A masculine man is a man who genuinely embodies masculine energy traits. I started taking personal self-development more seriously a couple of years ago. One area I wanted to improve was being more masculine in certain parts of my life. Some masculine traits came naturally, while others needed some work. Because I’m so happy with my results, I wanted to share ways to embody genuine masculine energy.
How to develop masculine energy
Before you try to look like a masculine man, it would be wise to develop a masculine mindset first.
Live with direction and purpose.
Having defined goals provides a sense of direction and purpose. Goals are crucial in building masculine energy traits such as confidence and decisiveness, which are viewed socially as masculine. These traits can enhance self-esteem and personal efficacy.
Discovering your purpose can be a lengthy pursuit for men seeking a deeper meaning in life. Here are some ways I began to find my purpose that any man can use:
Self-Reflection
Contemplate what truly matters to you. Contemplation could involve making notes or simply spending time alone to think deeply about your values, passions, and what makes you feel fulfilled.
Exploring Interests
Trying new activities and pursuing interests helps you to see what resonates with you and can bring you a sense of engagement. Whether it’s a hobby, a form of art, or a sport, exploration is critical to uncovering hidden passions.
Setting Goals
Identifying short-term and long-term goals can help clarify what you want to achieve, leading to a clearer understanding of your purpose. Goals should be challenging yet achievable and aligned with your deeper interests.
Seeking Feedback
Talk to friends, family, or mentors about what they see as your strengths and where they see you being most enthusiastic and effective. Sometimes, an outside perspective can provide valuable insights.
Educational Pursuits
After following some previous steps, you should have somewhat of a direction of intent. I strongly believe in engaging in educational activities, whether formal education like classes and workshops or informal learning through books and online courses, to expand your knowledge and skills in areas of interest. The more practical knowledge you have, the more valuable you are to others and yourself.
Mindfulness and Physical Health
Exercise and diet can improve physical well-being. Maintaining mental health through mindfulness, meditation, and therapy can help you focus on personal growth and purpose.
These are the five steps I took to help guide me toward my purpose in life. Here are some other ways that may help you find purpose and direction:
Professional Guidance
Working with a coach or a counselor can help uncover your potential and understand your motivations. This guidance can be beneficial in navigating complex thoughts about purpose and direction.
Volunteering and Community Service
Helping others or contributing to a cause can provide a strong sense of purpose and reveal what you are passionate about. They also connect you with like-minded individuals and communities.
Finding Masculinity Through Confidence.
Like a purpose-driven life, confidence is fundamental to developing masculine energy traits. Think of purpose, direction, and confidence as a foundation for masculine energy traits. Without them, it would be difficult (or impossible) to grasp some of the other concepts explained in this article and evolve your thought process to a more masculine mindset.
Becoming more confident is a path that involves self-reflection, practice, and persistence. Here are some practices that any man can do to start that path:
Practicing Gratitude
During the earlier stages of my path to masculinity, one of the first things I corrected was my sense of gratitude. Without realizing it, I didn’t take pride in many things about me or my accomplishments. Then I asked myself this:
How can I be grateful for things to come if I’m not for things already here? Am I going to continue to pursue life being ungrateful? Where does it end?
Once I cultivated a grateful mindset, I developed a more positive, appreciative approach to life. It also helped my day-to-day self-confidence.
Setting Realistic Goals
Confidence builds upon small successes. Setting and achieving realistic goals can provide a sense of accomplishment and boost self-esteem.
Practice Self-Affirmation
Positive self-talk and affirmations consistently can counteract negative thoughts and beliefs about yourself. Doing this in the morning helps me replace self-doubt with more positive and constructive thoughts.
Develop Competencies and Useful Skills
I mentioned direction and purpose as the first step to becoming masculine. Confidence often stems from competence. Learning new skills or enhancing existing ones in various areas of life (work, hobbies, physical activities) can significantly boost self-confidence.
Challenge Yourself Regularly
Stepping out of your comfort zone and facing new challenges can enhance your ability to handle uncertainty and build confidence in your capabilities.
