A 6-Week Live Training for High-Performing Men

The Margin

You built everything except the capacity to experience it.
This is where that changes.

6 Weeks· Live Sessions· Small Cohort· 15 Hours· Co-Facilitated
Free Essay

Why Time Is Running Out for High-Performing Men

The essay that names the operating mode, the margin, and the cost of what was deferred. Most men who read it say the same thing: "How does he know that?" Enter your details below and we'll send it straight to your inbox.

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Something has shifted. Not visibly. Not dramatically. But the distance between you and the life you're actually living has become harder to ignore.

Over years of adaptation, you built a default system. It was intelligent. It was necessary. And it followed you home.

It sits at the dinner table. It listens to your child talk about their day and scans for the problem to solve rather than simply hearing them. It lies next to someone at two in the morning and runs diagnostics on the relationship. It converts every human interaction into something to be managed rather than something to be experienced.

What was rewarded

Containment Managing emotional states internally rather than expressing them
Self-reliance The assumption that needing help is weakness, or at the very least an inefficiency
Provision Your primary value measured by what you provide, not who you are when the provision stops
Resilience under pressure Absorbing difficulty without visible effect — performing when the internal experience is strain, fatigue, or emptiness

What was deferred

Tenderness Genuine emotional range — the ability to be affected and let it show
Need The ability to need someone without it feeling like failure
Presence Being in the room rather than monitoring the room
Contact language Words that create experience rather than containing it — "I feel," "I need," "I'm afraid," "I don't know"
"Not broken. Not absent. Deferred — under conditions that made deferral the only rational response."

A structured descent from surface to substance

Experience first. Framework after. Each session builds on the last. Real-life homework between sessions ensures the work crosses from the screen into your actual life.

Foundation
Arriving Behind the Screen
You'll discover the gap between your professional self, your private self, and what you've kept hidden from both — through experience, not theory. Structured exercises surface the operating mode in real time. Then it's named — after you've felt it, not before. A personal commitment, witnessed by the group, becomes the throughline for all six weeks.
Foundation
The Cost of the Mask
The first honest accounting. What has the operating mode cost you — in your body, your relationships, your inner life, your sense of purpose? You'll speak directly to someone in your life who has been affected by the mask while the group witnesses. The first real emotional depth on camera. The moment you discover that being witnessed doesn't destroy you — it changes something.
Arrival — Turning Point
The Body Keeps the Score
The session that determines what follows. You enter through the body — where the tension lives, where the jaw clenches, where the chest armours. Body mapping reveals the operating mode isn't just mental. It lives in your physical structure. The Margin Call arrives as a name for what your body already knows: the moment when someone needed something the operating mode could not provide.
Descent
The Language Between Us
Containment language — the words that shut experience down — versus contact language — the words that create it. You'll learn the distinction, then use it live with the men you've been sitting with for four weeks. Naming what's real between you. Honest exchanges that prove honesty deepens connection rather than destroying it.
Descent — Peak
The Thing You've Never Said
The centre of the circle is open. This is the session the programme was built around. Spotlighted, witnessed — a man speaks the truth that costs something to say. The Withholding Cascade explains why it stayed unsaid. And the System Pushback teaching prepares you for what happens when you carry the truth home.
Integration
The New Position
You'll write the New Story: not the opposite of who you were, but its completion. The man you're becoming isn't a different man. He's the man who was always there, deferred. Public commitments. Concrete practices. Ongoing structures. One sentence to the room — the truest thing you have to say.

Three pillars

Pillar One

Old Story → New Story

Every man carries a narrative about who he is — assembled from conditioning, expectation, and the operating mode he built to survive. The work is not to destroy the story. It's to complete it. The New Story doesn't abandon the man you were. It finishes him.

Pillar Two

Language as Architecture

"I'm fine" isn't a feeling. It's a shut-down sequence. Containment words manage your interior. Contact words — "I feel," "I need," "I'm afraid" — create the possibility of moving through what you're experiencing rather than managing it indefinitely.

Pillar Three

Relationships as the Proving Ground

Transformation that doesn't show up in relationships isn't transformation — it's theory. The programme tests this live, within the group, before sending you into your actual relationships. The real test is what happens at the dinner table.

Structured. Demanding. Built for men who respect precision.

6
Weekly Sessions
2.5
Hours Per Session
10–12
Men Per Cohort
15
Total Hours

Live video calls, midweek evenings, 7:00–9:30pm. Cameras on. Gallery view. Small enough that every man is seen. An accountability buddy assigned before Week 1. A WhatsApp group for connection between sessions. Homework that sends you into your actual relationships — not worksheets that gather dust.

The work between sessions is the work.

