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How do we raise boys to become men of character, courage, and compassion? Suzy Shaw welcomes Boad Swanson, author of Great Souled Men, for a conversation about positive role models, healthy masculinity, and finding the balance between courage and recklessness. They explore the importance of letting sons learn from their mistakes, the lasting influence of mothers, and practical ways to build character. Boad also shares a powerful lesson from his father about what it means to be a good man: protect, provide, and preserve the relationships that matter most.
Boad Swanson is an author, entrepreneur, and father of four whose book, Great Souled Men: Reclaiming Aristotle’s Vision for Building Character and Virtue, began as a personal project for his sons, Ryner and Dane, as they approached adulthood. Inspired by his own journey of self-discovery and Aristotle’s philosophy of virtue and human flourishing, Boad offers young men a practical framework for building character, embracing responsibility, and living with purpose.
Boad is the founder and president of Salus Homecare, a healthcare services company serving Southern California since 2011. A former Ohio University football player, he has lived in Washington, D.C., Santiago, Chile, and Salt Lake City. He writes and speaks in English and Spanish and enjoys reading and outdoor adventures. Boad lives in Laguna Beach, California, with his wife, Kami, and their four children.
Learn more about Boad and Great Souled Men at https://greatsouledmen.com.
The information provided in this podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. Consult with a qualified professional for specific guidance.
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I think most parents’ goal is to raise good humans. It certainly was my goal. But as our boys grow into young men, what does that really mean? I mean, how do you help them develop character, purpose, and values they’ll need to thrive in the world and be good people?
My guest today is Bode Swanson, author of Great Souled Men: Reclaiming Aristotle’s Vision for Building Character and Virtue. Bode is an entrepreneur, husband, and father of four who wrote the book as his own sons were entering adulthood. Drawing on Aristotle’s ideas about virtue and human flourishing, he explores how we can help young men become men of character and purpose. Bode, welcome to the Mothers of Boys Survival Guide podcast.
Boad Swanson: Suzy, so good to be here. I’m so glad that you had me. I’m excited to speak to your audience. I really am.
Suzy Shaw: You know, I think all women and moms would want to have more good men in our world. So we’re vested in this. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became motivated to write a book. I mean, that’s a big thing.
Boad Swanson: I grew up in Columbus, Ohio. I live now in California, but I’m a Midwest guy. My family’s great. My parents are wonderful. They’re still alive, thankfully, and healthy, and still my best mentors and cheerleaders. So that said, I was kind of a rowdy boy. Drove too fast and was all too willing to court danger sometimes, or oftentimes.
And it wasn’t until probably, you know, after high school, after college, I moved to Washington, D.C. and was working on Capitol Hill. And I had a good life, it seemed, on the outside. I was prospering to a degree, but I was dying internally. I think that the accumulation of a lot of bad decisions through the years, which probably became bad habits, sort of caught up to me. And I’d become somewhat, probably melancholy, somewhat lost with regard to, you know, who I really was and who I wanted to be, where I was going.
And I kind of had, you know, this, an epiphany when I was 25. Someone had asked me a question that I really admired. And they said, “Bode, who do you, when you’re 75 and you’re sitting around, you know, your Thanksgiving table, who’s there? Who is that guy? Who’s with him? How’s his health? What’s he look like? Just paint me a picture of who that guy is.” And I’d never thought about it, really, in that way. I immediately had a vision, and I fell in love with that guy. It was me, you know? But it’s like, and I realized in that moment that I was doing nothing to get there, to become that man that I loved, that I wanted to be. I always kind of assumed that it would just, I guess, happen naturally, but it doesn’t.
And that’s the realization I came to, that it takes purposeful living. It takes hard decisions. It takes sacrifice. It takes work. And so I started turning my life more toward this idea of virtue. I was not a reader growing up, but I was blessed to have lived with a guy in D.C. just by a total happenstance who was a voracious reader who had a sparkling intellect and wit. And I just thought, I’d never met anyone like that. I just wanted to be like him. So I started really reading. And so at about the time that I was going through this change, I started shifting my reading more towards classics, more towards some philosophy, more towards the things that would help me become a better man. And it just made all the difference.
