How To Be A Man: Allegiance

In this episode of the Manhood Tribes show, we explore what it means to be a good follower, focusing on the Mark of Manhood known as 'allegiance.' 

Host Don Ross explains the significance of allegiance in vertical relationships, immediate authority, big influences, and ultimately one's higher code or faith. 

Additionally, we discuss the 5 Marks of Manhood: strength, courage, skill, honor, and allegiance, and offer a practical allegiance challenge to help you grow as a man by supporting your immediate authority figures effectively.

00:00 Introduction
01:15 Exploring the 5 Marks of Manhood
03:17 Deep Dive into Allegiance as a Mark of Manhood
06:56 Immediate Allegiance: Navigating Authority Relationships
13:33 Big Influences: Recognizing and Managing Dominant Forces
17:42 Ultimate Allegiance: Identifying Your Core Values
25:32 Manhood Challenge: Allegiance

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

Don Ross: 0:00

It can be said of men that all of us are followers, but only some of us are going to be leaders. And I think when we hear that, that tends to be inspiration for us to try to become leaders. But if the reality is that all of us are going to be followers. We probably need to spend some time thinking about what it means to be a good follower. And today that's exactly what we're going to do. Let's jump into the Manhood Tribes show. 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. Okay guys, welcome to the Manhood Tribes show. My name is Don Ross. I'm your host. And we are going to continue our series today about how to be a man. Here at Manhood Tribes, we want to help you become an extraordinary man by building a transformational group of men around you. But in order for that to happen, we need to first be able to give some clarity around what it means to actually be a man. Because in our world today, that's gotten really confusing and really difficult. Some people even question whether or not being a man is actually a good thing. We of course think that it is, we think it's worth celebrating and we think we need to try to give some definition to what it means to be a man so that we can help all you guys out there who are trying to figure that out, who are trying to navigate our world and just make sense of the fact that you know, that you are a man or meant to be one, but you're not quite sure exactly how to do that or especially how to do it well. So we're trying to just put some words to that and help you be able to navigate, to navigate that conversation. So in particular, we have been pro for the past few episodes, talking about the idea of what it means to be a man by using our 5 Marks of Manhood. We have said that these are the things that all men need to possess in order to demonstrate what it means to be a man. And if you've been listening to, and you might remember that the 5 Marks of Manhood are strength, courage, skill. Honor and allegiance. Now last time we talked about honor. And when we talked about it, we said that the last two of the marks of manhood art, relational in nature, that means that you can't develop them on your own. You have to do them within the context of relationships and in particular with relationships with other men. And when we talked about honor, we said that honor was really about doing right by your peers or doing right by your tribe. The closest group of men around you. So honor is really kind of about your horizontal relationships, right? Your, your neck, shoulder to shoulder, peer relationships. But today, we're going to explore that last mark of manhood, which is allegiance and allegiance is really about your vertical relationships. It's about the people that you are under authority with. Okay. So we're really talking about your authority figures in your life here and how you learn as a man to be able to relate to them. I started off the episode by mentioning the idea that all of us are going to be followers and only some of us are going to be leaders. But the thing about being a man is that because all of us are going to be followers, we're going to give our allegiance over to someone or to some thing throughout the course of our life. And we need to learn how to be able to do that. Well. So let's talk up for a minute just about that idea. Why is it that we would say that allegiance is a mark of manhood? Well, traditionally, when you look throughout history and culture, it has very often been the men within a family unit or a village. Who have chosen to be able to give their allegiance over to someone. Now that might be a tribe chief. That might be a local Lord. That could be an army commander. You. It could just be your boss. It can be anybody who you're kind of choosing to give your, uh, your leadership over to someone else and saying, I'm going to follow you. And in doing that, it likely affects the relationships around you. So as a man who has given his, uh, allegiance over to someone else, it means that your family members are probably also going to give their allegiance in some shape over to that person as well. And at the very least your family life is going to be affected by your allegiance as a man. So throughout history and culture, and you can make your comments about this as you want to, but a woman's allegiance has traditionally been to the men in her family, around her, initially to her father, and then eventually to her husband, whereas a