Introducing The Better Man Podcast from Man Flow Yoga

It’s official – The Man Flow Yoga Podcast, named “The Better Man Podcast”, goes live the week of April 11, 2022. Once approved by Apple, the first 3 episodes of the podcast will be released, including interviews with two NYT best-selling authors and world-renowned authorities in the fitness industry, Brian Mackenzie and Kelly Starrett.

I’ve also released a shorter 20-minute introductory episode going over my vision for the podcast, what I hope for you to get out of it, and a general scope of the content to be covered. You can listen to that using the player at the beginning of this page.

The Better Man Podcast is available on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Stitcher Radio, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and more.

If you enjoy the first episodes, I humbly request that you:

• Leave a 5-star review for it on Apple Podcasts
• Click the +Follow button so new episodes are automatically downloaded to your smart device.
• Listen to the episodes!! Send me feedback to my email address or through social media.

I can’t wait for you to listen. These were incredibly inspirational – potentially life-changing – for me, so I know you’re going to love them, too!

Now that we’ve got the logistics out of the way, let’s get into the juicy stuff.

• Why am I starting a Podcast?
• What will you get out of the episodes?
• What does the “Better Man” mean?
• My first 6 guests
• And more!

Why am I starting a Podcast?

I made the decision to start the podcast in November 2021. Since then, I’ve been hard at work refining the goals of the podcast, creating a format for each show, identifying questions to ask guests, and thinking about what I personally want out of it.

There are quite a few reasons why I want to start the podcast, but the big one is that I needed to approach fitness with more depth. Working out isn’t the only part of fitness. There’s so much more that goes into it – and into my approach to fitness and living a healthy lifestyle – that doesn’t come across in the programs, videos, emails, social media, and books I create.

There’s more to Man Flow Yoga than workout videos, programs, and tutorials. (In addition to books, yoga equipment, the MFY Community, and social media, of course.) But I find it challenging to explore the necessary depth of many of my desired topics with a short video on YouTube, a social media post, or even a 10-minute tutorial.

Working out is part of the equation of overall health and wellness, but to be more than just healthy, to feel happy and feel fulfilled, takes another set of practices, beliefs, and mindsets. This podcast is to work on wellness as a whole.

I want to examine the practices and the mindsets that lead to change in the areas where it counts most – not the ability of your body to perform a certain movement or to look a certain way, but to mentally and emotionally be in a place where you are happier, more satisfied with yourself, kinder and more loving to yourself and others, and an overall better person to be around – for the people around you as well as yourself.

What will you get out of the episodes?

I have programs for fixing back and knee pain, but what about for mental and emotional wellness? Exercise can only do so much. There’s more to being healthy than working out, sleep, and nutrition. I want to use this podcast to explore the necessary depth that it takes to really dive into feeling healthier, happier, and more fulfilled.

Don’t get me wrong – reclaiming your ability to move, losing weight, and looking great in the mirror are life-changing. But if you’re hoping that working out and getting in better shape is going to give you all the happiness you need in life, you’re probably going to be disappointed.

There are other practices and mindsets which need to be considered and explored if we want to be able to really appreciate the and build upon the benefits of what a solid level of physical fitness can do for us. Physical fitness is an enabler – it gives us energy to do what’s important to us, to spend time with who we want to be with, and to have the physical ability to do the things we want to do. But it isn’t the end goal.

This podcast is an opportunity to explore those other, but crucial, aspects of our overall health and well-being.

Instead of talking about the best poses for so and so, I want to talk about life situations that really challenge us mentally and emotionally. What’s something that you’ve gone through that forced you to change your beliefs? What happened that shattered your world? How did you recover from it? What are your biggest stressors and how do you deal with them?

Selfishly, these are many of the topics that I’m personally exploring. I’ve been reading self-development books for just as long as I’ve been putting out yoga videos on YouTube, but I’ve had a lot of difficulty implementing the information in those books. There’s no questioning the logic of certain practices or mindsets to embrace when it comes to being happier or more successful, but how do you convince the emotional side of yourself to do it?

Change is hard.

