Episode #10: An Honest Conversation About HSP Men and Modern Masculinity
A conversation with author William Allen on breaking masculine norms, embracing emotional depth, and creating space for highly sensitive men.
Welcome back to The Happy HSP Podcast. I’m your host Kimberly Marshall, and today I’m excited to share with you an episode I recorded with William Allen. He’s a renowned author, blogger, podcaster, and advocate for highly sensitive men.
In this powerful and timely conversation, William shares his experience growing up as a sensitive boy in a southern and conservative culture, and we also chat about how the expectations in our society in and around masculinity can impact the mental health of highly sensitive men. We dig into what happens when men feel the need to suppress their emotions, and how embracing sensitivity can build a path toward deeper healing — not only for men, but for every HSP.
William has incredible insight to share on the topic, and his words are deeply encouraging and supportive.
I hope you enjoy it!
Kim: All right, Bill, I am so glad to have you today, and I just want to welcome you to The Happy HSP Podcast.
Bill: Thank you. I’m glad to be here, Kim.
Kim: Yeah, I appreciate you joining me, especially with the topic that we’re going to discuss today. I’m so excited to dive into this with you because as you mentioned on your website and as I feel it’s something that needs to be talked about way more. But before we dive into that, I want to ask you first about your personal journey with high sensitivity and how you found out that you were highly sensitive and what that journey kind of how that led you, this journey, I guess.
Bill: Yeah, and that’s always a great question to start with because everybody’s journey is on this pathway of learning about high sensitivity and then learning to embrace it and so forth. Everybody’s journey kind of starts a little differently, but there is one thing I think is a common thread of people that I’ve talked to, and it was with me when I was younger. I knew there was something different about me. I think it just inherently, I wasn’t a typical boy, and I grew up in Southern United States, very conservative family, and boys were supposed to be a certain way. Girls were supposed to be a certain way, and if you get a little too emotional or whatever, you get labeled being too sensitive. So, the term attached itself to me when I was very young, and it was not a term that I was really keen on either.
I wasn’t really excited about being called too sensitive because the term had some pejorative meanings, especially for a young boy growing up in the south. So, it’s something that I knew inherently all along and I went through most of my adult life and I did not have a definition for what it was. Now, fortunately, in my family, a lot of the people are highly sensitive, so it wasn’t such an abnormal thing in our family or a lot of people that I would now consider to be highly sensitive, including my parents. But there was no definition for it back then. There were no books to read or how do you raise a highly sensitive kid or any of that stuff. So that just sort of followed me through life. I got into eventually got into a career and information technology at a big bank in the United States, worked that fully, really for my whole career, was an IT manager, very stressful job, and it really did bring out a lot of the things highly sensitive people considered to be challenges. You’re working in a very stressful environment.
It was one of those kinds of environments where you just had to do what you had to do. It didn’t matter how stressful it was or how overwhelmed or overstimulated you were or whatever. But the interesting thing is I went through life. I started looking on my own to figure out how can I calm my system down. And I think that’s true for a lot of highly sensitive people who don’t know about the trait is it’s a natural curiosity for us to see if we can figure out a way to make this calmer more peaceful. How do we get through these overstimulating environments that sometimes we find ourselves in?
So, I was doing that all along and became very much interested. I didn’t have a bachelor’s degree in psychology, I think in part because I was trying to figure out who I was and what I was like a lot of psych majors are.
But again, it was a struggle trying to get through that long period of time in my adult life not knowing exactly what it was. And it wasn’t until probably about the mid two thousands, the mid aughts, as they call ’em, about 2005 or 2006 that I found through a newsletter. I got a link to Elaine’s book, Dr. Elaine Aron’s book on high sensitive people, which a lot of people find out that way. They pick up her book, somebody recommends it, and this was recommended through a newsletter. I picked it up and I read the book, and I was about 50 years old when I picked it up. So I’d already gone through that part of my life that 50 below, just not knowing what it was When I read her book, everything in the book was me. Yeah, that’s me, that’s me, that’s me, that’s me.
A lot of people have that experience too. They say, oh, she described me to a T. But as a 50-year-old man and somebody was still working in that corporate environment and who had been indoctrinated for so many years on what it was supposed to be, what a man was supposed to be, and being sensitive and being emotional and not being able to handle stimulation and stuff like that, and the way I processed information as well was different. I just couldn’t accept that.
