s. Maybe older.

What do you have to show for it?

You keep saying you’re capable of more, but when exactly is this “more” supposed to happen? At some point you have to admit that maybe this is just who you are. Maybe you’re never going to become the man you keep talking about becoming.

How did that feel?

Did it piss you off?

Did you feel judged? Disrespected? Did some part of you immediately want to defend yourself and tell me that I don’t know what you’ve been through?

I didn’t name anybody.

So why did it hit you?

Here’s the part I want you to think about.

If hearing those words from me bothered you, why are you allowed to say the same shit to yourself every single day?

Some of you have an internal voice that talks to you worse than your worst enemy ever could.

“You’re behind.”

“You wasted too much time.”

“You screwed everything up.”

“You’re too old.”

“You always quit.”

“You’re never going to change.”

And then you wonder why you have no energy to move.

You already know what you need to do. That’s what makes this difficult.

You know where you’re lying to yourself. You know where you’re wasting time. You know what habits are destroying you. You know what conversations you keep avoiding. You know what work needs to be done. And somewhere underneath all the excuses, you know exactly what you could become if you finally committed yourself to doing the work.

But there is something else I’ve been thinking about.

Maybe becoming the man you’re supposed to become isn’t only about adding things to yourself.

Maybe some things have to die.

There are parts of us that served a purpose once. They protected us. They helped us survive something. Anger protected us. Ego protected us. Isolation protected us. Being emotionally cold protected us. Needing control protected us. Always being ready for a fight protected us.

But something can save your life in one season and destroy it in another.

That is why you have to identify what is killing you now.

What part of you is destroying your marriage?

What part of you keeps damaging your relationship with your children?

What part of you makes business relationships fall apart?

What part of you keeps destroying friendships?

What part of you walks into every disagreement already prepared for war?

What part of you keeps you sitting on the couch while you watch other men build the life you keep talking about?

Find it.

Name it.

And then understand that you may not be able to carry that version of yourself into the next part of your life.

You have to let him die.

I’ve attended my own funeral many times.

There have been versions of me that I had to bury because I finally realized they couldn’t come where I was trying to go.

And I carried a lot for a lot of years.

Trauma I refused to confront. Anger I justified. Things from childhood and from my past that I thought I had dealt with simply because I learned how not to talk about them.

That isn’t healing.

Sometimes we get so good at carrying damage that we mistake carrying it well for being healed.

I did.

There were things I dragged from one stage of my life into the next and then wondered why the scenery changed but the problems kept looking familiar.

Different people.

Different circumstances.

Same reactions.

Same anger.

Same defenses.

Same man underneath it all.

Eventually you have to stop asking why this keeps happening to you and start asking what part of you keeps showing up when it happens.

That question is uncomfortable because now you don’t get to blame everybody else.

Now you have work to do.

And real work isn’t posting quotes about discipline. It isn’t talking about becoming a better man. It isn’t sitting around analyzing your childhood for the next fifteen years either.

At some point you confront it.

You forgive what needs to be forgiven.

You take responsibility for what belongs to you.

You make amends where you can.

You change your habits.

You change the way you speak.

You change what you tolerate from yourself.

And you bury the man who keeps taking you back to places you claim you don’t want to be anymore.

Go to your own funeral.

Stand over the grave of your arrogance.

Bury the excuses.

Bury the victim mentality.

Bury the need to always be right.

Bury the anger you’ve turned into an identity.

Bury the old stories.

Bury the version of yourself that keeps saying, “This is just who I am.”

No.

That is who you have practiced being.

There is a difference.

And understand something else: you can mourn him.

Because even the worst parts of you may have once been trying to protect you.

Thank them for getting you this far.

Then put them in the ground.

Because the man you are becoming doesn’t need them anymore.

We spend so much of our lives afraid of death that we never realize sometimes death is exactly what is required for life to begin again.

Not the death of the man.

The death of what has been controlling the man.

So ask yourself today:

What part of me needs a funeral?

And when you figure it out, don’t just talk about burying it.

Dig the grave.