So fast forward, you know, 20, 25 years, and I have two sons of my own. I have two daughters too, or just wonderful, a little younger, but I have a 20-year-old son and an 18-year-old son, and I obviously love them very much. And counseling with my wife, I felt like if it was written down, there would be maybe a chance that they would absorb it more through the years, especially as they had developed ears to hear it or eyes to see it. So I wrote a draft, and it was terrible. It was unreadable. And I said, “Who would want to read a book from just some random guy?” Like nobody. So I kind of laid it aside until about a year and a half ago, when I stumbled upon Aristotle’s ethics. It’s called Nicomachean Ethics. And in his book, he talks about 12 virtues. He talks about flourishing. He talks about prospering and how we can increase the chances of us prospering and flourishing in life and increasing our chances of being happy. And I would add, increase our chances of being serviceable to our community, which I think is important for men.
Anyway, when I found this book and I read his virtues, the 12 that he chose, I just thought, “That’s it.” This is exactly what I wish I could say. I wish I was wise enough to say. So I use that as the foundation of my book, Aristotle’s 12 Virtues. And for every virtue, I decided that I’d tell a little bit of my own story and my transition, or just not too much. And then either a historical or a contemporary figure that kind of personifies the virtue or teaches the virtue well. And once I had the idea, everything just kind of flowed and came together. So that’s kind of where this all came from.
Suzy Shaw: I got the book. It’s really interesting how you have divided it up. And each chapter- here’s one on friendliness, the key to friendship. And then you have a deficiency, a mean, and an excess. So you span the spectrum. You hung your thoughts on Aristotle’s virtues. Did you have a virtue that you were, that especially spoke to you at the beginning?
Boad Swanson: Well, I think, yeah. The virtue that I think speaks to so many boys is courage. And that’s the first virtue that I address in the 12, is courage. There’s something so romantic, I think, to us as men about being the guy that helps, being the guy that overcomes fear to help the community or to help a friend or to protect our wife or our children. We dream about those things. And a fear, I think, that all of us have deep in our DNA is being a coward and not standing up when our name is called. And so what Aristotle is describing with that deficiency, excess, and mean, he calls the golden mean.
And so Aristotle does not say we have to master each of these virtues or become perfect at living all these virtues, nor does he present a standard and say, this is where you have to be on the virtue. He says that we need to find the balance, and we need to understand; we need to think about the virtue enough to understand the virtue when it goes too far and the virtue when maybe it doesn’t go far enough. And so, in our courage, we can certainly be so courageous or so determined to face danger and prove our bravery that we do something reckless, that we unnecessarily run into a burning building to save whoever might be there and only to find that there’s no one there. The building was just burning by itself. Or the deficiency, the other end of the spectrum, which is that we’re so cautious and we’re so careful that we’re not able to stand up and put ourselves at risk when a situation could actually use us.
So he encourages us to find that middle ground in each of the virtues. I feel like that is a much more attainable end than perfection. Balance feels reachable. It feels like it’s a lifelong pursuit that you probably never ultimately master or reach. But as long as you’re in this range and constantly improving in that range, as long as you’re in balance, I think that Aristotle would say you’re doing good. You’re okay. You don’t have to meet this defined standard, and until you do, you are not courageous, or you are not a good friend or you are not a just human or whatever. It’s just finding the balance.
Suzy Shaw: Well, and when the boys are younger, so your sons, I call that teen stage the Man Cub stage.
Boad Swanson: I love that.
Suzy Shaw: Because they’re looking you right in the eye, and I have to tell you, for a mom to suddenly have her little boy staring her right in the eye is kind of an awakening.
Boad Swanson: How so?
Suzy Shaw: Well, because men look at you. I mean, men are your height. And so to have your son suddenly be your height and then they get taller than you, and now you’re the shortest person in the family when that didn’t used to be the case.
So that Man Cub stage, they’re man-sized, but they’re still very much a boy, and they’re figuring it out. And then I call that last stage the Remarkable Transformation. So when you were talking about at age 25, you’re thinking, okay, there’s got to be more to this. You know, that light bulb moment, which really comes like a light switch turning on, also happened with my boys in their early 20s.