So here was the problem, right? I internally knew that I was highly sensitive. The book confirmed it, the book spelled it out for me. But the emotional part of me that had been told all of my life as a man and as a boy, that being sensitive, being emotional, not being logical, not being vulnerable were things that were traits for men.
And so, anything that I read in the book was kind of negate almost right out of the gate because I had been socialized to believe that that was not what a man was supposed to be. So, it took me about 10 years really to get to a point where I could accept it. I had retired from my work. I got to remove myself from that environment, and I started to write a blog I wanted to write all my life. It was one of the things I’ve always wanted to do. And I started writing this blog about highly sensitive. There weren’t that many of those out there at that time, and I had questions that nobody else was asking, particularly about being a sensitive man and those conflicts that I was telling you about. So, a couple of years into that, I’ve been writing this thing and really having a great time putting it together.
I decided I had enough material to write a book, and when I wrote the book, it wound up being two books. It was Confessions of a Sensitive Man, which is kind of my story. And then there’s On Being a Sensitive Man, which is the things that I learned over that time and how I coped with things and so forth, which is the basis of the course that I created this past year. So anyway, it got me to that point, and it completely pivoted my entire life because now I’m doing something, one that I love, something that is extremely interesting to me because it’s a part of me that I found to be unexplained to myself all the way up to that point in my life. And it also gave me an opportunity to help other people, especially highly sensitive men. So that’s kind of my career as a highly sensitive person in a nutshell. It’s from birth to nail. That’s how I got to where I am.
Kim: Wow. So, you mentioned you were retired, and yet you’re on this journey still working with men. In what capacity? How do you help highly sensitive men? You mentioned your blog, you mentioned your writings and your books. What other ways do you help men in that way?
Bill: Well, I have created a men’s group, an online men’s group, and I think the idea of this is to give highly sensitive men an opportunity to meet other highly sensitive men. Very often I found, and I felt this way myself, because we don’t openly talk about it typically until we discover it. It’s one of those things we just keep inside of us. And one of the things, when I first started the group, I kind of did a survey with the men to find out what topics do you want to talk about? Because this is a discussion group, it’s not a therapy group, it’s not a place for people to heal deep wounds and that kind of thing, but it’s an opportunity for men to talk about topics that are important to them. And one of those things, one of the most important things that they were looking for is fellowship.
They want to meet other highly sensitive men. And so, what happens is when we get together in our online meetings, we’ll maybe have a topic, somebody will bring a topic up and other men get to express how they approach that as a sensitive man or how they have been affected by something as a sensitive man. So, it’s in the sharing of life’s experiences that it actually does help validate the feelings that these men have about who they are. And in that regard, it’s useful. It’s helpful for them to be able to meet other guys that have the same trait as they do. And we’ve got men and members to this group that are all over the world. And what I have really found is that it doesn’t matter what country you’re from, it doesn’t matter your ethnicity, your age, or anything like that. Those experiences that highly sensitive men have are almost universal. They feel the same way across the board. So that’s kind of another exciting thing that these men are discovering.
Kim: It’s so funny. I think a lot of the research, well, A points that out, that 25 to 30% of the population has this trait, but that it’s split 50-50 between men and male and female. Men and women, half and half have this trait. A lot of the information I see out there is from women for women in support of women. For men who have this trait that aren’t familiar from the men’s perspective, what are the topics people that they’re talking about, what are the things that they’re kind of grappling with? Would you say that may be different from the female perspective, or is it the kind of same for both?
Bill: Well, here’s the thing. I had an opportunity with Randy to interview Dr. Michael Pluess, one of the leading researchers in the world on high sensitivity. And it was a point-blank question, what has the science told us about the difference between highly sensitive men, highly sensitive women? Is there any neurological differences or physiological differences between the two of them and shaping the experience of being highly sensitive?
And the answer was no. To this point, there has not been any research that said, well, women have a more pronounced amygdala than highly sensitive men do. There’s none of that. We don’t have any of that kind of evidence right now that says that there is a fundamental different way that they’re wired.
The big differences, and this is probably the most significant part of this, is a socio-cultural difference. Now, I don’t want to get in trouble with highly sensitive women because their experience is unique and also have challenges, many of which are shared by highly sensitive men.