Before you begin

  • Personalised welcome from Richard
  • Pre-programme questionnaire — 5 questions, 10 minutes
  • Lead magnet essay as pre-read
  • Group agreements: how we work together
  • Accountability buddy assigned and introduced
  • Brief technical rehearsal
  • Physical kit shipped to your door: journal, pen, candle, large paper, coloured markers

After the six weeks

  • Personalised message from Richard and Tim within 48 hours
  • Consolidation email with frameworks, vocabulary reference, integration plan
  • Monthly alumni calls — ongoing, free
  • Continued buddy partnership
  • Active WhatsApp community
  • Pathway to 1:1 coaching and The Rising Man Retreat

What this is. What this isn't.

This is not

Therapy or a men's circle
High-energy motivational performance
Spiritual bypassing or toxic positivity
An invitation to dismantle what you've built
Humiliating exercises or performative emotion
A room that treats you as broken

This is

A structured training with a specific curriculum and real accountability
Direct, intelligent, substantive — co-facilitated by two men who have done their own work
Practical work that shows up in your actual life and your actual relationships
An expansion of capacity, not a demolition of what exists
A room of men operating at a similar level
A beginning — with ongoing community and clear pathways forward

Two men. Complementary strengths. One container.

Richard Cuevas
The Rising Man

Creator of the operating mode framework and the Margin Call metaphor. Richard works with accomplished men who have built externally successful lives and are experiencing a growing disconnection between what they've achieved and what they can actually feel.

He delivers the core conceptual teaching, facilitates the deepest group work, and holds the primary emotional container. His credibility comes from having done his own work and from having sat with hundreds of men in the exact place you're standing now.

Tim Clements
My Mental Kitchen

Over 30 years in high-performance environments. Certified transformational coach with a foundation in psychodynamic psychotherapy and counselling. Tim brings the operational and systemic lens — he understands how the operating mode runs not just your personal life but your leadership, your team dynamics, and the culture you create around you.

He leads the somatic and grounding work, manages the accountability structures, and ensures the transformation survives contact with the real world.

Why two facilitators

One holds the man in the centre. The other reads the room. One delivers the teaching. The other watches for who's checked out, who's activated, who needs something that hasn't been said. The quality of attention doubles. And it models something these men rarely see: two men working together with complementary strengths, each trusting the other to hold his part.

A beginning, not a standalone event

01

The Margin

6 weeks of structured group work. The foundation. The vocabulary, the self-awareness, the relational capacity.

02

1:1 Coaching

Personalised, deeper work with Richard. Your specific material — your marriage, your children, your career inflection point — with the same directness and rigour, tailored to your life.

03

The Rising Man Retreat

Three days in woodland near Salisbury. A man who has completed The Margin arrives with the vocabulary and capacity to go deeper faster. The Retreat becomes the advanced experience, not the introduction.

04

Alumni Community

Monthly calls. Ongoing accountability. A growing body of men who have done the work and carry it forward.

Addressed directly

"I don't have time."+

One evening a week for six weeks. 150 minutes. You have time for everything that's urgent. This is important. The operating mode will tell you that important can wait. It can't. That's why the margin thinned.

"Nothing real can happen on Zoom."+

We shared that scepticism. What we've found is that Zoom creates a different kind of intimacy. When a man speaks honestly on camera, his face fills every screen in the room. The proximity is extraordinary. And it happens from your home, in your actual life, which means the work crosses from the screen into your relationships in real time.

"Is this therapy?"+

No. Therapy typically works with individual pathology over extended timeframes. The Margin works with a structural developmental gap — specific capacities that were deferred, not damaged — over a focused six weeks, in the company of other men facing the same gap. Both have value. They serve different purposes.

"Will I have to cry in front of other men?"+

You won't be asked to perform emotion. You'll be asked to tell the truth. What happens after that is yours. Some men access deep emotion. Others access deep clarity. Both are legitimate. The programme meets you where you are, not where it thinks you should be.

"What about confidentiality?"+

Non-negotiable. What is shared in the group stays in the group. Sessions are never recorded. No digital footprint. Every man agrees to this before the programme begins. The men in this room are professionals with the same concerns you have.

"I've tried things like this before."+

If it didn't work, the programme probably started from the assumption that something is wrong with you. The Margin starts from the opposite: you built what your environment demanded, brilliantly. But the building was incomplete. That's a different starting point, and it leads to a different kind of work.

"What will my partner think?"+

Some partners will be relieved. Some will be suspicious. Some will be afraid of what changes. All of those responses are addressed in the programme. Week 5 explicitly prepares you for what happens when the people around you resist the new version of you. This is not a reason to hold back. It's a reason to go in with your eyes open.

"Is this going to make me soft?"+

The men who complete this programme don't become less capable. They become more complete. The strength doesn't go anywhere. What arrives alongside it — presence, emotional range, relational capacity — makes the strength more effective, not less. The New Story doesn't replace the old one. It finishes it.

The margin can still be rebuilt

But it requires beginning.

Next Cohort
September 2026
Sessions
Wednesday, 7:00–9:30pm
Investment
£397
Places
Limited to 12
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