man's allegiance has been external to the family to some of the different just types that I just mentioned. So again, what that does is it tends to set up a type of cultural environment where allegiance is really important as a mark of manhood for helping to establish. Not only how the man is going to live and how he is going to be shaped, but even how his family and the relationships around him are going to be affected and shaped as well. So, this is why allegiance is in particular, an important mark of manhood. So for a man learning to choose and navigate your allegiances is going to be really important, not only to thriving for yourself, but also for thriving in your relationships, who, or what you choose to follow. Isn't going to just affect you. It's going to affect those closest to you as well. And what their lives look like. And if you do this poorly, it's not only going to go poorly for you, but it's going to have a negative impact on those around you. If you can't learn to be a good follower. Then the people who are going to be affected the most by that are the people that you are closest to your family members in particular are going to suffer because you won't be able to do what you need to do as a man who is trying to follow and give his allegiance over to someone else. Now. When we are talking about allegiance as a man, we need to really explore a few different areas of allegiance, because there's a lot to this idea as a mark of manhood. It's not just about like who your boss is, although that probably is important nowadays. Uh, in the modern age of what it looks like to be a man. There are several different aspects of allegiance. So we need to talk about a few different categories. The first that we're going to talk about is immediate allegiance. Okay. Immediate allegiance is that kind of thing of who am I immediately in allegiance to now as a young man growing up, that probably is going to be your parents, your teachers, your coaches, maybe a pastor or some other kind of authority figure in your life around you. But immediate allegiance begins to change as you get older and you begin to take on some of that authority and responsibility for yourself that those parents and teachers and coaches have been having in your life. And as you enter the workforce, your immediate allegiance usually becomes your boss or maybe some kind of a board of directors or something like that. Maybe if you own your own business, you happen to be in the weird place of being your own boss. And then you have to figure out what is your allegiance actually, to. Two. If you are your own boss, you still have to give your allegiance over to something in the way that you are running your business. Is that going to be all about your bottom line? Is it going to be about doing good work in your community? Is it going to be about serving those who are employees of yours? You've got to figure out where your ultimate allegiance lies in the way that you're handling, being your own boss. Okay. So all of those things have to do with immediate allegiance and we, as men need to learn how to be able to follow in those places. Well, Immediate allegiance also has to do with things like government and law enforcement. Meaning, can I be a man who follows the rules of the community and the society around me? Am I going to be someone who respects other leadership, or am I going to live with a mentality that says, I know what's best for me? And if the laws don't work with that, then I'm going to buck the system and do what I want to do. You can try to go that route, but more often than not, it's going to get you in trouble. And so figuring out how am I going to be a man who serves and lives under the laws and the law enforcement agents around me in order to be able to thrive and do well in my community and in society. So here's the question for you when it comes to immediate allegiance? How do you handle the people that have authority over you? What did those kinds of relationships look like for you? Let me illustrate a little bit by telling kind of a story from my own life. Okay. Now, as we have gone through these marks of manhood, one of the things that I hope you have been realizing about yourself is that all of us tend to be stronger or weaker at different places. And each of those marks of manhood. Some of us are going to gravitate more naturally to one or the other. And some of us are going to be weakened one or the other. That's okay. We're all built differently. And that means that our strengths and weaknesses are what they are, but likely you've got some marks of manhood where you're kind of naturally strong in some where you're naturally weak. For me, allegiance was one of those places where I have tended to be naturally weak. If you're familiar with the Enneagram, I'm an Enneagram eight. And that just means that I tend to, as a personality, I tend to be a challenger. I want to really try to come up with ways of being able to do things better and to improve the things around me, as well as improving myself. I want to work the best that I can. And I want the people around me to work the best that they can as well. Now, oftentimes that's a really good thing. It means that I'm a hard worker. It means that I like to do my work well. I like to get things done and I can be counted on to move things forward. But when it comes to authority relationships, especially in the workplace. It