Men may act strong, but it’s often a pretense. Connor Beaton, an entrepreneur and founder of ManTalks, an organization designed to bring men together to talk about themselves, wants to help fix this.

He offers details about his own journey: growing up in Alberta, Canada; his parents divorcing when he was still a toddler; and eventually learning “how to father yourself.”

Beaton’s book is practical, organized in short, digestible sections often followed by practical questions to answer. These questions are aimed at helping the reader uncover truths that have remained hidden. For example, in an early chapter, after discussing “absent fathers,” Beaton comes to “understanding your father’s pain” followed by “your father’s anger.” The questions then include “My father’s anger was…” “It showed up when…” “It was hidden when…” and “The impact it had on my mother was…”

Men’s Work is written with frankness and realism and shouldn’t be read by anyone easily offended by cursing. Beaton is honest about his own self-destructive past, as when he mentions how he used to bottle up the anger he was beginning to feel: “Drink — get fucked up — fuck someone up — find a woman — take her home. This was the pattern I used to deal with my inner rage.”

Those sentences in fact reveal a great deal about this honest book. A later chapter is devoted to “Embrace Your Anger.” And another chapter is all about “Illuminating Infidelity and Porn.” Many men need what’s in here and hopefully will stick with it until the end.

“Integration exercises” appear in many chapters, designed to get the reader out of the head and into the heart and to see clearly what is happening inside them. For example, Beaton wants men to realize when they are being reactive — which is usually characterized by “defensiveness, passive-aggression, feeling hopeless, shutting down, or aggressively criticizing.” Then he offers one of these exercises (filling a full book page) with a five-step method to catch themselves being reactive, noticing the signs in their behavior, then to hold themselves accountable, “shift[ing] attention from cognition to sensation (move the focus from thoughts to physical sensations and reconnect with your breath, deepening the inhale and extending the exhale).”