How To Be A Man: Honor

In today's episode of the Manhood Tribes show, we dive deep into the importance of having close male friendships that challenge us to be better men. 

Host Don Ross discusses the three pillars of Manhood Tribes: manhood, camaraderie, and freedom, with a focus on the first pillar. Don elaborates on the five marks of manhood: strength, courage, skill, honor, and allegiance, and particularly stresses the relational aspect of honor and allegiance. 

Through personal anecdotes and practical advice, he emphasizes the need for men to develop meaningful peer relationships to cultivate honor and grow as individuals. Don encourages viewers to start by spending quality time with other men and engaging in shared activities to build these essential bonds.

00:00 Introduction
00:41 How Manly Are You? Take the Quiz
01:14 Welcome to the Manhood Tribes Show
01:24 Exploring Manhood: Series Overview
02:12 The Three Pillars of Manhood Tribes
03:02 Defining Manhood: The 5 Marks of Manhood
05:11 Deep Dive into Honor: A Core Mark of Manhood
15:14 Honor in Practice: Real-life Applications
19:35 Building Honor Through Relationships
25:18 Manhood Challenge: Honor

#manhoodtribes #manhood #honor #howtobeaman

Want to know how you measure up as a man? Take our free quiz, called How Manly Are You? and learn how you can get better at being a man. Download for free at manhoodtribes.com/manly.

Transcript

0:00

When things get really tough in your life who are the two or three guys that you can call on to be there for you. Or maybe said another way. Who are the two or three guys who are consistently helping you to be the best man that you can be? If you're having a hard time naming some men to answer that question, then today's episode is going to be all about you. Let's dive in.

Don Ross: 0:42

Guys want to know how you measure up as a man? I've got a great resource for you. It's called how manly are you? And it's a free quiz that you can take to figure out how you stack up against what it means to be a man. And when you take the quiz, you'll also get some free resources to help you figure out how you can get better as a man in the areas where you would like to grow. So go to manhoodtribes.com/manly to download your free. How manly are you quiz today? That's manhoodtribes.com/manly.