took me a long time to realize that. Not everybody's going to have the same mindset that I do. And especially not every boss is going to appreciate being challenged. When I think things can be done better than they're being done at the moment. So I had to get some feedback over time of hearing people say things to me, like. You don't seem to have a lot of humility or they're just some real sharp edges to your personality. I had a really hard time figuring out what this feedback meant because when I would talk to my friends, when I would talk to my peers or coworkers who were at the same level of the organization as me. They didn't give that same kind of feedback at all. They would say I was a good teammate. I was somebody who was easy to be around. I was fun and energetic. I was faithful and loyal to the people around me. All of those things sounded really good. And so I was getting really mixed messages about who I was as a person and what it was like to be able to interact with me. And after lots and lots of this kind of feedback over many, many years. I'm kind of ashamed to say it took me way longer to figure this out than it should have. But what I realized is that that negative feedback was always coming in the context of authority relationships. It was never showing up with my peers. It was only really showing up with my bosses. It was my bosses who were saying. Sometimes you're hard to get along with. Sometimes your feedback is a little too harsh. Sometimes the things that you say come across, like, you know, better than everybody else does. And so I began to realize that this challenger aspect of who I am made it hard for me to be seen as a good follower to the people that I needed to give my allegiance to. I needed to learn to not just be good at my work, but to actually be good at being under my boss. At supporting my boss and his, or her objectives and missions for what they wanted our teams to be able to accomplish and to do my work in a way that made them feel like they were succeeding as well. Took me a long time to figure that out. But in figuring that out, I realized, okay, This mark of manhood that I have been struggling with has made life more difficult for me. And in some ways it probably has cost my family over time in the sense that I couldn't really advance my career in some of the ways that I wanted to, because I had challenges in relating to my bosses. So as you can be, as you hopefully can see from some of that allegiance is really critical to what it means to be a man. It is an important. Uh, mark of manhood because it helps shape the way that we navigate our world. To be the best men that we possibly can be. We're going to have to be good at allegiance. We're going to have to learn. To follow? Well, this has been a weakness of mine for a long time, but hopefully something that I have really gotten better at, and I'm learning to be a much better follower than I have been in the past. Okay. So that's the first aspect of allegiance is this whole idea of immediate allegiance. But the second aspect that I want to talk to you about is what I would call big influences. Big influences. Okay. And so this just means. As men, one of our tendencies is that we can sometimes give ourselves over to big influences in a way that they begin to have a controlling effect on our life. And we now have an allegiance to a thing instead of just to a person. Now, this could take this, the shape of something really negative, like an addiction where you have gotten to a place where porn or alcohol or gambling, or you name it, you know, fill in the blank. Has gotten such a hold on your life, that it is no longer just something that you do on the side or something that you do occasionally. But it has become something that really has control over you. Even to the point that you might say you have given yourself over to it, and it now has your allegiance, you are serving that thing, whether you ever meant to do that or not. But big influences. Aren't just about super negative things like addictions. They can also be just things that become really common in our world as men. Any kind of major narrative in our culture can be something that you can give your allegiance over to. This especially is true right now for guys in the world of politics. Right? We see this all the time with guys who are caught up in the meta narratives of what it means to be a Republican or a Democrat, a conservative, or a liberal or a progressive or a green party member, or, you know, I mean, you name it, fill in your political persuasion in any Stripe that you want to. But the point is that it has become so easy to get caught up in following a certain political narrative. That that thing really becomes to dominate us. We think all the time about how politics is going in our world, and if it's going the way that we think it should, we feel favorable about how things are going and about ourselves and about our prospects in life. And if it's not going the way that we think that it should, then we feel really bad about that. Our conversations very often always drift to politics. If this is something. We have given our allegiance over to, but it doesn't have to just be politics. It can also be things like sports. We all know the guy who can't talk about anything but sports when you're around him. It seems to be the only topic of conversation that he knows how to have. He's on, you