But one of the additional challenges that highly sensitive men have is living up to the measurement of what masculinity is. And so that becomes, and because this is something that starts when you’re very young, there’s a man code slash boy code that boys have to follow. And a lot of that is contradictory to what inherently is true about highly sensitive people, the emotionality, maybe even the empathy, the way we process information and certainly our emotional reactivity to things. But if you’re shamed and humiliated for being that way, naturally, the first thing you want to do is kind of snuff that out, push it down, suppress it, and keep it hidden. So, it’s more about cultural things. Now, I would imagine some of the things that we talk about in the men’s group relationships, I mean, that’s a problem or an issue or a concern for both men and women.
So, they’re not really that different that way. But I think what the difference, the key difference is, is that highly sensitive men don’t process differently than highly sensitive women. What they do is they interpret it through that lens, that prism of masculinity, and they’re going back and forth with the struggle of, am I man enough? Am I manly enough? Because they do this, and it’s not something they easily talk about either.
It is a difficult topic for them because no man wants to say, gosh, I don’t measure up to the man code, so therefore I must not be a man. What does that make me? And so those are some of the things they talk about, but they talk about work, how work affects them, and the environment affects them and so forth. They’ve been talk about to some degree, we try to steer away from this, especially now, but politics and philosophy of life and things like that. But most of the topics can be fairly mundane: “How I interact with my partner? or “How I interface with my boss at work?” So again, it’s all through the lens of being a highly sensitive person and frankly, it’s from what I’ve gathered and what I’ve been able to see is pretty standard between both men and women.
Kim: Would you say that men may struggle with this label maybe more than women, or maybe it’s not fair to say? I mean, I would just assume that, I guess.
Bill: Well, let me give you an example. This is a really a difficult topic in terms of trying to find a solution to it. We know that 50% of HSP population is male, right? The question is, where do you find these guys? Right? Nobody’s walking around with T-shirts, say, I’m an HSP man, or have some marker biomarker that gives them away.
They can disappear into a crowd of people you never know. We have a lot of activities. We have a lot of things that we’re trying to get going with highly sensitives. And one of the things that I went to last week, I was doing a presentation for Jacqueline Strickland’s, HSP gathering on the West Coast, and we were trying to stir up and get more men to come to these conferences. The representation is not 50-50 when it comes to these kind of things.
Usually it’s much less. And we had, including myself, we had four men and there was probably 18 or 19 women to that ratio that we had there. And it’s become very typical of that. When you talk about doing meetups, you’re talking about getting people to come to talk about this highly sensitive men to talk about it. It’s a struggle to get them to come, and it’s sort of giving them permission to come to these things so that they can seen and heard, and we can count them sort of on a numerical type basis so that we can see more like that 50% representation that we know exists in the population.
So yeah, the “sensitive” word is for some men is the kiss of death. They do not want to be called that. And for them, it has had very powerful sometimes shaming and humiliating sort of emotional association with that term. So, they don’t really like it, and I think they struggle with that.
Kim: Right. Do you think that has any kind of repercussions on our culture? If there’s a portion of the population who is highly sensitive and they’re men and they don’t want to even deal with that or they push it down, do you think there’s any kind of…yeah, just kind of repercussions for that?
Bill: Well, here’s the thing that in the last couple of years has really been solidifying itself with me. I think highly sensitive men can be good role models for what an evolving masculinity could be like. We do express our emotions more often and probably more freely, even though within the restrictive constraints of the traditional masculinity code of ethics, if you will. So, it is an opportunity for us to lead the way and to helping to make masculinity, and this is another thing that I really like to emphasize more human.
We get so hung up on gender roles that have been around for, I don’t know, centuries if not longer, that are not reflective of the world we live in today. Women and men both are taking on roles that were not traditionally in those buckets years ago, and it does affect life. It affects the way we react to things.
So, I think it’s more important to understand that as men, the emotional suite that we have, the palette that we draw from is the same as women do. But the problem is we have restricted ourselves, and I’m using emotion because it seems to be the key thing here. It’s not the only thing, but it’s one of the key things is that we don’t allow ourselves to fully express that as human beings.
