This 5-Part Code Saved My Manhood (It's In the Book)

Men, what does it truly mean to be a man? In this episode on the Manhood Tribes Channel, we explore the five marks of manhood: strength, courage, skill, honor, and allegiance. 

Don shares his personal journey and the challenges he faced in understanding manhood, leading to the creation of his book 'How to Be a Man.' 

Available for pre-order on Amazon now! https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Man-Masculinity-Brotherhood-ebook/dp/B0FPBPZL97/

This episode not only defines these key traits but also provides actionable steps for men to develop and embody them. Tune in to learn what it takes to live a life of authentic and impactful masculinity.

00:00 Introduction: What Defines a Man?
00:46 The Struggle with Modern Masculinity
02:53 Introducing the Five Marks of Manhood
06:21 Strength
08:32 Courage
10:03 Skill
11:20 Honor and Allegiance
15:36 Conclusion and Call to Action

💪 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

Men, if I ask you the question, what is it that makes you a man? How would you answer that question? And now I'm not just talking about what makes you a man physically, right? Not body parts, but I'm talking about at the soul level. What is it that makes you a man? Would you have an answer to that question? And even if you did have an answer to that question, how confident would you be in that? Answer that, yeah, that's the right answer. And not only that, it's the right answer for you, but that you think it's the right answer for men in general. That what it is that makes you a man is what makes other men believe that they are men as well. Now, I know that maybe sounds a little complicated or a little complex, but I think actually that's the question that we as men are wrestling with in our culture today. It has gotten really difficult to figure out what is a man in our culture? How do we males know that we are men? How have we lived or what have we done that has earned the right for us to be called men? Is it just simply by having male anatomy and showing up onto the scene that we get to be called men? I think most of us feel something intuitive in us that tells us, ah, there's more to it than that, but we're not entirely sure what that is. If any of that rings true for you, I want you to know that it rings true for most men. It certainly has rung true for me and in my early twenties, I was really wrestling with these questions very significantly. What does it mean to be a man? Am I a man? How would I know if I am one? How do you define what it means to be a. All of these questions have gotten really unclear in our culture, and it from the time of my twenties to where I am now in my forties, it's only gotten more confusing in our world. The whole idea of gender and of masculinity in particular are things that have gotten very vague, have gotten very fluid. When it comes to masculinity, have maybe even become very negative to even think about identifying that way or proclaiming yourself as that sometimes looked down upon or frowned on, or made for you to feel something shameful because that's how you think of yourself. All of that makes it really difficult for us as men to actually figure out what does it mean to be a man and how do we live as men in a way that feels both authentic and helpful to the world around us. My name's Don Ross, and here we are on the Manhood Tribes Channel and I have some really exciting news, which is that I have written a book called How to Be a Man, and this book is meant to help us try to answer some of those questions to together, to be able to give us something of a roadmap to figuring out what does it mean to be a man. To give us a vision of strong and healthy masculinity and point us in how to actually be able to get there. Because I'll tell you what, guys, when I was in my twenties, I'm wrestling significantly with those questions. I was having a hard time finding the answers. I didn't know who to turn to. I didn't really have a model for what I wanted to look like as a man, and so I wasn't sure what direction I needed to head in to be able to actually make that happen. So I just started doing what I could. I read a bunch of books that were written about manhood and masculinity. I watched a bunch of movies that guys really love and tried to figure out what is, or what are those movies saying about being men? And I just started talking to a whole lot of men. I asked guys my age and guys older than me, what it meant to be a man in their minds. And I got honestly a lot of different answers. But I did start to see some themes emerge. I started to see some commonalities, both from the ways that guys around me talked, but also in stories and histories, the ways that guys had kind of always talked, the things they talked about, the ways they lived, the kinds of relationships and interactions that they had, not only with just the culture at large, but especially with other men around them, the men that they were close to, and why they chose to be close to those men. What was it about those relationships that helped them be able to step into manhood within their realm and feel confident that they belonged as men? These are the things that I was really hungry for and that I think our culture is hungry for as well. And what emerged from all of that study and research and question asking and conversation was what I have now written about in this book that I call the Five Marks of Manhood. Now, if you followed along on this channel at all, you know that we talk about the five marks of manhood regularly, but I don't always get to go in depth into the five marks of manhood in every episode here on the channel. And so that's one of the great things about this book is that it gives me an opportunity to discuss with you what these marks of manhood really are and what they're all about and why they present to us a picture of manhood that is worth following. So let me very briefly lay out to you what those five