Dress for Success
Dressing well can improve how others perceive you and your feelings about yourself. It doesn’t necessarily mean wearing expensive clothes; instead, it means clothes that make you feel good and are appropriate for the situation. Not being appropriately dressed can leave you feeling out of place in social and professional settings. There’s more on this later in this post.
Seek Professional Help if Needed
Sometimes, low confidence can be linked to deeper psychological issues. Therapy or counseling can be beneficial in understanding and overcoming these barriers.
Sure, any man can one day look in the mirror and say, “I will be more confident!” But building and maintaining true confidence is a journey in itself. It takes consistent self-reflection, practice, and persistence.
Maintain Emotional Control
Masculinity is historically associated with remaining calm and composed in challenging situations. This perception of emotional control as a masculine energy trait is based on the idea that men should be able to manage their feelings to protect, provide, and make rational decisions. Without emotional control, being viewed and respected as a leader is impossible socially and professionally. Here are some of the approaches I used to help improve emotional control during difficult times:
Pause Before Reacting
This one is difficult to apply daily, depending on your personality. But this is no excuse if you want to see results. The wisest approach is to take a moment to pause when you feel overwhelmed by your emotions. This break can help you process feelings and respond more calmly and effectively, maintaining a masculine image.
Be Assertive when Communicating
Communicate your thoughts clearly and directly without coming across as unnecessarily aggressive. Finding this balance in difficult situations is a great way to convey masculine energy when it counts. Assertiveness should be used not only in difficult circumstances but also in everyday situations.
Develop Problem-Solving Skills
Focus on finding solutions to challenges to get closer to the results you want to see. Finding solutions demonstrates capability and decisiveness, both viewed as masculine energy traits.
Become Resilient and respond to failure well.
This was a big struggle for me. I was too afraid to fail in more situations than I could count. Just the thought of failure would sometimes have my heart racing. To fix this, I began viewing failures as learning opportunities rather than a reflection of your worth. This change of mindset helped me maintain confidence through setbacks.
In my pursuit of being more masculine, I discovered that I lacked emotional control in some challenging situations of the past. My results at the time were that I was rarely selected as a leader by friends, family, coworkers, etc. In hindsight, I don’t blame any of them. After much self-reflection, maintaining composure and strength in challenging situations became my focus. And while working in commission sales, I had plenty of opportunities to practice. Years later, I feel like a completely different person amid hardship.
Be respectable
As a man, you want to be admired and respected by people personally and professionally. Being held in high regard by your peers helps improve your quality of life and, in return, helps internalize your masculine energy. Here are some common ways to become more respectable:
Embrace Responsibility and Accountability
You must own your actions and decisions. Whether it’s at work, at home, or in social situations, it doesn’t matter. Being accountable and reliable is crucial when it comes to earning respect.
Develop Integrity
Your actions must align with your values and principles. Because if you can’t be trusted for your values, how can you be trusted for what others value? If your goal is to maintain or earn a leadership role, always showing integrity helps tremendously.
Communicate Effectively
Strong communication skills have greatly benefitted me in the past. Learn to speak clearly, listen actively, and confidently express your thoughts and opinions.
Give respect to the respect to earn respect:
Respect others based on the content of their character, not their background or status.
Develop Self-Discipline
You should practice self-control and discipline in many areas, such as health, fitness, diet, finances, and personal habits. Discipline will show maturity and reliability when you least expect it.
Present Yourself Well
How you are dressed and groomed tells the world how they should perceive you. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is rarely correct. Dressing appropriately depending on the occasion and maintaining good hygiene contribute to a respectable appearance.
Though respectability is great, reasonable boundaries are also essential. The ideal balance is between being kind and not being a pushover.
Develop leadership qualities
Leadership qualities have always been viewed as a top masculine trait. After working on some of the steps mentioned in this post, you should be better at leading yourself. Now, let’s talk about learning how to lead others.
Many ways to improve leadership qualities have already been mentioned in this post. Here are some ways to develop leadership qualities:
Leading by example
This ties into having integrity. Ensuring your actions align with your words is essential and builds people’s trust in you. Show that you are accountable, reliable, and responsible.