So, men are not allowed to cry. Men are not allowed to feel tender feelings. Men are not allowed to be intuitive. Men are not allowed to do some of these things that we typically associate in our culture with the feminine.
For me, one of the things I like to advocate for is that if we can evolve masculinity into something that’s more compassionate and kind and thoughtful and express to some of these, what we call classically feminine characteristics, which we all have both male and female, we both have masculine, we both have feminine energy in us. Then I think to your point about impacting society, I mean, if you think about it, a lot of the problems that we have can be traced back to hegemonic or toxic masculinity. Again, that’s not all men, but the idea that that principle that exists in our culture is one of the reasons why we have the problems, many of the problems that we have today in the world, and I think highly sensitive men could be on the front end of trying to create a sort of more balanced perspective on things that would allow for the feminine to be expressed in the male as well as the masculine in the female.
Kim: I love that so much. It’s almost like if more highly sensitive men were able to show up and show that there is strength in showing emotion, there is strength in being who you are and having compassionate tendencies that does show strength. I don’t know. I just feel like we need more of that in our society. To your point, when you say toxic masculinity, I just think of this idea of masculinity as being like, I don’t have emotions, extremely stoic. That doesn’t exist. We’re not going there. And it’s like we need more people to step up and show these depths. We are human. We have these emotions. We can’t just hide them or deny them. I feel like that puts us in more trouble than anything.
Bill: You’ve nailed it right on the head. I think because men are not allowed to express the full palette of emotions, there are consequences for that. One is an immediate health consequence. If you’re not allowed to express anything other than anger, you’re limiting your stunting, your emotional health, which is ultimately going to affect your physical health and your mental health. And it does. And men are paying the price in lives that are curtailed because of the health issues associated.
Kim: As are women, because we don’t have that strength in our men a lot because they just won’t even turn on that emotional aspect.
Bill: Yeah. Yes, it does have consequences for women and children and others, which this stifled emotional expression that we’ve given men sometimes manifests itself in violence, not only to people around them, which would include women and other men and children, but also to themselves. Suicide is a much bigger problem with men than it is with women. Even though women may talk about it more, men are the ones who actually do it. They talk less and they actually go and do it. So, I think the ultimate price that we pay here is a very conflicted internal sort of masculine energy fighting itself within a man that manifests itself in things that we see in society that are not good.
Again, I am not against men. I don’t want people to think that I’m against men. I think it’s the behaviors that we encourage in men that are the problem. When we talk about toxic masculinity, hegemonic masculinity, those are a small subset of all men that typically run things that usually run governments or corporations or whatever. They’re hard-driven people, but the balance to that is to allow the other men to be able to express themselves as full human beings. And again, it goes back to, let’s forget about this gender thing. For the moment, women are doing things they never did 50 years ago. Men are doing things that they would’ve been really looked down upon 50 years ago. So, the reality is it’s changed. We need to evolve what masculinity looks like, and I think in doing so, I think we benefit everyone.
Kim: So, what would you like to see highly sensitive men doing more of in the next, say, five to 10 years, and how would that kind of shift things for us as human beings?
Bill: Again, the first thing is they really need to come out of the closet, so to speak. And I think there’s three things that I suggest that every highly sensitive person do as soon as they find out about the trait, male or female. And one of those things is educate themselves about the trait. The more they know about the trait this happened to me, you start to realize that it’s not this, “Oh, we’re weak, we’re soft. We can’t handle stress, we can’t handle criticism,” et cetera, et cetera.
Until you start digging deeper into the research, you start to see the capabilities of highly sensitive people. A lot of people talk about as a superpower or gift. I look at it as that we’re specialized human beings that can see and sense things that other people cannot. It’s not magical. It’s just the way our brains are wired.
And that can be a wonderful gift that we can give humanity, especially men being able to express that so that other men can, even non-highly sensitive men can learn that, Hey, I have a degree of sensitivity. I can pick up some of this stuff as well. The other thing, and this is really, really important, is that we start getting to our young men and our boys and we start teaching them a new way of doing masculinity. Because right now we’re in a crisis, I think, with young men and in them trying to figure out what it means to be a man. And I think there are a lot of bad actors out there that are shoveling crap down their throat about what it means to be a man.