know, ESPN and all kinds of other sports sites all day long. He's probably taken up sports betting as a hobby because this just is his world. It has become his go-to thing. And because of that, it really begins to have his allegiance. He has dominated by it. He can't go a weekend without turning on some kind of sports channel or sports streaming network and watching whatever game is on. Even if it's not necessarily a sport or a game that he's particularly interested in, he. He just has to have sports going on in his world. All of this is signs that a big influence has really taken over in his life. And so this is you. I want you to begin to be aware of this, that this is something that has to do with you as a man. This is part of what it means to be dealing with the mark of manhood of allegiance you have, whether you intended to, or not given yourself over to something in a way that it has a controlling effect on you. And you are now following that thing, even though it may not be a thing that is actually worth following it certainly may not be a thing that is worth the amount of time that you're giving to it, because it's not only taking up your time, but it's probably taking the time of the others around you, who are constantly annoyed by the fact that you can't devote any time to just them. Without bringing that thing into the conversation or the relationship in some way. All of this is a sign that you are overwhelmed by a big influence in your life. Okay, so that is the second thing we talked about immediate allegiance. And we've talked about big influences. Now I want to talk about the third aspect of allegiance, which is really what I would call ultimate allegiance. Ultimate allegiance is probably the most important aspect of allegiance. And it is really all about how you are doing at following your God or code or whatever is really kind of the highest authority in your life. Whatever is the thing that you have kind of said, I want to base my entire life around this at the end of the day, this is how I make my major decisions. And this is what really is the driving force of my life. Now here's the thing. Every man has some kind of ultimate allegiance. Whether he realizes it or not. Now many of us as men of faith as I am, uh, I'm a Christian. I haven't hidden that fact at all, but I do want to be clear about it. It's easy for us as men of faith, to be able to try to identify what we think our ultimate allegiance is, or at least should be, we would say, well, yeah, this is my God. I'm choosing to follow my God. And because of that, all of the decisions in my life are really filtered through the lens of what does it look like to follow that God, he has my ultimate allegiance and as a Christian. I would say that Jesus Christ is the one who has my ultimate allegiance. I believe that Jesus is the man who is most worth following. And because of that, I feel really good about filtering all of my decisions through that lens and being able to say, is this something that Jesus would do? Is this something that he would want me to do? Is this going down a path that he would have me to go down? All of those are questions that are reflective of ultimate allegiance. But even if that's not you, if you're not a man of faith and you can't really point to something that you would obviously say, well, yeah, this is my ultimate allegiance. Well, then all that, that probably means is that you haven't spent enough time actually thinking about it. Something is actually your ultimate allegiance. You just might be unaware of what it is. It could be money. It could be that you have really decided that the thing that you want to follow after most in life. Is making money being successful and having enough to provide, and then some, for yourself and for the people closest to you. Uh, it could be some sort of ideology where you have said, I want to be a man who is known for this thing or this cause, or, you know, whatever. And you have really kind of put all of your eggs into that basket. And you filter a lot of your decisions through that lens. You know, like how you're going to spend your money, where you're going to live, how you're going to spend your free time, what kind of job you're going to take? What you're even looking for in a spouse or a partner, you know, that person probably needs to line up with you. And some of those ways. These are good signs, that this is some type of ultimate allegiance for you, because it is what you're filtering most of, if not all of your decisions and especially your big decisions through that lens. Now I do want to challenge you as a man that thinking through your ultimate allegiance is really important. You need to know what holds that place in your life. You need to know who that is and why that thing is in that place of ultimate allegiance in your life. Did you choose it willingly? Maybe it has gotten to a place where it's one of those big influences that actually has moved into the place of an ultimate allegiance. Because you've given it so much of your time, attention and resources, that it has taken a place in your life that has become overpowering. And maybe you never minute to be that, but it has become that for you. Countless men and our culture right now are living with some kind of version of their sexuality as their ultimate allegiance. Especially for young men, this can take the form of pornography and prostitution and, uh, just