1:14

Men welcome to the Manhood Tribes show. My name is Don Ross and I am your host here on the manhood tribe show. It is really exciting to be with you. And today we are going to talk about one of my favorite topics within the whole world of manhood tribes. If you have been following along with us, you know, that we are in a series that we're calling how to be a man. And this is really just all about helping to bring some clarity to the idea of what it means to be a man. Because as we all know, it's gotten tougher and tougher to not only be a man in our culture, but honestly just, just figure out what even a man is. How do we know if we're doing it the right way? How do we know if the guy next to us is doing it the right way? We've kind of lost our sense of how to be able to evaluate what a man is all about, why it's good to be a man and what we should do to make sure that we are one. So we're trying to address those things in this series. And we've talked about the fact that it manhood tribes. We have three big pillars that we talk about when we talk about these kinds of things. The first is obviously manhood. We need to give some clarity and some definition to what it means to be a man. The second is camaraderie, which just means that you've got a group of men around you who are helping you to become the best version of yourself to helping you become what we call an extraordinary man. And then the last one is freedom. You are going to need the means to overcome the major obstacles in your life so that you can be freed up to be the best version of yourself. Okay. So when you think about Manhood Tribes, you should think about those three things, manhood, camaraderie, and freedom. But in particular, in this series, we are talking about that first pillar of manhood. And how to be a man. And we are starting off by defining that along our 5 Marks of Manhood. We're saying that these are the things that all men should possess in order to demonstrate what it means to be a man. Okay. So there's been lots of different ways that different people have tried to define masculinity or explain that these are the roles or the virtues of a man. We're really trying to say that. No, there's just really about five kind of basic marks that if you look at men throughout history and all cultures, you're going to see these things kind of clustered around the men and those societies. So, what are they? The 5 Marks of Manhood are strength, courage, skill, honor, and allegiance. And the great thing about these five marks is that you can grow in each of them. That means that no matter where you are on the spectrum of what it means to be a man, you have some capability of getting better at it. You're not just stuck at whatever place you're in right now, but you actually can challenge yourself and even invite other men to challenge you to get better in those places. Now for the past few episodes, we have been talking about the first few of those marks of manhood. Strength, courage and skill. And in particular, we've kind of said that those marks of manhood really make up kind of the core of individual marks of manhood. And what I mean by that is that as a man, you can kind of work on those things on your own and get better at them on your own, right. You can grow and strength by going to the gym. You can advance in a skill by just practicing it and learning it on your own. It's better to do it with somebody else, but you are capable of. Of doing it by yourself and you exhibit those traits mostly as an individual. But as we round the corner to these last two marks of manhood, we do need to say that these two are inherently relational. You cannot develop in these marks of manhood, apart from relationships, with other people and in particular relationships with other men, those last two marks of manhood, our honor. And allegiance. And today we especially want to talk about the mark of honor. Now. This is probably one of my favorite topics when it comes to talking about manhood, because what we mean by honor here at manhood tribes. Is really different than the way that our culture uses the word honor today. So let's talk about it. What are we talking about when we're talking about the idea of honor? Honestly honor is probably the most difficult of the marks of manhood to understand. And that's because we use the word in a way that's really different from the way that the culture around us uses it. When you hear the word honor today. You probably hear people using it in a way that means something kind of like integrity. It means that a man has character. That he's a standup guy, right. We might hear it used in ways where people would say something like he's an honorable man. And that just means that he does right by people. For the most part, he does what he says he's going to do. He represents himself. Well, he has character. Right. And that's kind of along that same idea of integrity. Or we might use the word honor to save it. A man is something like noteworthy or significant meaning that he has been well honored in his life where he's received many honors. And this just means in this case, that honor means that you've achieved a lot, right? It has more to do with your accomplishments than it does with your character in that case. But still, this is not quite the way that we are using the word here at manhood traps. So, this is not what honor is really all about. What is it? What are we talking about? Well, we're using kind of an older definition of the word honor. And so the way that I want to talk about it is to say that. A man has honor, if he does right by his tribe. Okay. A man has honor if he does right by his tribe. Now I know that I'm talking about the idea of a tribe and we haven't really fleshed that idea out very much yet on this podcast. So let's just say a man has honor if he does right by his peers. Okay. This inherently means that a man needs to have peers in order to have honor. It means that you are doing right by the people. And in particular, the men closest to you. It means that you have a group of men around you with whom you share a set of values. And when you uphold those values, you are worthy of honor. And when you neglect those values, you are now worthy of dishonor. Okay. And so this is really