And most of it is misogynistic and can be very harmful, especially to females. We need to get on board with that, and we need to start showing, especially we can start with highly sensitive boys, but it needs to spread to all boys that we have an avenue for them to explore what masculinity can be and what being human can be. And I think those two things right there is we start working on the youngest ones, but also get the older ones to come to terms to with the trait and to be able to see it for what it really is. It’s a gift.
Kim: So, what is your struggle been with this trait personally? What would you say?
Bill: Well, I probably very early on it was the overstimulation and the overwhelm part of it, and with no guidance or no direction on how to deal with that, I had to figure that out pretty much on my own. And I did over the years. And again, like I said, I don’t think it’s anything innate about me. I think a lot of highly sensitive people go down that route and have to figure out some way or the other and how they’re going to go about it. But I think the biggest thing, honestly, Kim, and I think this is true for most highly sensitive men, is not feeling like we’re seen, not being seen, whether it’s about being seen by women or not being seen by other men, or not being seen by culture at large. Part of that is on us. We need to get out there and educate people about this trait and talk more about it and being more open about it.
But a lot of it is, I think trying to incorporate within ourselves those ideas about this thing being a gift. And one thing that I like to latch onto here is something that Dr. Elaine Aron talks about a lot, and that this is an evolutionary trait. It wouldn’t exist for a hundred thousand years had it not been useful, it would’ve been selected out and gone. It’s evolutionary in the sense that we may be that small portion of the population that sees that the bus is going off the cliff, and we need to be the ones who are the canary in the coal mine. We need to be the ones that are the wise counselors and sort of like, as Dr. Aron says, the priestly cast to be able to inform the rest of the population when it’s getting out of control, when it’s going into an unsafe direction.
So, there’s purpose behind all this. It’s not just that there’s a meaning for this because we have a definition now, but there’s purpose to it, and nature has built this into the human population and to over a hundred species of animals. So, it’s not just one off with humans, it’s out there everywhere, and it’s a survival tool. And if we see that, I think especially the men, if they can see that, yeah, there’s a reason we’re here, then I think there’ll be a lot easier for them and not so much to have to struggle with this idea, with these old pejorative definitions that people have given on given highly sensitive people.
Kim: And what would be your favorite part of this trait? What do you celebrate and enjoy?
Bill: Well, this is something that’s come to me recently is this idea that all the stuff that we have, all these things from the DOES model, depth, the processing and even the overwhelm has benefits to it, the emotional reactivity and the empathy and the sensing, the subtle, all that stuff is taking in information from the environment.
And so, what’s the output for that? What is the reason we’re going through this iteration doing this? And to me, and the best part of it all to me is the idea that we have awareness at the end of the day, that’s the output awareness. We know what’s going on in the environment. We have an awareness of that. There are 70% of the population may not see what we see, but it’s that awareness that we have. That’s the gift. Being able to share that awareness with other people to help them with their struggles or help the population at large, that to me is the thing that I think is the gift of high sensitivity.
And again, like I said, as you start to go on this journey and you start educating yourself, this stuff kind of slow rolls its way into your life, and you start to recognize, you know what? This isn’t so bad. I can figure out how to deal with the overstimulation because I read this book, or I watched this movie. Now I can take this process that my brain does naturally and create this awareness. And it could be creative awareness. You could be a great artist or a musician or even a writer or something, but it’s the awareness. That’s the gift. That’s the output.
Kim: And when you say awareness, what are you talking about specifically of the trait or?
Bill: No awareness of the environment around us. There’s two parts to that too, Kim. One is an awareness of how we are affected by the environment. So, if you’re in a bad environment, you’ll probably know pretty quick, especially highly sensitive people will do that. That might be useful information too. If you’re in a corporation and it’s a very toxic environment to work in and people are quitting, you might be the one who brings that up because you have noticed, observed and maybe even written it down, the other side of the coin on that, and this is I think less talked about, but really important is what our impact is on the environment, how we affect other people. So, if you go into a room with people and you’re talking to them and you say something, usually the HSP person is the one that knows, oh, “I think I may have said something here. That person looks like they’re not happy.”