marks of manhood are, and then we're gonna talk a little bit more about them so that I can give you some information that you'll find. Uh, some of it's in the book, but not all of it is. And so I want to tease you to be able to get to a place where you would say, yeah, I need more of that. The five marks of manhood are strength, courage, skill. Honor and allegiance. These are the traits that I believe every man should possess in order to demonstrate what it means to be a man. In other words, you should have those things within yourself so that you can live them out in a way that other people see from you. Oh, yeah, that's what it means to be a man. He does those things. Strength, courage, skill, honor, and allegiance. He does them in a way that demonstrates, he is a. man Now let's take a little bit more of a deep dive into each of those things. Strength. When I'm talking about strength as a mark of manhood, I'm particularly talking about physical strength, although I know there's other forms of strength as well, but. Physical strength is something that is really at the core of what it means to be a man. Our bodies are built for strength, and there's something about the essence of a man that involves using our bodies to be able to do something that we once couldn't do, to push ourself to a limit and to surpass that limit to see how we are capable of overcoming challenges in the world by using our physical strength. This is at the heart of what it means to be a man. And our physical strength is meant to be for good. It's meant to be offered to the world in a way that helps others. Men show up in the world by being strong and by using our strength for the benefit of the world around us. This is the essence of what being a man is all about, and all of the other marks of manhood flow out of this idea of strength. So that's the perfect place to start. It's also the easiest mark of manhood to be able to work on. One of the great things about the marks of manhood is that we can get better at all of them. You're not stuck at the place where you're starting from today in any of them, and just because you might feel maybe a little bit unmanly in a certain area, maybe particularly in the area of strength, doesn't mean that you can't do anything about it. Are you gonna be the world's strongest man one day? Probably not, but that's not what the mark of manhood of strength is all about. It's not about being stronger than other men. It's about using your strength for the benefit of others around you. So you've got to be cultivating that strength so that you have something to actually offer and getting stronger. Getting better at strength is actually not that hard for men to do. Like I said, our bodies are built for it, and so if you can push yourself just a little bit, your strength will naturally improve. The second mark is the mark of courage. Courage isn't about having no fear. It's about actually showing up in the face of our fears and trying to move towards those things in a way that we can overcome them. So courage is really about a posture and a movement. It's about saying I'm not going to back down from the things that scare me, from the things that intimidate me, from the things that feel maybe overwhelming or too big of a challenge. In fact, I'm going to stand up to those things and figure out how to move towards them. And in doing that as a man, I start to learn that. I actually can overcome some things that my courage is meant to assist me in being able to accomplish the things in life that are really worth accomplishing. Whether that's actually, uh, facing up to some kind of threat or something that's imposing or intimidating and being able to say, Hey, no, you don't get to take advantage of me. Or whether it's something more like. Going into a relational depth with someone that you want to go closer with, and realizing you don't really know what to do there, but you're gonna venture into that territory anyway. That can feel really scary for most men to do. But building those kinds of close relationships, whether it's with a woman or whether it's with close other male friends, those things are really valuable in a man's life. So summoning the courage to be able to do that is really important. The third mark of manhood is skill. Skill is really all about learning to be able to do things well. That can be simple things like, you know, driving a car or fixing a leaky faucet, or it can be much more complex. Things like running, learning how to run an organization, or how to be able to cure some kind of illness or disease. Those things all involve skill and men are meant to be relied on for our skill. In fact, throughout history and just about every culture, it's always been men who have brought skill to the table and said, we can figure out how to do this, and if we do figure out how to do this, it's going to make our world and the world around us even better. So that's what skill is all about. It's not about being an expert necessarily, and it's certainly not about showing off how good you are at something or even how much better you are at something than someone else's. That's kind of a modern version of skill that's really based in arrogance. We're not looking for arrogance, we're looking for helpfulness. Men need to learn the skills that are necessary in order for them to be helpful to the people around them in their world. And in doing that, we show what manly skill is really all about. Now the last two marks of manhood are a little bit different because the first three are primarily things that men can do on their own. You can get better at strength, courage, and skill just by working on them by yourself. But the last two are inherently relational, which means that to grow in honor and allegiance, you're gonna have to do it within the context of relationships with others. Honor is all about your relationships to your peers. It's about doing right by those closest to you. And so honor is kind of the horizontal access of a man's