I’ve told my nieces and nephews and my kids that in your 20s, you have to beat your head against the wall. You have to learn the lessons. And there are three big ones in my mind. You have to live on the brink of poverty so that you appreciate money. You have to have your heart broken so that you appreciate love. And you have to be treated poorly in a job by a boss so that you understand what it means to have a good job and career. And I think you’ve got to let your children experience those things and come out on the other side. And so when you’re laying these virtues now on top of that, I find that very tangible and interesting.
Boad Swanson: I love all those. Yeah. I was hoping that you’d mentioned love, and I’m glad that you mentioned career. I wasn’t expecting that one.
My own experience with being treated poorly in a career led me to make a decision when I was, oh gosh, probably 20- probably around the time I was going through the whole transition.
I made a decision, and I would not advise anyone else to do this, but I made a decision that I would never create another resume again. I wanted to live a life in such a way that I could define. I would be my own boss. I would be my own, you know, an entrepreneur. Because I have, maybe, an independent spirit and a lot of boys are like this, probably and women too, that I just could not suffer the idea of being treated poorly. My parents didn’t treat me poorly. My mentors and coaches, I know, loved me even though sometimes coaches can treat you poorly, but you know it’s coming from a place of love. But in business, I found it wasn’t that way.
But I needed to go through that to develop my own sense of self and self-respect enough to see I’m not doing that anymore. I won’t subject myself to that anymore because I stumbled around. I mean, I’m 25, and still I have a decent job on the surface, but I’m still like, I left that career. I left DC at 25, and I moved to Chile for two years, and I got back from Chile, and I moved to Mexico for- I was kind of a wanderer, and I had to figure things out. And it wasn’t until I was probably 30 that I really, from a professional perspective, was able to settle down enough and build something that took some stress off my mom and ultimately enabled me to start a family. But it just takes us; we’re all different, and it takes us, we all get there in different times and in different ways and for whatever reason I needed to go, I needed to wander for a while.
Suzy Shaw: I think as a parent, giving your child space to figure it out is a gift.
Boad Swanson: So hard though. Now as a parent, I see my kids, I’m like, what are you doing? I have to remind myself, it’s okay. There’s a good foundation there. We have a good relationship.
It’s a little bit like this idea of catch and release and fishing. When you’re a young parent, you’re catching your kids from falling down. You don’t want them to hurt themselves. You’re catching your kids in their teen years from making really catastrophic choices in the car or with dating or with neglecting school. So you’re constantly in this catch mode, I feel like, as a parent. And then at some point, you just got to let go. You just have to release them into the wild and trust that they’ll be good and they’ll come back. They’ll come back for your advice.
My wife and I are starting to see a little bit like if we’re too, if we hover too much with our college-age kids and try to tell them what to do and they resist us. They don’t want it. They need to fail. They need to figure things out. And like in the same way I did. But with our older son, we found that he’s now coming to us more and wants our advice and wants our counsel because we’ve let go a little bit more with him.
Suzy Shaw: When you look at the young men today, what do you think is missing?
Boad Swanson: Role models. Role models. You and I aren’t going to solve this problem right now. But it feels like, you know, I don’t know if we can diagnose the why necessarily, but it’s so easy to blame everything on social media and AI, perhaps and just how connected we are as a society. But it feels like, at least with boys, what we admire, who we look up to anymore, are athletes; they’re entertainers, they’re uber-wealthy titans of industry or whatever. And we’re not, as a society teaching anymore or focused anymore on celebrating men and women of virtue. So I feel like with young men are so focused on perhaps falling into this trap of following the wrong type of role model.
Suzy Shaw: The manosphere, right?
Boad Swanson: For sure.
Suzy Shaw: There’s this hyper, which I’ve met, I find a little overwhelming, maybe concerning, you know, this manosphere of perfection, because I don’t think perfection is achievable. I think you’re setting yourself up for failure if that’s what you’re going for.