Whereas there’s a whole group of people out there who can say things and not have the slightest clue that they’re hurting people, that they’re upsetting people. That to me is, like I said, one of the greatest parts of the awareness that we have is knowing how we affect other people. And that can be translated to what, let’s say, as a country we’re doing affects other countries or as a region or the people around it, or as males versus females or whatever. We’re picking up that information, which I think is vital. If you’re going to have an empathetic, compassionate, thoughtful culture, you have to have that kind of awareness. If you don’t have that, you’ll never know.
Kim: It’s almost like we have a heightened responsibility here.
Bill: Absolutely. I think so. I think so. And I don’t want to say that in a way that people feel overwhelmed by it as, “Oh gosh, now I got to change the world.” Now besides going to work every day, that’s not the idea. You don’t have to be on a national, international scale of what you do. You can do it locally, you can do it in your community, you can do it with your family. If you can help create more of this awareness that people need to start paying attention to, because we have a very interconnected world that I think is sufficient, and you’re doing your job if you’re doing that.
Kim: Love that if all of us did it in very small ways where we would be in a very different place.
Bill: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that’s ultimately the end goal for why nature put us in here in the first place.
Kim: Yeah. So, what would your advice be? I mean, specifically for highly sensitive men who may be struggling with joy and finding happiness as a highly sensitive person?
Bill: Well, I think the first thing is, especially when you first become aware of this, because obviously before that you’re kind of in a state of no awareness is to educate yourself. And it is the three E’s. I call it educate yourself, and I mean, read everything you can get your hands on about it, whether it’s a book about the trait itself or whether it’s about aspects of the trait or whether it’s written specifically for men or for women, or read as much as you can. Blogs, podcasts, YouTube, wherever you can get the information from. I would say this though, be cautious about some of the stuff that you’re reading. Try to stick at least initially with things that are evidence-based, factual and are true. It’s always nice every once in a while, blue sky out, and I don’t have a problem with that, but when you’re first learning, you want to have the best information you can get.
So, get stuff that’s vetted and certainly evidence-based. The second thing is that when you get enough of that information in you, it’s time to embrace the trait. It’s time to put your arms around it and say, Hey, whatever your name is, Mr. HSP guy, put your arms around yourself. Give yourself a big hug and say you’re okay, and there’s nothing wrong with you. And definitely embrace the trait. And the third thing that we need to do is execute on this. What that means is be yourself in the world, be authentic, be true to yourself. Let your HSP self be shown to the world, and in doing so, I think you will affect change and also educate other people. This is one of our responsibilities too, is to help people understand the trait. We’re not, I used to use the word evangelize, but a lot of people got put off because they had so many connotations, religious connotations. But the idea is we’re not converting anybody. We’re simply going to talk about the trait, whether they’re HSP or not, helping other HSPs get more acclimated. And then certainly telling other non HSPs who actually are much more open to it, if you present it to them wherever they’re at, I mean as far as their head is concerned towards the trait, you’d be surprised how many people will go, gosh, that’s the way my dad was, or my cousin was like that, or my mom was like that.
Kim: I find that people tend to think it’s fascinating and more interesting than anything. When you come out of the closet, people like to talk about it. They have questions. It’s interesting.
Bill: The way you present it too has a lot to do with it. You’re not being defensive. Be proud of the fact that you’re an HSP. Be confident about what you’re talking about. That’s where the education comes in. You’re not giving them bad information, and if you meet them where they’re at, there’s going to be some people that are going to go very tentatively into that.
Others will jump in wholeheartedly, but the idea is you’re supposed to be imparting information to them, meet them where they’re at. You’d be surprised, like I said, how many people will just, like you said, were fascinated by it or they absolutely know some ways an HSP, there isn’t a person on the planet, doesn’t know at least one person who is an HSP, and so you’re actually helping them understand that person.
Kim: Right. Incredible. Bill, what an awesome conversation. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you could just share really quick what you’re up to and how people can follow along on your journey, I would appreciate that.
Bill: The best way to reach out to me, and I’ve got it all kind of packed into my website, www.thesensitiveman.com, that’s usually the best place to start and find out what I’m up to because it has information on the classes that beyond being a Sensitive Man class, which is actually designed for highly sensitive men, it’s a 16-module class.
Jules DeVito is hosting that for me. And it’s a walk through a journey of how you can handle the challenges of being high sensitive, but it’s also a challenge to you, too, to look through that through the class and then to start thinking about how you can use some of these ideas. Or maybe there are other ideas that you want to be able to use, but we’re stimulated by what I had said in the class. So that’s one thing I’m doing. We mentioned the HSP men’s group that meets once a month.
