Why Misalignment Always Demands Payment (A Year-End Reckoning for Men)

2025 didn’t break you—it revealed you.

In this powerful year-end solo episode of The Revolutionary Man Podcast, Alain Dumonceaux closes out the year with an honest reckoning for men who started strong, faced pressure, and were forced to confront who they really are.

This episode isn’t about perfection or finishing the journey. It’s about ownership, alignment, and the quiet transformation that happens when a man stops avoiding the truth and starts leading himself with integrity.

You’ll hear:

• Why misalignment always demands payment—and how 2025 collected
• How pressure exposes the cracks men try to hide
• The real turning point where ownership replaces excuses
• What it actually means to become a stronger man without pretending you’re finished
• How pain, when faced honestly, becomes purpose

If this year challenged your marriage, your business, your body, or your sense of direction—this episode will help you close the year grounded, clear, and ready for what’s next.

🎯 Your challenge: Identify one area where you’re being called to live with more integrity—and act on it.

👉 Ready to take the next step? Visit The Revolutionary Man and take the Integrity Challenge.

The strongest men don’t drift.

They decide.

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening Reflection On 2025
• 1:37 Mission, Mindset Shifts And Discipline
• 3:16 Unexamined Starts And Misalignment
• 6:00 Pressure As Friction, Not Failure
• 9:15 Ownership As The Turning Point
• 12:06 Becoming The Truer Man
• 15:11 Year-End Challenge And Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Welcome everyone to the Revolutionary Man Podcast. It's a show where men stop drifting, start choosing, and learn to lead with integrity in every area of life. And I'm your host, Alan D'Monzo. And as we get started to this episode for our final one of the 2025 year, I want to ask you a couple of questions. And the first one is who were you at the beginning of 2025? Really? Who were you? And who are you now after everything this year has demanded of you? Because if we're truly honest with ourselves, this year maybe didn't go quite as planned. You started with some goals and ran into issues with resistance. Maybe you started with some confidence and then you started to meet your edges. Maybe you even started strong, and somewhere along the way, life applied pressure to you. And so here's the truth most of us choose to avoid, and that is 2025 didn't break us, it revealed who we are as men. Today's episode is not about perfection, it's about progress. It's about the man who showed up, even when he was stumbling throughout this year. It's also about how pain, when we decide to face that honestly, becomes our purpose. If you've been tested this year, maybe through your marriage, your business, body, faith, your sense of direction, I'd really like you to stay with me because this episode is about closing the year as the man that you earned on this portion of the year. And so this isn't going to be a highlight reel, but I think it is going to be a reckoning. Today we're going to look at where you started, what tested you, and who you're becoming right here in this moment. Subscribe to the podcast and drop me a comment about one word that you would use to describe what 2025 taught you. When we get engaged, other men can find this message and they get an opportunity to start to do the work that you and I have been doing this past year. As this movement continues to grow, we're going to change more and more families, communities, and lives. Thank you so much for subscribing and doing that work this year with us. It's been a great pleasure. With that, let's get on with today's episode.

SPEAKER_00: 2:22

Yet the hunger still exists, albeit buried amidst his cluttered mind, misguided beliefs, and values that no longer serve him. It's time to rely on yourself for greatness. It's time to become a revolutionary man. Stay strong, my brother.