Develop Confidence and Competency
The more competent you are, the more confidently you will lead.
Assertiveness and Communication skills
To be respected as a leader, you must be assertive about decision-making and communication. Excellent communication skills will ensure that the right message is conveyed.
Take initiative
Proactively addressing challenges and finding solutions builds leadership skills. Knowing when and where to take initiative is vital. For example, you and an architect are tasked with creating a house. If you don’t know how to build a home, it’s best to let the architect take the lead and help out where you can. If neither of you is an architect, taking the lead may be necessary.
Learn from leaders and seek mentorship.
Study the habits and traits of successful leaders and mentors you admire. My advice is to start by studying people currently where you want to be in life or who have the qualities you want to have. You can learn by reading biographies, developing relationships with mentors, watching interviews, and observing what you want to know about them.
Develop Emotional Intelligence for Others
Being good at recognizing and influencing the emotions of others helps while in leadership roles. Reading the collective emotions of the group you lead may be the difference between having people who support you or not.
Great leaders are hard to find; therefore, they are highly regarded. I believe the best way to internalize masculine energy is to be viewed as a leader, personally and professionally.
How to look more masculine
Looking more masculine has a lot to do with public perception. I think it’s the most useful look a man can wear. Understand that life is about people because no one can survive alone. Building relationships with other intelligent and valuable people is crucial to getting the best out of life. The effort you put into your appearance helps attract the right or wrong type of people to your life. Here are some ways you can appear more masculine.
Physical Fitness and Diet
Appearing out of shape and overweight shows a lack of discipline, which isn’t perceived as masculine. Anyone can choose to start eating better and do more physical activity. Some people prefer to do more than others. Sure, you can do everything else that this post mentions. But without the physical fitness discipline isn’t evident, your masculinity may come across as not genuine. I’m not here to “fat shame” anyone, but to be honest with you, the reader.
The good thing about physical fitness and diet is that anyone can start immediately. There are plenty of well-qualified physical fitness and diet experts out there. Here are some things to consider when choosing a diet and exercise plan that gives you the results you want to see:
Assess your body shape goals
What type of body do you want? Is your goal to build muscle, lose fat, or both?
Research
What will it take to reach your fitness goals? Evaluate your fitness status and determine how much diet and exercise will be required. Don’t just look at it once; make a note of it and look at it frequently.
Create a plan and stick to it.
Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t believe in the modern shortcuts to weight loss and physical fitness. If you are serious about maintaining a masculine image, fitness should be a part of your lifestyle.
Evolve your plan as you evolve.
Maintain good posture and masculine frame.
If you want to be perceived as a man with masculine energy, having masculine body language is a no-brainer. Genuine masculine body language does require balance. I started with the simplest changes and found balance over time. Here are a couple of behaviors to be aware of when presenting yourself as masculine:
Posture
When standing, keep your back straight, shoulders, and chest out. When sitting, avoid slouching and sit up straight. These habits show confidence and strength. Meanwhile, slouching shows weakness, immaturity, and uncertainty. Also, taking up space instead of using closed-off gestures (e.g., folding arms, crossing legs, etc.) conveys confidence.
Movement
No more fidgeting or making quick, jerky movements. They come across as nervous energy. Instead, try deliberate and purposeful gestures often perceived as masculine energy.
Maintain an upright posture and with your shoulders back while walking steadily. Practice posture often to find balance. A great stride shows confidence, stability, and control.
Eye contact and Handshakes
Eye contact and a good handshake show that you are confident and attentive. Always have a firm handshake with a moderate grip. Maintain steady eye contact when speaking and listening. However, you may want to avoid staring aggressively.
Facial expressions
Facial expression control ties into maintaining emotional control. Yes, at some point, it is wise to address your emotions. But wearing them on your sleeve is not perceived as masculine. It shows the Chinx in your armor and the cards in your hand. Frankly, it shows everyone who’s a weak link. Instead, save those emotions for a confidential or private setting rather than a public or professional one.
Project confidence and control by keeping calm, relaxed, and composed facial expressions. Smiles also show confidence, but overdoing them will show you’re too eager.