Boad Swanson: Well, and it’s also the manosphere is filled with a lot of machismo. And it’s filled with kind of this hyper, hyper machismo that isn’t necessarily, like, it’s a complex topic, right? Because there’s a lot of good, I do feel like there’s a crisis in America right now, and maybe worldwide, with young men. It feels like maybe in the last 20 years or so, or maybe longer, it’s kind of become a little dangerous to be a man. It’s kind of become a little dangerous to follow your instincts, to your masculine instincts, because society or the media or whatever will at times push those down. And so we feel like we have to kind of stay quiet or we have to stay in the corner. In the meantime, you have video games and gambling and social media and pornography, and all of these traps that men are falling into that are keeping us sedated. There’s no conspiracy in that. It just is what it is. I’m not saying that it’s by anyone’s design that this is happening to men, but it does feel like men are very sedated.
And when we do want to follow these instincts to lead, perhaps, or to be strong or to start a project or to rally our troops and let’s say, “Let’s go do this or that or whatever,” it can be received with raised eyebrows. It feels a little bit like in society right now. I think we’re getting better, but I think part of that is my generation of men. Maybe we haven’t done a good enough job at being those role models, at celebrating men of virtue and character, at reading those stories, or highlighting those stories, or pointing out the pitfalls that might exist by narrowing our focus on role models to athletes and entertainers and billionaires.
There’s good in everybody, I firmly believe. But what I believe more is the world needs men and women of substance and character and virtue, people who are willing to sacrifice, who are willing to not put such a focus on money or fame, who are willing to run into that building or to be the one that’s kind, maybe even at the sacrifice of their own financial well-being. If you want to be perhaps just, there’s a story I tell in the book that I just love.
My grandparents were Depression-era kids and were distrustful of banks and very frugal. They really valued money. When they died, my dad and his siblings, when they were kind of cleaning the house and settling all the affairs, they kept finding little treasures of cash and equally divisible denominations. There are three kids, and so they’d find $3,000. That’s a form of justice. They want to make sure that there’s a quality in the way that they’re taking care of each of their kids.
Then there’s another kind of justice that I’ll tell you about with this story. They had a garage sale to get rid of a lot of the things that they didn’t want to distribute amongst themselves. A woman had purchased something, had come back about an hour later, and inside the pocket of a woman’s wallet, she had found a denomination of money, a fairly large sum of money. She returned it, and she easily could have kept that money. Genuinely, no one ever would have known, but she would have known. It feels like those little stories; I don’t know that we tell those or celebrate those enough. Those are the little things that I think little boys and little girls, when they hear those stories, it means something. It meant something to me when I was 16 years old. I thought, wow, what a great gesture. What a great woman. I just think we need role models.
Suzy Shaw: Well, you know, parenting, it’s hard to think of something else that you do for 25 years, and it takes that long to find out if you were successful.
Boad Swanson: High stakes.
Suzy Shaw: I do think these repeat messaging, from little as they’re growing up to big and continuing as they’re in adults is very important.
Boad Swanson: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Suzy Shaw: As a mom of two boys, this courage versus recklessness occurred in my house with both of them. In my book (Mothers of Boys Survival Guide), I call my boys Ernest and Exuberance. And on the cover of the book, there is a photo of Exuberance because Ernest wouldn’t have done this, but Exuberance was literally jumping off a cliff, and it’s a very high cliff.
Boad Swanson: I love him for that.
Suzy Shaw: And, I discovered it on Instagram. Thank you. What should my reaction have been? I won’t tell you what my reaction was; I mean, by the time I discovered it, it was over, right? How should moms react when the recklessness is staring us in the face?
Boad Swanson: I’m going to get a little deep here. First of all, I would say, I would guess your reaction was panic and fear, and what are you doing? Your life is so precious. Why would you be so reckless? Why would you be so careless and like that? If you died, I would die. My mom just told me that last week.
So, I would say boys need that. We need our moms. Moms and dads show love in different ways, but looking back, moms’ care and concern and love and perhaps at times over-protectiveness is an expression of that love, and it means something to us, and it creates that balance. Because I would imagine that a lot of dads out there would just sit back and smile at seeing that picture and say, “I remember when I did that,” or “I’m glad that he did that because he’s pushing boundaries and he’s finding out what he’s made of and he’s overcoming fear.” So that’s the genius I think, behind having a mom and a dad. For those of us who are lucky to have had that experience as a kid or to provide that experience, because you get both sides of that.