And while I’ve seen a lot of success in my ability to change my daily habits to improve my physical well-being, I’ve uncovered a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of mental and emotional well-being, things like:

• Being able to recognize self-limiting beliefs and changing them
• Fully loving and accepting my entire self, instead of only the parts I want to brag about
• A willingness to be vulnerable, to avoid my tendency to put up walls and instead to let myself connect with others.

None of these examples are unique. These are struggles that billions of other men [and women] also go through. But it’s exactly because these problems are not unique that they should be explored, because if I’m going through these same struggles, I KNOW for a fact that there are others going through them as well. (It’s the same reason I started Man Flow Yoga – I knew that if I was searching for a yoga that reflected my goals as a man and as an athlete, then somebody else would be interested in that type of yoga, too!)

And what better way to discuss these challenges than in a conversation with other successful men? One in which the expectation is to be vulnerable as we have a conversation that digs deeper into the challenges that we go through as men, how we dealt with those, what changes we underwent, and how we came out of them for the better.

So if you had to ask me, “Dean, considering all the other podcasts out there, why are YOU starting a podcast?” I’ve have to summarize my answer with 3 big reasons:

1. There’s more to your health and well-being than physical fitness. This podcast explores the practices, beliefs, and the mindsets that help us strive for being happier, healthier, and more fulfilled; the aspirations which belong to wanting to be a “better” man.
2. I want to have conversations with men whom I respect; who I believe to have gone through many of the thought processes and personal transformations that allow us to strive toward these aspirations.
3. I want to use these conversations as an opportunity to practice having real connections and friendships with other men, which is something that we truly lack in our society. I want to change that stigma. I want to make it normal for guys to talk about stuff that makes them uncomfortable, that gets deep to the core, because it’s something that I’ve shied away from to the detriment of my own wellness, and I want to practice and encourage the opposite.

What does the “Better Man” mean?

Being better doesn’t just mean being more successful; to me, it means living in alignment with your true self; striving to accomplish your goals, acting in line with your core values and beliefs, and also taking care of yourself from a health and wellness perspective.

Being the better version of yourself; based on who you are at your core as an individual, your core beliefs, and doing your best to create alignment between your day to day actions and your core self.

Avoiding a universal set of standards; recognizing that each one of us is a unique individual, and therefore we all have our own measures of standards which we want to live up to.

To me, the better man is somebody who is striving to be the best version of themselves, while also balancing their own health wellness needs. It’s a man who strives for alignment in his day to day actions and who he is as an individual at his core, taking into account his own values and core beliefs in what he does on a daily basis. But he isn’t so focused on success and being better that he does it at the expense of his wellbeing. He makes things better for others while also respecting his own physical, emotional, and mental wellness.

There’s a way to be better without sacrificing our health and well-being or who we are. This is my goal.

Why the need for redefining this?

Because as a group, men are not taking care of themselves. We say and do things that we think will make us feel accepted or respected, without really thinking about what we would say or do if we weren’t just trying to conform to what we thought a certain group of people wanted us to do.

We damage our ability to be of service by not taking better care of ourselves. We feel little gratitude for the success we’ve reached, but all of the shame in the world for the success we haven’t yet reached.

We can’t just sit still and be satisfied with who we are now; there’s always some way to be better, to do more, and it’s gotten to a point now with our modern society – being attached to our phones, constantly working, scrolling on social media for an unreasonable amount of time daily – that it’s seriously damaging our wellbeing.

I think there’s a way for us be “better” while also taking better care of ourselves. And that’s what I want this podcast to be about.

To explore the practices and beliefs that it takes for us to be more fulfilled, but also to be healthy and happy; to reach our goals, but not at the expense of our well-being. And to be able to actually appreciate the work that we’ve done, instead of just looking at the next thing we need to accomplish.

If any of this resonates with you, I look forward to you listening to the first few episodes (and beyond!)

What you can expect – a sneak peek of our first 6 guests on the show:

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BONUS Preview: Listen to the intro of the podcast.

PS – Come back next week for a 5-minute sneak preview of episode 1!