What Are Core Values? | The Men's Work Directory

What values actually are

A value is not a feeling, a goal, or an aspiration. It is a commitment to behave in a particular way regardless of outcome or social approval. Honesty is a value if you tell the truth when it costs you something. Courage is a value if you act despite fear. Family is a value if you make choices that prioritize it even when other things are more compelling.

The distinction between stated values and lived values is where most men find the most uncomfortable information. A man who says he values his family but consistently prioritizes work is demonstrating that his actual values — productivity, achievement, or avoidance of domestic tension — differ from his stated ones. Neither is a moral verdict. Both are data worth attending to.

James Hollis's framework describes this as the difference between the provisional self — the values absorbed from family, culture, and early experience — and the authentic self, which has its own commitments that may or may not match the inherited ones. The work of maturity is discovering which values you actually hold and which you were handed.

Why most men haven't clarified their values

The cultural structures that historically provided values to men — religion, military service, trade traditions, ethnic community — have weakened without being replaced. Many men inherited a values framework through one of these structures and have not examined whether they endorse it. Others grew up in the absence of any coherent values framework and made their way by default.

Sam Keen in Fire in the Belly argued that most men have outsourced their values to their employers, their partners, or their cultural tribe — absorbed the values of whatever structure gave them belonging and never examined whether those values are genuinely their own. The result is men who know what they should value but don't know what they actually value.

The internal conflict this produces is real and costly. A man living by values that are not his own — performing the role of the person he is supposed to be rather than being the person he actually is — carries a background dissonance that has no obvious name. Men's work uses various language for it: the unlived life, the provisional self, the inauthentic existence. Clarifying genuine values is one of the primary interventions.

How to identify your actual values

Values clarification is not primarily a cognitive exercise. It requires attention to behavior — what you actually do — rather than to aspiration — what you want to do.

Useful starting points: When have you felt most alive, most yourself, most engaged? What principles, when violated, produce genuine outrage rather than mild discomfort? What are you doing when you look back and feel that you spent your time well? What are you willing to sacrifice for — consistently, not occasionally?

Bill Plotkin's approach through soul work suggests that genuine values are often discovered rather than chosen: they are what the soul has been pointing at beneath the noise of the provisional life. The wilderness work he facilitates creates conditions in which the habitual noise reduces enough for these deeper commitments to surface.

The myvalues.io assessment provides a structured starting point: a set of values organized into categories, with a process for identifying which are genuinely operative for you versus which you endorse only in principle.

Common Questions

Can values change over time?

Yes. Significant life experiences — crisis, loss, genuine success, becoming a parent, encountering death — often reorganize what matters. The values that organized the first half of life may not be the ones that should organize the second half. James Hollis describes this as one of the central tasks of the midlife passage.

What if my values conflict with each other?

They always do. Ambition and presence. Freedom and commitment. Security and aliveness. The work is not to eliminate the tension but to make conscious choices about how to navigate it. A man who knows his values can choose his conflicts. A man who doesn't know them is living his conflicts without understanding them.