It’s a little bit more complicated if you’re a single mom or a single dad because you have to maybe strike the balance on your own, which I don’t even know how I would do that, but it’s important to have. It’s important that young boys feel, “I can’t do whatever I want.” There are limits, and there are things that are naturally dangerous, and there are things that are actually dumb for me to do. That sensibility, I think, has to come from somewhere, whether it’s mom or dad. I think the power that moms have over their sons to shape and to mold is so big. It’s so important. We will hearken back, and my mom’s still living, so I don’t know how this will be when she’s gone, but we’ll hearken back to all of those memories, all the feelings, all of the confidence that was instilled in us, all of the guardrails that were instilled, and all of that will come back. It maintains a place in our subconscious and rears itself at appropriate times when necessary, and we need it. I am assuming you reacted with caution and alarm, and I would say you acted exactly as you should.
Suzy Shaw: I did. I will say that’s not the only time he jumped off something high. We live in the Annapolis area. We drive over bridges all the time. There was a point when he was in the car with me, and he’s like, “Oh, and I’ve jumped off this bridge, and I jumped off that bridge.” I’m like, “Okay, you can stop sharing.” (It’s too much.) I’m glad you’re alive. I’m glad that you don’t feel the need to jump off bridges anymore.
Boad Swanson: I like this guy.
Suzy Shaw: You can stop.
What do you hope a young man, and what age do you think is the best age, to read for a mom to give this book to their son? What do you hope they read and understand about masculinity that might be getting lost in that noise? We touched on that a little bit.
Boad Swanson: Honestly, Suzy, the way I wrote the book is to serve more as a field guide that you’ll come back to again and again in life as you want to bone up a little bit on, let’s say, the virtue of wittiness, which I can explain if you want, which is kind of an odd one, or the virtue of generosity or the virtue of temperance. At the end of every chapter, as I do my best to explain the virtue, I give a challenge. The challenge typically involves you thinking and writing, or thinking about your experience with whatever virtue, and then writing, looking for the extremes you’ve experienced in your life as a means to help you hone in on the mean.
So, I think at any age is good as long as it’s perhaps to avoid not expected that they’ll read it straight through. But if you say, “Hey, you had this recent experience, and maybe you need to think a little bit about temperance; maybe the kid drinks a little too much, or whatever.” So it’s an opportunity for you to teach and use that chapter as part of the teaching that you’re using as a parent, applying whatever tools you can to help them gain a greater perspective of whatever virtue that they need at any given time.
Suzy Shaw: I think one of the things for your book is the chapters are shorter and digestible, which would be helpful at least for my boys reading it.
Boad: Swanson: It’s an easy read.
Suzy Shaw: You mentioned that at the end of each chapter, you’re giving a challenge. So for a parent listening to this podcast today, what’s one thing we can do this week to help our sons build character?
Boad Swanson: I love it. The first thing I thought about this before, the first thing I would say, is I came up with three C’s. Okay, so the first thing is celebrate. Boys feed off of maternal love. You don’t know. We don’t show it, perhaps, because maybe we’re not as expressive or whatever. So celebrating means so much to these boys and has such a big impact on the development of their identity and their self-esteem and their confidence.
The other thing is to correct. We also need that balance. We can’t have parents who just tell us how great we are all the time. There has to be a level of heavy correcting and then teaching. This is one of the methodologies in teaching that I have found to be so successful when people have taught me. But the idea of correcting and teaching the why and then saying, “If you do this, this is the good that can come or this is where this ultimately leads.” I think for me, as a kid, developing a vision of why I was doing something and what good could come into my life as a result, then it kind of came full circle. Okay, well now we’ll do it.
Then the final C is let it cure. Let the medicine set. Let it bake is mixing metaphors. Letting your kids fail. Letting your kids struggle. Letting your kids, especially boys, figure things out on their own and develop the skill of problem-solving and watching. Maybe they’ll come to you and say, “Mom, I just can’t figure this out. I need some help.” Then, of course, you jump in. Celebrating, correcting, and letting things cure, I think, is what I’ve been trying to do, now even more so with my daughters than I did with my sons.
Suzy Shaw: The only thing I’d add to that is curiosity. I think as a parent, to question what it was that made you think that hitting somebody was the right thing to do? The curiosity of having that conversation, I think, is valuable.
