Last week I walked to a restaurant near my office to grab lunch to go. I was dressed the way I dress most weekdays: brown slacks, walnut brown loafers, a beige shirt under a brown vest, a green and brown tie, and a beige panama hat with a black brim and brown trim. Nothing unusual for me. Just Tuesday.

My head was somewhere else, though. I was carrying the weight of a rough day: people problems, office politics, a stack of paperwork that wasn't shrinking. I was walking back to work in a daze, barely noticing the block I was on, when a car slowed down in the middle of the street. The driver, a man in his forties, rolled down his window and shouted, "Hey, brother, you're looking sharp today!" I smiled, thanked him, and kept walking.

Thirty seconds later, it happened again. A second driver, also a man around the same age, slowed his car, rolled his window down, and yelled, "That hat is smooth!" I laughed, thanked him too, and finished my walk back to the office a different man than the one who'd left it.

The Weight Two Strangers Lifted

I've been coaching, training, and studying men for over 30 years, and that walk still caught me off guard. Two grown men, strangers to me and to each other, took five seconds out of their day to throw me some encouragement out a car window. My mood lifted. I went back to my desk and tackled the rest of that rough day with energy I didn't have an hour earlier.

Here's the question that stuck with me: why did that surprise me so much?

We as men don't do this for each other nearly enough. We'll talk sports, work, cars, and politics all day long. We rarely tell another man his tie looks good, that we're proud of him, or that he handled something well. Researchers Erica Boothby and Vanessa Bohns, from the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University, ran a series of studies on exactly this hesitation, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. They found that people consistently underestimate how good a compliment will make the receiver feel, and they overestimate how awkward it will land. The giver worries. The receiver almost never feels the way the giver fears he will. He feels seen.

That's precisely what happened to me on that sidewalk. Neither of those drivers had time to overthink it. They saw something, said something, and drove off. I felt it the rest of the day.

This matters more than it looks like on the surface. A study published in the journal Current Psychology examined men's friendship networks and found that men, on average, keep smaller social circles and fewer close friendships than women do. When that connection thins out, the risk of depression climbs with it. Researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad, whose decades of work on social connection are referenced throughout that study, has spent her career showing that isolation carries health risks on the level of smoking a pack a day. Add to that a separate finding published in the Journal of Adolescence: men who feel understood by the people around them are significantly less likely to spiral into loneliness and depression, and the men most at risk are the ones who feel like nobody's checking for them.

Our mental and emotional health matters just as much as any other man's. We were taught to tough it out, handle it alone, keep the vest buttoned and the tie straight no matter what's happening underneath. That teaching has a cost, and men are paying it in isolation, in silence, and in some cases, in their lives. A word from a brother, even a stranger, can interrupt that spiral before it starts.

I think about how many men are walking around right now carrying what I was carrying that day: a rough patch at work, a divorce, a diagnosis, a financial hit, a fight with their kid. None of it visible from a car window. All it took to change my whole day was two strangers willing to say something kind out loud.

Rise Above This

I don't know either of those men's names. I'll never see them again, most likely. But they changed my day, and now they've changed how I move through the world. I'm looking for more chances to be the guy in the car, the one who slows down and says something true out loud to another man who has no idea how much he needs to hear it.

Your move, brother. Who's the man in your life who could use a word from you today?