the idea. It's about the fact that you've got a group of men around you. That group has a shared set of values, and you are showing yourself to be worthy of honor by upholding those values. So it's just basically kind of the idea of, as you spend time around your tribe, you sort of learn. This is the way that we do things. Okay. And that can be really simple. It can be as simple as like, if you think about a boyhood movie, like the Sandlot or the Goonies, right. Where you see this kind of pack of boys moving around together and the way that they play together or the way that they talk to each other, the vocabulary that they use, the way that they treat girls, the kinds of activities that they participate in, all of those are the kinds of things where you earn honor by doing like your peers. You're doing the same kinds of things. That they're doing and the way that they are doing them and that earns you honor with the group. Okay. That's what it is at just a very basic level. But we can say that it takes time to really learn these things. It takes time to develop honor, because you have to spend close time around the other men and your tribe in order to be able to learn what are the shared values that you need to uphold? I tried my say that this is the way that we treat women, or this is the way that we treat our family members, or this is how we use our free time, or this is how we talk. Talk to people who are different from us and who are outside of our tribe. All of those things reflect a value set that the tribe is trying to uphold. And if you will uphold it as well. You will be worthy of honor. The rhythm of honor is only learned by shared experience and close contact. Let me say that one again. The rhythm of honor is only learned by shared experience and close contact. It just takes time. It takes time to develop the kinds of relationships where, you know, each other well enough to know if you're being worthy of honor or not. Now. This is also why. Being worthy of honor, isn't necessarily about being a good man. And this is probably where the idea of honor within manhood tribes is really different than the way that we think about honor in our culture today. Honor in our culture today is really a virtue. It's a good thing. Anytime we talk about somebody being honorable, we mean that in a really good way, but the older definition of honor just means that you're doing right by the people around you. And if the people around you happen to be doing morally not so good things. And you're upholding that set of values, then you're not necessarily a good man, even though you might be high on honor with your peers. Okay. So like, We know the phrase there's honor among thieves. And it's kind of just that idea that even among a corrupt group of people, like, you know, a pack of thieves, They're still kind of a code of how they operate with each other. And so you could be, and have a lot of honor among that group of fields, even though you're a thief and you're doing some things that really aren't good as a man to be doing, but you do have honor. Okay. So this is why it's really important for us to understand that. Being a man is not the same thing as being a good man. And that's really where I think our definitions of manhood have gotten lost in our culture today is that they have tried so hard to emphasize what it means to be a good man that we've lost track of just what manhood is about in the first place. There are ways that manhood can go bad. That's true of anything in life. And so we don't need to just try to eliminate the definition of manhood by only focusing on how to be a good man. We need to understand what it means to be a man, even when we do it wrong. And in order to be able to understand how to do it right, and how to be good at it. Okay. So this idea of honor helps us get there. It helps us to see that honor is really important to manhood. It is important and necessary for men to have a group of men around them, with whom they are upholding a shared set of values. This has been true for men throughout all history and cultures, and pretty much every part of the world. Men have always lived in these small kind of tribes. Where they develop close knit relationships with the other men around them. And they shared their same set of values with those men. That is what honor is all about. Now as men, we sure do want to try to uphold really good things. We want our shared set of values to be the kinds of things that mold us and make us into good men. But just because you aren't necessarily upholding those kinds of things doesn't mean that you're not a man. It just means that the things you're choosing to honor. Aren't morally good. And that might make you a bad man. But it still makes you a man honor is morally neutral. It isn't good or bad. The things that we choose to honor are what make us good. But to help a little more with this concept. Let me give another example. So when I was in college, I was part of a fraternity. Now, if you're not in the United States and the idea of a fraternity is kind of a foreign concept to you. I'll just say that. Uh, during college, it is a way for men to join together and kind of a social club. So a fraternity is just for men, women have a similar version of that called a sorority. And it's really just a way for guys to be able to get to know each other, to make friends and as a group, to be able to do some really fun social things together. Sometimes that's with other fraternities and other sororities. Sometimes it's just the guys that are in your fraternity, but it's great ways of building some really good relationships. But the really interesting thing about fraternities on our college campuses today. Today. Is that they very often are known for the things that they are doing that are morally not good choices. So they're often known for in particular, uh, alcohol abuse, sometimes drug abuse, very often poor treatment of other women and taking advantage of them. And while this isn't always true of fraternity guys, it is the kind of thing that makes the news about fraternities. Just because this contend to be the kind of culture that young men on college campuses generate when they get together in groups and they don't have any kind of more adult