Boad Swanson: I would say as long as the curiosity is genuine. Because if it’s coming from a place of, “Why are you so stupid that you would hate your sister?” then we’re defensive. But if it’s more like you’re saying, Suzy, it’s like, “I genuinely want to know what is it that’s a different thing.” I like that.
Suzy Shaw: So, Boad, this has been a really wonderful conversation. I ask every guest to share a guiding motto, something that a parent could say to themself as they’re in this character-building exercise. What would you advise? What would your motto be?
Boad Swanson: I would come back to catch and release. There comes a point where, and it probably happens in micro ways, even when our kids are young, but that idea of protecting and keeping them from harm and danger, balanced with letting them go and figure things out on their own, I think is a powerful concept that really can apply in a million different ways based on the age and the circumstance of the kid. So, I would say that.
But if I could add one more thing, Suzy. Thinking about this idea of the Manosphere, my dad said something to me that started to sound, this is probably when I was around my son’s age, 18 or 19, it started to sound like he was going to give me a platitude, kind of a trite saying about what my job is as a man. And then it turned into something that has been teaching me ever since, because I never hear this. But a man’s job, he says, is to, and this is what’s cliche a little bit, he said, “a man’s job is to protect and to provide.” I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he said, the third thing he said, I thought, wow, that’s different. He said, “preserve.” And I haven’t heard that much, but what he meant by it, based on the circumstance, was it’s my job to preserve relationships. It’s to preserve, in this case, it was preserve a relationship with my mom, because I was, I think I was at an age when I was starting to rebel a little bit against the teachings of my parents. And I think I’d probably said something that maybe hurt my mom’s feelings, or I don’t remember exactly what the circumstance was.
But that idea of masculinity being about protecting and providing, that’s easy. That falls right into these categories of strength and dominance and machismo. And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t protect, we should, but preservation is different. Preservation means it’s inherently not macho, it’s inherently not toxic, it’s inherently good and kind and selfless and sacrificial. It’s, I need to be mindful enough of the things that are important to me in my life, namely my relationships, that I act in a way, reach out in a way, nurture in a way- even men can nurture- that preserves relationships, that ensures the happiness and the well-being and the safety of those around me.
And if there’s one thing moms listening to your podcast might consider, it’s that idea of teaching preservation as a responsibility that we have as men. Because I don’t know that it’s necessarily inherent or instinctive for us. But if a good mom or a good dad can point out that, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Or like, like your job is to make sure that your relationship with your mother is sound. Your job is to make sure that your relationship with your siblings and your neighbors and people of the opposing party, political party, or people that have a different religious view than you. It’s a peaceful way to look at the world and to ensure that you’re maintaining and working to maintain, I’d say, working to preserve relationships that ultimately need preservation, that need our focus and attention. So I guess two answers.
Suzy Shaw: I hear you, and I will say, thinking about what you just said, one of the things that I’m probably the proudest of right now with my two sons, who are now 27 and 29, is that they, on their own, have interactions with their grandparents. Like they- one’s married, one’s engaged – they will go and take them out to lunch or go see them. And my younger son lives close to an aunt who’s 80, and they’re checking in with her all the time. And I think that’s part of that preservation. That’s not something I’m asking them to do. They feel that sense of responsibility to make sure that that generation is taken care of.
Boad Swanson: I love that your son is reaching out and trying to preserve those relationships. It’s really meaningful. That’s character. Eventually, his aunt will pass, and his grandparents will pass, but he’ll have that instinct to look in on and try to take care of or look after people that are meaningful to him and his community. And that could be neighbors. It could be his own brother and his parents, and it should extend beyond that. We all should be doing that. It would be a better place if we’re all more mindful of that virtue.
Suzy Shaw: Yeah. I agree. Well, Boad, thank you for joining me and talking about your book. Tell the audience where they can go to find more information about you and where to buy the book for themselves.
Boad Swanson: Yeah. It’s my website, greatsouledmen.com. And then my social media is at @GreatSouledMen, both for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. But we all, as you said, at the beginning, have a vested interest in making sure that our young men grow up to be good and strong and preservation-minded, let’s say.
Suzy Shaw: Yes. Yes. Thank you.
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