SPEAKER_01: 2:41

Welcome back, everyone, to the Revolutionary Man Podcast. My name is Alan DeMontso and I'm the host and the founder of our Band of Brothers Group mentoring program. We've established the challenge. We've also asked some pretty hard questions. And so now it's time for us to get into some mindset shifts, the systems that we're going to need to use, and the practices that have built discipline on a daily basis. Because we all know that a disciplined man doesn't have to rely on willpower. We know how fleeting willpower is. And so when we can build structure, that's going to carry us when our emotions start to fail us. So the first point I'd like us to look at is the man that you were at the start of 2025. Let's be honest, most of us didn't begin the year right. We excited, we set New Year's resolutions, but it did begin unexamined. And it's that distinction that truly matters in today's conversation. When we think about that, the weakness means that maybe we've lacked capacity, but that's not really true. Because if it was truly unexamined, then it means we had our power. We were just a bit out of alignment. And so it's a subtle shift for us to make. Most men started the year in a functional state, right? We were capable, responsible, and very productive. But underneath that competence, something was slightly off. It's why we fall off on our New Year's resolutions. It's why at some point, when we hit our edges, we tend to fall back to old habits. If you weren't necessarily falling apart, but trying to hold everything, it cost you dearly, didn't it? We could be strong at work and present enough at home, and maybe we were reliable to everyone else. But internally, where were we at? Were you tired? Did you become irritable? Were you disconnected from your own signal? Or did you get trapped in the noise of life? Here's the hard truth that most men just don't want to admit that we didn't have a motivation problem and we didn't have a discipline problem, but we did have an avoidance problem. And how did that show up? Maybe if you're like me, it showed up like this. This is just a season. I'll deal with it later or next time or next week. And when I think about it, other men have it much worse. See, isn't that just a changing perspective? It was the thing that was delaying us. And when we delay, guess what happens? Delay starts collecting interest. And what we were really doing was confusing endurance with our strength. And because you just couldn't carry all this load, because we kept delaying, it didn't mean that load that you were carrying was right. Just because we don't collapse doesn't mean that nothing is truly misaligned. Because misalignment doesn't announce itself loudly, right? It shows up so quietly, just little pieces for us. It shows up when we have a short fuse about life. In the numb evenings after a long and hard day's work. In the sense that we were living beside our life instead of in it. Maybe like an NPC. And so this is the part I really want you to hear clearly from me. That 2025 didn't arrive to punish you, but it did arrive to reveal you. So the pressure didn't create your struggle. It just exposed where you had outgrown your level of self-honesty. That showed up for me around June this year when I looked at myself and how I was managing my physical health. I made a decision to hire a professional coach to help me get on track because I knew that if I kept lying to myself and doing the I'll get better on Monday or I'll start again next week, nothing was truly going to happen. So I was completely out of alignment. And so when we can recognize that the year of 2025 truly didn't break us, didn't break me, but it did reveal to me where I was out of alignment. And so whether we like it or not, this is where real transformation begins. And so misalignment always is going to demand a payment. And in 2025, at least for me, I know it sent the invoice. And so that's going to lead me into our second point that I want to talk about today. And that's the pressure really exposed the cracks in my life. And maybe some of this will resonate for you as well. The misalignment is when that bill finally came due for me. It didn't show up all at once. It wasn't really dramatic, but it was persistent. And for most of us, the pressure didn't arrive as a total catastrophe, but it arrived as friction. The friction for me was leading a group of men in a theme this year of living with integrity. How can you lead others about living a life of integrity when there's one aspect that everybody can see and you know in your heart that you're not living with integrity? It doesn't mean that I'm trying to be the next Mr. Universe, but it does mean I can take steps to take better care of who I am. And so when we recognize that what used to work has stopped working is when we can truly create change in our lives. Maybe it was the conversations that you avoided, but they just kept coming back louder and louder. And maybe these were habits that you justified and stopped numbing the discomfort that you were having in your life. Maybe the pace that you had relied on stopped producing the same results. A lot of times for us men, we think that if we just work harder, go at it with more grit and determination, then things change. But that's how pressure truly operates for us. See, it doesn't just attack us what we're really good at and targets what we've been compensating for. And for some of us, it shows up in our marriage. Maybe there's shorter patience in your marriage. Maybe there was less presence, more distance started to creep in between yourself and your wife, yourself and your children. And always that is surrounded with more justification for it. I have