supervision, right. This is what tends to happen. So you can see there that within that fraternity culture, there does tend to be a culture of honor. There are things that are tended to be upheld within that group community. And sometimes they can be really bad things like seeing who can drink the most or party the hardest or seeing who can be with the most girls, you know, whether that's and just dating relationships or pushing it even further into sexual relationships. All of these things can be upheld within the fraternity set of values. But in doing so they're not necessarily promoting a really vision of being a good man, but they are promoting what it means to be a man, because those guys have honor with each other. Even if they're not upholding a set of values, that's helping them to be good men. So that gives you kind of some context for what it looks like to really possess honor, and to have the kind of relationships around you where honor is a necessary and important and helps you understand why it's needed for being a man. Let me give you some examples of how I have tried to live out honor in my own life. And in particular with my tribe now, I realized pretty early on that having some close men in my life was something that I wanted to make a priority. And so I tried to develop that in different ways throughout my twenties and even into my thirties, but it wasn't really until my late thirties and into my early forties that I started developing this concept of a tribe and really understanding that honor was going to be an important part of that. That in order for us as a group of men to not only grow close to one another, but to challenge us to be better, we needed some ways to be able to honor each other for the ways that we were upholding our shared set of values. So one of the things that we have done as a tribe is that we have created manhood challenges for each other. Now, you know, about manhood challenges. That's a segment that we do here on the show that kind of gives you a way to be able to get better at being a man. in one of the 5 Marks of Manhood. So. Even in my own tribe, we do this on a regular basis. Now, early on in our tribe, we did something that was really fun. We haven't done this as much lately, but it was really fun to kind of start off our tribe this way. We actually, when we would do our manhood challenges, I would help kind of collect the results of those things. And whenever a man would pass one of his manhood challenges, when he would succeed at the thing that he was challenged to do. I would try to create some kind of just token or emblem as a way of being able to celebrate that man for passing that particular manhood challenge. So it might've been, uh, just a little wooden. Uh, peg or some kind of little emblem that symbolized the challenge that he had done a skill challenge or a strength challenge, or an allegiance challenge or something that just indicated, Hey, you have grown as a man in this way. That's a really easy way to be able to honor one another. But that can also kind of seem like some of the simple ways that we can do that. And while that's a lot of fun, I mean, what guy doesn't love collecting. You know, some kind of token to recognize his own achievements. But I think a more significant way that we have tried to do that is that over time as a tribe, we have learned some of what our shared set of values are. What are the things that really make us worthy of honor in our tribe? So those things can be even just as simple as like, Hey, we really value showing up to our tribe meetings. That's an important thing. We honor one another for being there consistently at our tribe meetings, because we know how important they are. We honor one another for doing well in our family relationships. That's one of our real values. All of us in my tribe happened to be married and have kids. And so we honor one another for doing well at being a dad and it being a husband. Those are things that are important to us as men. We also all happen to be men of faith. We're Christians who follow Jesus. And so because of that, we've placed a high value on not only just being a Christian, but in particular on learning to listen to Jesus. We practice listening to the voice of God. And in doing that, we have really learned to honor each other for not just doing that in our time, gathered together as a tribe. But also doing that on our own individually. That's, that's a part of our normal rhythm and walk with God is to be men who try to listen to the voice of God and put into practice the things that we hear him saying to us. So all of those are examples of the kinds of values that we have learned over time that we want to uphold as a tribe. And we try to honor each other by just affirming. Encouraging celebrating one another for doing well at those things. When we see that happening in our group. That those are the kinds of things that make us worthy of honor and our tribe. And it matters to us as men to be the kind of men who are worthy of an uphold those values that we show that we deserve the honor that our tribe gives to us. It makes us feel proud as men. It makes us feel like we belong. It makes us feel like we matter to those men around us. And we know that those men are going to have our backs because we are upholding the virtues that we have said as a tribe. These are the things that matter to us. So that gives you some idea of why honor is so important as a man and why it is really critical, especially for the idea of developing a tribe of men around you. I opened this episode by asking you who are the two or three men that you would call on to have your back when things are getting really difficult or who are the two or three men who are really challenging you to get better and become the best man that you possibly can be. Now. As you're listening to this guys, or as you're watching the show. I just want to say, statistically, probably your answer to that question is I don't know who those guys are, or I don't really have those kinds of men in my life. And I want to say to you, Hey that's okay. It's okay. That that's where you're at at the moment. Most men and our modern Western culture are in the very same place. I mentioned it often that loneliness is becoming the