You can go to the website. There’s a tab, HSP men’s group, and you can sign up for that. And we also have smaller pod groups that are all over the world or starting to be all over the world where you have six or eight highly sensitive men meetings and so forth, as opposed to the bigger meeting, which we have much more men going into.
I’m working with Randy Grasser co-hosting a podcast. We just started in April, and it’s starting to really build momentum quickly, which was surprising to both of us. But that’s called Men with S.T.Y.L.E., it’s on Buzzsprout. You can Google that and should be able to find the website for us as well. So, we have a lot of interesting guests, and we want to focus on that topic of highly sensitive men and how they interface. So those are some of the main three things right now.
I’m also working on a novel. I hope to get that finished this year, which is about a highly sensitive man on a journey, and I’m looking forward to getting that finished and hopefully getting it out and getting it published. So those are some of the things that I’m working on right now.
Kim: Bill, that’s amazing. Thank you so much for the work that you do. It’s so needed, and it was just such a pleasure to meet you today.
Bill: Oh, it’s been my pleasure to meet you as well, Kim, and to be on your podcast and good luck with this.
Thank you so much for listening in on my conversation with William. I hope it gave you a deeper understanding of what it’s like to navigate the world as a highly sensitive man — and how powerful it can be for all of us to give ourselves permission to be fully human.
If today’s episode resonated with you, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, or share this with someone who needs to hear these words.
And if you have your own story to share about high sensitivity, I’m always looking for my next guest. You can reach out to me on Instagram at @happyhsppodcast or send me an email at kmarshall@happyhspcoaching.com. I’d love to hear from you and learn more about your journey!
Until next time. Take care!
About William:
After a distinguished 30-year career in corporate IT leadership, William Allen transitioned from the structured world of finance and technology to pursue a new calling: unlocking human potential through the power of the mind. He founded BrainPilots, a pioneering hypno-coaching and neurofeedback practice in Bend, Oregon, dedicated to helping individuals optimize their mental and emotional well-being.
This venture marked the beginning of a deeper mission— one rooted in giving voice to the often-overlooked inner lives of highly sensitive men. What began as a personal blog quickly resonated with readers worldwide, evolving into a platform for advocacy, education, and community. William's writing led to the publication of two acclaimed books, Confessions of a Sensitive Man and On Being a Sensitive Man, both of which have become foundational texts in the growing movement to reframe sensitivity as a strength rather than a liability.
Through his website, TheSensitiveMan.com, William provides resources, insight, and community support for highly sensitive people. He leads a dynamic online men's group and recently launched an in-depth, self-paced online course — On Being a Sensitive Man — designed to help men understand, embrace, and thrive with their sensitive nature.
William is also the co-host of the podcast Men with S.T.Y.L.E., alongside Randy Grasser, where they explore evolving models of masculinity, emotional authenticity, and the lived experiences of sensitive men. He appears briefly in the film Sensitive Men Rising, further contributing to the visibility and empowerment of this often-misunderstood population.
Today, William Allen is recognized as a thought leader and educator in the field of high sensitivity, especially as it pertains to men. His work continues to inspire men to step forward with confidence, purpose, and emotional depth — redefining what it means to be strong in the modern world.
Follow along with William’s journey:
Website: www.thesensitiveman.com
Facebook:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wrallen/
Instagram: www.Instagram.com/zallenw
Let’s Connect:
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📩 Want to be a guest on the show? Reach out to Kimberly at: kmarshall@happyhspcoaching.com
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About Kimberly:
After 20 years in the publishing industry working for companies like Time Inc., Monster.com, and W. W. Norton, Kimberly Marshall left her corporate work to create a gentler and more nurturing career that better suited her as an HSP. After repeatedly struggling with burnout and low confidence in the workplace, she now helps HSPs create careers that bring them lots of purpose, meaning, and joy. With the Happy HSP Podcast, Kimberly hopes to shed more light on the reality of living with high sensitivity and inspire more HSPs to embrace their empathetic, generous, and loving natures.
Hosted/produced by Kimberly Marshall
Edited by Fonzie Try Media
Artwork by Tara Corola