relational world. Allegiance is about being under authority to someone or something else in your life. So allegiance is the vertical axis of a man's relational world. Now, when you put these two things together, learning to relate rightly to the people who are closest to you and the people who are in authority over you, a man can improve significantly at his life. That's why honor and allegiance are probably the two most important of the five marks of manhood. They are really the place that most men can stand to grow and to get better at being a man. When it comes to honor, it's helpful to realize that the definition of honor that we are using here as a, as one of the five marks of manhood, it's actually different than the way that we use honor most of the time in our culture. It's not just something like integrity or esteem or ACC claim, although it's okay to use the word that way. But those words assume that honor is something positive and it really isn't. Honor just means that you're doing right by the people around you. So if the people around you are doing bad things and you do bad things in order to get honored by them. It doesn't make you a good man. So honor doesn't have to be morally good. It's actually kind of morally neutral. It depends on the way that the people around you are living, and if you're living by their values and their codes, you're gonna get honored for that. That's kind of the point. What it means is that you need to choose the people around you wisely. What they honor is going to be the kind of man that you become, and so you want to choose other men, especially who are going to honor things that move you upwards and towards the kind of man that you want to be. You want the values that they have. To be the things that are gonna actually help you grow into being the best version of yourself. And as you do that, you will be honored by the people that you care most about. That kind of honor is something that men naturally crave. We want the people around us to praise us, to respect us, to hold us in high regard, and we will do just about anything to earn that kind of affection and attention. So making sure that we are getting it for things that are actually. What we want it to be about is really important. Choose the people who will honor you wisely. In the same regard, choose the people that you will follow wisely. The person or the things that you give your allegiance to are going to shape not only your life, but the lives of those around you as well. Especially for those of you who are husbands and fathers, your all. Is going to shape the life and the culture of your family in ways that you can't even predict, but far more than your own values. Your allegiance is actually going to shape a lot of your life and your world. So learning to be able to choose that allegiance well and to follow well, those that are in authority over you is an important part of being a man. Especially when it comes to what we'll call ultimate allegiance, which is the aspect of your God or your code, or whatever the thing in your life is that holds ultimate authority over you. Learning to be able to choose that rightly and to follow that God or that thing well is of utmost importance to being a man. Okay. Those are the five marks of manhood, strength, courage, skill, honor, and allegiance. When you put all of those things together, you begin to get a picture of what it means to be a man and how to actually do the things that are gonna help you demonstrate manhood to the world around you. If you are actively. Working on those five traits, trying to get better In all of those things, you will grow as a man. You will become more manly. That's just how manhood works. If you are actively engaged at getting better in those five marks, you are becoming better at being a. It is not that hard. Right? And I think that's actually the kind of definition that we need for manhood. Look, 50% of the world have, you know, managed over the course of history to step into manhood without nearly as much challenge as we're having to face today. So it really shouldn't be that difficult of a thing to figure out what a man is and how to do it. We need a simple definition. And so this gives us a really clear and a very accessible picture of what it looks like to be a man. Now in the book How to Be a Man, you're gonna get much more detail about what those things look like. But you're also gonna get some challenges. You're gonna get some things that are gonna actually give you opportunities to get better at each one of those five marks. So some ways to be able to kind of. Test yourself to see how you're doing and to actually make some progress in those things. So I want to encourage you to go right now and to get a copy of how to be a Man. It should be available at Amazon or anywhere that books are sold. You can pick up an ebook. Or a paperback copy, and either way it will help and challenge you as a man. I have written it as a book that is accessible to men. It is less than a hundred pages, so it is an easy read for you. It's something that you're going to enjoy. There's no fluff. It's just straight to the point, and it's things that are gonna challenge you and encourage you with a picture of a man that is actually accessible and capable for you of becoming. I know that it's gonna help you get to the place where you are becoming the kind of man that you really want to be. So I hope that you'll go pick up a copy of it now. And I hope also that if you've enjoyed this content, that you will like this video and subscribe to the channel. And I would love to engage with you around this topic. So put in the comments down below which of the five marks you feel like you most need to grow in, and how do you wanna work on that thing? Write that down there in the comments, and I look forward to discussing with you and engaging with you about the things that you have to say. And I will talk to you next time here on the Manhood Tribes Channel. We'll see you then.