epidemic that is affecting men in our culture because very few of us have the kinds of relationships that we need, especially the kinds of male relationships that we need in our lives. We want to do something about that here at manhood tribes. And in order for that to happen, you need to understand that honor is necessary for you as a man, you are built to live as a man of honor, but in order to have that, you have to have other men around you that are going to see that you are worthy of the honor that they can give to you. You can't have honor by yourself. You have to have it with others. So what I want to do today. Is, I want to begin to challenge you to develop those two to three relationships in your life. Now, I know you might be thinking, I don't have a clue who those guys even could be in my life. How am I going to get started with two or three of them? I'm not even sure that I have one. And that's okay. If that's the place that you're starting from. That's really great. But I want to also talk to the guy who might be starting from the place who's saying, yeah, I've got two or three friends that like, if you know, Life really hit the fan in my, you know, in the things that are going on with me that I've got two or three buddies I could call on, you know, in the, in the state of emergency that I might be in. And I want to say, Hey, that's a really good thing. It's great that you have those kinds of relationships in your life. They might be old friends from college. You know, they might be just a guys that you work with. That's great. It's good to have those kinds of men, but I want to say that those aren't really the kinds of relationships where you are worthy of honor. Those are the, what I would call 3:00 AM relationships like when something really goes wrong in your life. And you're up at 3:00 AM in the midst of some kind of trauma or drama, or who knows what. Those are the guys that you can call to be able to bail you out or to help get you out of a really tough pickle. You may not have talked to them in years, but they're going to be there for you because of the shared history that you have, even though it might've been a while, since that history took place. That's okay. It's good to have those relationships, but honor is a present day thing. Honor is something that you cultivate with men in your life, in the present. It's not something that you just earned in the past, and you can hope to be able to call on. Now, even though you haven't talked to those guys in a really long time, Honor is something that you are cultivating with men who you're talking to on a regular basis. Today. Okay. So I want to encourage all of us to be able to look ourselves in the mirror and say, who are the two or three men that I have honor with today? Who am I worthy of their honor, and I am honoring them as well. If you don't have that. And most men don't. It's time to start cultivating it. So we're going to talk at length as we move along in this series and on this show about how you begin to develop that. But I would just say, as a start, if you don't have a way of developing those kinds of friendships, if you can't even think of who those men might be or where you would get started doing it, then it is time for you to find some ways of being able to interact with other men around you. Maybe that's your coworkers. That tends to be the easiest place where men develop those kinds of friendships. But if you don't have that in a work setting or the people that you work with, aren't the kind of guys that you would develop, those sorts of relationships. Then you need a hobby where you're developing relationally with other people around you. Lots of guys have hobbies that they do individually. They do them on their own. And why, I want to say to you guys that it's time for you to take your hobby out of your basement and find a way of doing it with other guys. Okay. So if that's fitness, if you're used to working out on your own it's time for you to join a type of gym or to do your type of fitness in a way that you're interacting with other men. Okay. Not just showing up to the gym with your AirPods in and working out, but there's other guys doing the same thing. You're doing just on the bench next to you and you never talk to each other. That's not what I mean. I mean joining some kind of gym or participating in some kind of fitness where you've got a group of people that you see regularly and you work out with them. That's the kind of group that you can begin to develop meaningful relationships with other guys where you can grow an honor over time. Okay. So that's just one example, but whatever it is, you need a hobby. You need a way of doing it with others. And that is the most natural place where you can begin to develop the kinds of relationships that are going to lead to honor. Now, we're going to talk more specifically about how you might do that in our manhood challenge segment that is coming up next. So stay tuned and we're going to talk about. Honor and our manhood challenged today. I'll see you then. All right, man. It's time for a manhood challenge here on the Manhood Tribes show. My name is Don. I'm your host, and I'm excited to be able to help you get better at being a man. Here at manhood tribes, we talk about manhood by using the 5 Marks of Manhood. Which are strength, courage, skill, honor, and allegiance. We say that every man needs to possess those traits in order to demonstrate what it means to be a man. And that he needs to be growing in all five of the marks of manhood. So today in particular, we want to talk about the mark of honor and how you can challenge yourself to get better at honor. Honor is really all about doing right by your peers. It requires you to have a group of men around you, who you are trying to uphold the same set of values so that you can be worthy of honor, and you can honor them as well. Now, most guys would struggle to have that kind of a group of guys around them that would be characterized by that sort of friendship. So what I want you to do today as a manhood challenge to get started in the world of honor is just to go to lunch with another man. I don't know. But I want lunch with a friend and I want you to is meant to help chip. So if you're with your work,