any kind of sexual encounter and engagement that they can manage to get the time for and have access to. This has really become an issue for all kinds of men in our world today who are trapped by an ultimate allegiance to their sexuality, and really saying that even their identity revolves around who they are sexually. And trying to figure that out and put a label to it or not put a label to it and make sure that everyone else knows that that's how they define themselves. This is in the category of ultimate allegiance. Everything about you circles around or becomes identified with that thing. So I want you as a man to actually spend some time thinking about that. I want you to figure out what is the ultimate allegiance in your life and should it actually be that? And if not, what do you want to be the ultimate allegiance in your life? What do you really most want to follow? And how can you take some steps to actually being a better follower of that thing? For those of you who are men of faith and in particular are Christians like me? I really want to challenge you on this idea to be able to say. Is your God is Jesus. Actually your ultimate allegiance. If you would say that you're a Christian, but you don't necessarily filter all of your decisions through what you think Jesus would think about that. Then maybe he isn't actually your ultimate allegiance. You might have other things that you are more loyal to or more Allegiant to than you actually are to Jesus. Just because you call yourself a man of faith doesn't mean that your God is actually your ultimate allegiance and that's worth thinking through as well. Can you justifiably say that the way that you spend your time, that the way that you spend your money, that the kinds of activities that you participate in that the way that you think about what you're going to make of your life and the kinds of things that you actually care about? Can you say that all of those things are really shaped by your faith? Are they shaped by your God? Are they shaped by Jesus? If not, what are they shaped by? And then you begin to realize, oh, I've got some conflict here. There's actually a conflict between what I want to say. My ultimate allegiance is, and the way that I'm actually living. And when you begin to realize that that's actually good, because now you've got room to grow. Now you can actually say, Hey, my ultimate allegiance is something that I actually need to grow in. I need to work on this and I need to actually work at improving the fact that. I've said I'm going to be a follower of this thing or this person or this God. And I need to better do a better job of actually living up to that. Okay. So I want to challenge you in that as men, to be able to say, take some time to think about what is your ultimate allegiance and how are you doing at actually following that person? God thing, code, whatever is in that fill in the blank spot. All right. So we've done a good job of talking through those three things. Immediate allegiance, big influences, and ultimate allegiance. And I hope you've gotten a really good picture of how important and crucial understanding allegiance is to what it means to be a man. We're going to deal with this topic a lot here on the manhood tribe show, because it tends to be one that gets really overlooked in our culture. But is one that is absolutely essential to understanding what it means to be a man. Now to help you grow in that area of allegiance. I want to be able to give you a man who challenged that you can take some practical steps with. So jump in with me to our manhood challenge segment, where I'm going to talk about what you can do as an allegiance challenge. I'll see you there. Men welcome to a manhood challenge segment here on the Manhood Tribe show here in our manhood challenge segment, we like to talk about how you can get better at being a man through one of our 5 Marks of Manhood. And those are strength, courage, skill, honor, and allegiance. And today I want to give you an allegiance challenge. Allegiance is all about the authority relationships in your life. And as a man, you need to learn how to follow well, the people who have authority over you. So I want to give you just a very simple challenge today, which is to do an allegiance challenge where you are going to support your boss. Okay. And what I want you to do is just figure out what is one way that you could support your boss or that person who is in immediate authority over you. What's one way that you could kind of do right by them to show them that you are a team player, that you are behind them, and that you are supporting them and whatever their missions and initiatives are at the moment. It could just be a simple conversation where you actually just tell them that kind of thing, or it could be a way of writing them a note, doing something that kind of displays that for them. Uh, treating them to some kind of special occasion or meal or any sort of way that just encourages them and reminds them that they have your support. Okay. That will be a great way for you to show and demonstrate your allegiance to the immediate authority, figure in your life and help you to be able to grow as a man who is learning to be a good follower and be strong in allegiance. Thanks for joining me for this manhood challenge. I look forward to talking to you again, next time on the Manhood Tribes show. I'll see you then.