Voice projection, clarity, and tone
Develop a voice that projects masculine energy by speaking with a deeper, steady, and clear voice. Avoid speaking rapidly or quickly, which projects a lack of control. But also avoid mumbling and speaking too softly or slowly.
Growing up, I was utterly oblivious to how much communication was non-verbal. For more time than I realized, I displayed poor posture and frame. Once I was aware of this, I vowed to make a change. Once corrected, I immediately noticed that difference when I met new people. I had a sense that my presence felt more respected.
Skincare, Hair Care and Hygiene
Healthy skin, hair, and good hygiene are underrated as masculine energy traits. Having a well-kept appearance helps with the social aspects of masculinity. Intelligent people can tell when a man doesn’t take good care of themselves. And you don’t want to be in the business of just impressing the dumb. Feeling clean and looking good boosts self-esteem, presence, and confidence. Here are some essential skincare and hygiene that any man can use:
Shower and Moisturizing
Shower daily using a quality body wash. After, follow with a moisturizer to keep your skin healthy. Use quality deodorant to stay fresh throughout the day.
Oral Hygiene
Brush your teeth and use mouthwash to ensure fresh breath and a healthy smile. Schedule dental office visits as needed.
Facial Skincare
In the morning and before bed, use a daily facial cleanser to remove oils and impurities. Use a facial moisturizer to aid skin repair. Exfoliate 2-3 times weekly to remove dead skin cells and prevent clogged pores.
Hair Care
You can maintain a neat appearance by styling, shaving, or trimming your hair and beard to suit your professional and personal needs.
Hydration and Balanced Diet
Drink plenty of water throughout the day to keep your skin hydrated from within. Eat a balanced diet rich in vitamins and antioxidants to support healthy skin.
Some of these suggestions (or all) may be things you are already doing. However, keeping up with these routines helps you maintain a well-groomed, masculine appearance.
Clothing, Footwear and Style
How a person dresses is usually a window to their personality and values. What would you like your clothing to say about you? Wearing well-fitted clothing that accurately conveys masculinity can boost your confidence in social and professional settings. It also shows a level of self-awareness. Here are ways that any man can dress to become more masculine:
Fitted-Clothing
A few things say, “I lack self-awareness,” like clothing that doesn’t fit. Don’t be that guy whether the clothing is too big or too small! Be honest with yourself when it comes to fit. Consider using a tailor to ensure the right fit on some clothing.
Choosing masculine pieces
Invest in timeless, versatile pieces like a well-fitted suit, crisp white shirts, dark jeans, and leather shoes. Choose solid-colored shirts and simple patterned shirts like stripes or checks for shirts. Darker colors, such as navy, burgundy, charcoal, and black, are usually perceived as masculine. In most cases, avoid wearing bright colors. Buy sturdy, well-made footwear like leather shoes, boots, and loafers. Also, investing in high-quality pieces rather than a large quantity of lower-quality items is best. Quality clothing not only looks better but also lasts longer.
Compliment with Accessories
Keep accessories minimal and tasteful. A quality watch and a leather belt can enhance an outfit without overdoing it. A rule of thumb, matching your belt and shoe color helps the outfit coordinate.
Final Thoughts
If needed, seek professional help for traits you can not fix alone. Hire a dietitian and fitness trainer for a customized diet and workout plan. If you need help with psychological and emotional issues, find a therapist who specializes in men’s issues. Finding mentors and camaraderie amongst other masculine men would also be wise.
I wrote this article from the perspective of what I know now about being a man that I wish I knew sooner. I’m a thirty-three-year-old male with no father or role models. As a child, I never knew another black man I wanted to be like. These and so many other factors made my masculinity learning curve very difficult. Some masculine traits came naturally, while others were suppressed or not there. Understanding why these missing traits are important helped me change my thought process.
I genuinely hope that it comes across that I have spent countless hours on self-development, for this information has saved my life. I also hope that this and other articles that I write help other men from being misinformed like I was. Now, I can confidently say that not only did I cultivate the best man I could be, but I also tried to help other men cultivate their masculinity.