to pay the bills, I need to go out and do the work harder. Yet we've avoided having the conversation and doing the deep work that is truly necessary. If you're in business, maybe there was the idea of more effort, but then you were getting fewer returns. The ROI wasn't quite as good. More control and started putting in more processes in place. But that also gave us less clarity on the direction that we were going. And so what looked like success on the outside, it was truly an erosion on the inside because things were starting to get unraveled. Just couldn't control everything. For me, it was truly starting to show up in my body. No, there was so much tension that I just couldn't find ways to release it. There was fatigue that sleep just couldn't fix. It was more about insomnia. I was lucky to get five and a half to six hours sleep on a daily basis. It can't function for a long time that way. And so the nervous system was totally on edge. It's also a big reason why we struggle to lose weight because when we're in a high stress situation, that cortisol levels never seem to come down. And so here's the assumption that many of us make, and I'm going to tell you that it's wrong. We think that pressure means something is going wrong. But pressure doesn't mean that we're failing. Pressure means the old way can't carry you anymore. That was a hard pill for me to swallow to recognize that what used to be true may not be true any longer. And so this is where men start to split. Some of us will double down on our control. We're going to work harder, stay busier, and then we're just going to get numbed out, just do it more efficiently. When others will do something far different. We're just going to stop asking. We're going to stop asking, how do I get out of this? And instead, we start asking, what is this exposing in me? Because pressure isn't punishment, it's about being more precise and precision. It's going to reveal for us where discipline replaced awareness, and where strength replaced intimacy, and where performance replaced our truth. Many of us realized that white knuckling life isn't going to be in leadership. Endurance without alignment isn't strength. And avoidance, no matter how refined, always collects interest. So the pressure didn't come to destroy you, gentlemen. It was here to strip you down and to bring to you what is actually real in your life. And once a man realizes that this pressure isn't leaving, then there's only one move left, right? And I talk about it lots, and that's about ownership. And so that truly leads me into my third point. And this is what I call the turning point. It's when ownership replaces all of our excuses. Because eventually, every one of us is going to reach that moment. It's not a breakdown and it's not a dramatic failure, but it is the reckoning. And it's going to be maybe that quiet moment where pressure stops feeling external and really starts feeling personal. This is where most men really get the story wrong for themselves. They think that the turning point is when life changes, but actually it's not. The turning point is when a man stops asking, why is this happening to me? And starts asking, What is this asking of me? That's a question that changes everything, doesn't it? Up until that moment, excuses still feel useful. You can blame it on the timing, the workload, the economy, your partner, your past. Pick your excuse. But when ownership arrives, all these excuses lose power. Ownership doesn't show up as confidence, it shows up as sobriety, a clear-eyed recognition that, you know what, some of these patterns are self-created. And some wounds are self-maintained. And some suffering is the price of avoidance. This is the moment we can realize that no one is going to come and save us, but no one is stopping us either. With that one realization, when I had that, then I realized that it's going to cut really two ways for me. It's first off, it's very terrifying. But on the other hand, it's also so freeing. Because when we stop outsourcing the responsibility, we can reclaim agency. Agency means we have control and the opportunity to make decisions in our life. And so that is when true transformation begins. I speak on a weekly basis with my fitness coach, and we were having this conversation, and really the idea of decision making was what do I want to prioritarize more? Do I want to prioritarize getting that workout in, getting my steps in, planning my nutrition, or do I just want to continue to wing it? It didn't take long to realize that I'm the one preventing the growth in my life. It's the decisions that I make. And so when I realized that it's freeing, more freeing to be able to make the decision to do what needs to be done versus making excuses. Life changed dramatically. And so this is where for me transformation trutely changed. See, it's not with a plan, although I had a plan, and it was not with a promise, although I did make commitments, but it was with truth. It is totally grounded in truth. And truth is where I've been hiding. It's probably where you've been hiding. The truth about where you've been dishonest with yourself, and it's the truth about the man that you've been versus the man that you respect. The part that matters most is that ownership doesn't mean self-attack that was challenging to get through. It's not about self-attack, it is about self-leadership. It's the moment we can stop trying to feel better and instead start to choose to be better. It's not about perfection, it's not about being public and posting everything on Facebook and Instagram, but it is about consistency. This is the line that most of us just never cross. The men that did do that in 2025 didn't escape any