"Authentically embracing my high sensitivity" - William Allen

Bill is someone who was born in the 1950's and grew up in a culture where "men were men." His dad was a WW2 veteran and society told Bill that men were not supposed to be sensitive or emotional. From an early age though, Bill struggled with this and it wasn't until much later in life that he realized he actually had a highly sensitive personality trait (which about 20% of the entire population--men and women-- also have). He eventually became a psychology major and an author who spent a lot of time working to understand more about this trait. He has since published two books called, On Being a Sensitive Man, Success Strategies to Harness Your High Sensing Nature and, Confessions of a Sensitive Man, An Unconventional Defense of Sensitive Men. And as Bill puts it, "I wrote these books for every man or boy that was told that they are too sensitive or too emotional; that they aren’t man enough or masculine enough simply because they feel more, sense more, and experience a broader range of emotions." This made for a really interesting and dynamic discussion. Bill is really knowledgable on the topic so he was able to explain the scientific and biological aspects of highly sensitive people; but we also dove into the societal and philosophical implications of it as well. Is high sensitivity an adaptive or maladaptive trait? Do we think older generations of men can ever be comfortable fully embracing this trait? If more men tapped into their high sensitivity would we have been able to defeat the evil in the world like we faced in WW2?  Some of these questions were intentionally provocative, in the spirit of the show, to really try to explore the implications of being highly sensitive. And Bill was great at providing really thoughtful and candid responses to all of them. In the end, I think Bill is right that we need to embrace who we truly are, whether that be highly sensitive or not. That is obviously much easier said than done, but hopefully as we continue to evolve as humans it becomes much more prominent.