pressure, they just used it. And that's when the pain stopped being the enemy and it started to become the instructor. Once we accept our ownership, the question is no longer who we are, it's about who we're becoming. And that brings me to my fourth point. The man that we are becoming. Here's the truth. Most men, when they talk about growth, don't become the new man all at once. We become the truer one slowly. And that's exactly what began in 2025. We didn't wake up one day suddenly feeling healed and confident. What changed was much more subtle and far more powerful. We became aware, didn't we? We were aware of our patterns, became more aware of our triggers, aware of where we used to avoid vulnerability, discipline, and the truth. This awareness changes how we move, doesn't it? We still feel the pressure, but we must respond differently. We still feel fear, but we don't let it drive us. We still feel pain, we listen instead of trying to numb this out. Gentlemen, that is true growth. It's not loud and boisterous, it's not performative, but it is grounded. And we stop pretending that we had to have it all together. When we did that, we actually started putting things together much better. This is the man we are becoming. He's the man who chooses responsibility over resistance, who values alignment over appearances, who understands that integrity is not intensity, it's about consistency. You don't have to announce this big change. You don't need to prove it to anyone. It shows up in how we speak, it shows up in what we tolerate and what we no longer chase. You may not have completed the journey, but you did cross the line. The line between drifting in life and deciding. Between enduring and leading, between pain as a punishment and pain as purpose. That doesn't make you finished, it makes you dangerously honest. And that honesty sets the stage for everything else that's going to come next. Let me show you what that looks like. Not in theory, but of a life of a man who actually lived it. At the start of 2025, he looked like he was doing just fine. From the outside, his life was functional, respectable even. He handled his responsibilities, he showed up, he stayed busy. But inside there was a quiet tension, it wasn't a crisis or a disconnection. He felt like he was constantly carrying weight without ever setting it down. As the year unfolded, the pressure increased. Work demanded more focus, but delivered less performance. He felt quieter, but way more distant. His body stayed tense even as he rested. He tried to push through it, told himself that this is gonna pass. But none of that happened. Because the problem wasn't circumstances, it was misalignment. The more that he avoided truth, the heavier everything felt. And the turning point didn't arrive with noise. It came in a moment of stillness, a realization that the pain wasn't random, it was instruction. And so this frustration wasn't a flaw, it was his feedback. And for the first time, he stopped asking how to escape discomfort and started asking how to learn from it. That question changed his posture. He didn't need a new identity, he needed integrity. He started small and was honest. He told the truth where he'd been avoiding it. He owned the patterns he used to justify, and he chose responsibility over excuses daily. Not perfectly, but deliberately. Over time, something shifted. The pain didn't vanish, but it gained meaning. Pressure became guidance, struggle became structure, and purpose began to emerge. Not as a destination, but as a direction. By the end, 2025, he wasn't finished, he was forged. This man was me. And so the key takeaway I'd like you to have for today's episode is that the year is almost coming to a close. And 2025 really wasn't about fixing your life, it was about telling you the truth about it. You didn't become perfect, but we did become aware, didn't we? The awareness is the beginning of our strength, gentlemen. We learned that pressure is in the enemy, it's avoidance that's the enemy. We learned that endurance without alignment is unsustainable. That real power doesn't come from pushing harder, it comes from choosing more honestly. If you take one thing from this year, let it be this. You don't need to finish a journey to be a different man. You only need to stop lying to yourself about where you are. That alone is going to change how you lead, how you love, and how you decide. Your challenge is simple. As you prepare to step into next year, ask yourself one question, and answer it without flinching. Where am I called to live with more integrity? Then act on it. Not loudly and not perfectly, but for sure to be consistent. As this year ends, I want you to understand this. You're not behind, you are not broken, and you are not finished. You are truly becoming. The men who live with integrity don't wait for clarity to arrive, they create it. Through ownership, alignment, and through action. If you're ready to begin the next phase of your journey with intention, I'm going to invite you to take our integrity challenge. It's your first step toward aligning who you are with how you live. Just go to members.net and take our integrity challenge. Because the strongest men don't drift into the future, they decide. When you do that, life starts to change. Thank you so much for spending time with me this year in 2025. Whether that was through the podcast and actually joining our program, our programs, all the best to you in 2026.

SPEAKER_00: 22:15

Thank you for listening to the Revolutionary Man Podcast. Are you ready to own your destiny to become more the man you're destined to be? Join the Brotherhood that is The Awakened Man at theAwakened Man.net and start forging a new destiny today.