Speaker 1: 0:00

Are you ready to break free from hesitation, self-doubt and isolation? Do you want to lead with confidence, build powerful connections and live boldly? I'm Cory Baum and I'm here to share the most impactful strategies and mindsets that I've learned through coaching, leadership and real-world experience. Together, we'll forge unshakable confidence, master social dynamics and create a life rooted in purpose, brotherhood and bold action. Inside, you'll get the tools and insights to become the strongest, most connected version of yourself. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Evolve Men podcast. I'm your host, corey Baum.

Speaker 1: 0:40

This is where we talk about the real work of becoming the man that you were made to be. Let me ask you something up front. If I stopped you right now and asked what guides your life, what really drives your decisions, your direction, your sense of self, could you tell me and I don't mean what sounds good, not what you hope it is, but the truth? Most men can't, Not because they're lost or lazy, but because nobody ever taught us how to look that deep. We've been handed roles, rules, expectations, but very few tools to build a life that's actually ours, and that's what this episode is about. Today, we're talking about values, not corporate buzzwords or aspirational posters, but the real, gritty stuff, the things that matter when no one's watching the inner compass that either grounds your decisions or leaves you drifting. We're going to explore what values actually are and how to uncover the ones that are yours and what it looks like to live in alignment with them. Because when you do, everything changes your confidence, your relationships and your peace. This isn't about being perfect and your peace, this isn't about being perfect. It's about being honest and powerful in who you are and how you lead your life. So let's get into it.

Speaker 1: 2:14

I didn't grow up thinking about values, right? No one sat me down and asked hey, what do you stand for? What are the principles that guide your life? That just wasn't a conversation that we had, not in school, not at home, not with friends. The word integrity might have floated around once in a while, maybe in a classroom poster or an assembly, but I never really understood what it meant in terms of my actual life, and I sure as hell didn't have a list of values that I was living by. So when I first got introduced to this idea of actually choosing your core values, defining them, letting them shape how you lead your life, I was almost embarrassed. How you lead your life, I was almost embarrassed by how foreign it felt At the time.

Speaker 1: 3:08

I was surrounded by a group of other men who were doing similar work, and a lot of them came back to the group with their values nailed down within just a few days. They'd say things like yeah, you know, I picked mine. Courage and authenticity and discipline, blah, blah, blah. It took about 10 minutes and I remember sitting there thinking what it wasn't that simple for me and it felt huge, like I was standing at the edge of something that I had never, never realized. Right. I, I was missing and and now I had to build it from scratch.

Speaker 1: 3:53

I didn't want to just throw words on a page and to keep up with everyone else. I wanted to actually mean it, because the more that I sat with it, the more that I realized I had been making every decision in my entire life, both big and small, without any framework at all. Every conversation, every choice, every crossroads was a blank slate that I had to figure out in real time. That I had to figure out in real time, and there was no compass, no North Star, just survival, adaptation, trying to guess what the right move was based on whatever felt least painful or most acceptable in the moment. And that was exhausting, and it's a heavy way to live, because when you don't have values to come back to, you question everything right, you second guess yourself, you shape, shift depending on who's watching, you try to keep the peace, to avoid conflict, to get it right, and in the process you lose touch with who you actually are. So, for me, discovering this concept wasn't just a self-help exercise. It was revolutionary. It was the beginning of self-leadership for me, and it taught me something that I had never heard before that your values aren't just about who you want to be. They're about how you come home to yourself, how you decide what matters when life gets loud, complicated or messy.

Speaker 1: 5:38

And from that day forward, I started asking an entirely different question Not what should I do, but what would the man who I want to be do? And that really shifted things for me. So let's slow this down for a minute. Why is this whole values thing so hard for some of us and why does it matter so much? Because most of us were never shown how to live from the inside outward. We were trained to read the room, to fit in, to do what made sense right. We were taught to follow the rules to earn the approval, avoid the consequences. But no one ever pulled us aside and said hey, man, you don't have to guess, you can decide for yourself. You can actually choose the kind of man that you want to be and then build your life around that. And that idea blew my mind when I first heard it, because before that life felt like a constant game of reaction and negotiation. What is it that will make her happy right now? What is it that will get me ahead? What's the least risky path? How do I keep the peace? And there's nothing wrong with being strategic or acceptable. But when every decision in your life is made through the lens of fear, avoidance or appeasement, you lose yourself. You don't know where you end and the rest of the world begins.

Speaker 1: 7:28

Most men that I talk to never consciously choose their values. They inherited them from their parents, from religion, from school or coaches or culture, from the wounds that shaped them and the survival strategies that protected them. Sometimes those values are good and sometimes they're garbage right, but either way, they're rarely questioned. You just absorb them like oxygen, right? And eventually you confuse what you were taught to value with what you actually value, and that's where the friction starts. Maybe you value growth, but you were taught that security is everything. Maybe you value honesty, but you were trained to keep the peace. Maybe you value connection right, but you were rewarded when you were a kid for being self-sufficient, right.

Speaker 1: 8:33

So now, when you try to live differently, when you speak up or slow down or choose yourself, you feel this invisible resistance, this guilt, this anxiety, and that's not a character flaw, that's the ache of misalignment. And you don't fix it by performing harder. You fix it by asking a question that most men never stop to ask what do I want to live by? See, your values are not just abstract ideas. They're the rules of the game that you're playing, not society, not your parents, not your boss or your partner, you. They're your internal code, the lens that you use to make sense of your life. And when you define them clearly, when you know them, you name them and you own them, everything gets simpler, not easier, but clearer. You stop spinning in indecision, you stop betraying yourself just to avoid discomfort and you stop letting other people's values override your own, because now you have a compass. And here's what that looks like in real life.

Speaker 1: 10:01

Let's say you're offered a job that pays more, but something feels off. And instead of agonizing for weeks, you check in with your values super quick. Do I value freedom more than status? Do I value growth more than comfort? Do I value alignment more than approval? And suddenly the answer isn't in the numbers or the opinions. You find that it's in yourself. Or maybe you're in a relationship where you've been holding your tongue for months.

Speaker 1: 10:38

Right, you feel the tension building. You've rehearsed the conversation a dozen times, but you keep swallowing the truth. And then you remember I value honesty, I value self-respect, I value intimacy, not just peace. So you have the hard conversation, not because it's easy, not because it's comfortable, but because it's aligned with the man who you want to be, and that changes how you feel about yourself. It builds trust, it builds integrity and it builds you. And look, this isn't I keep saying this, but this really isn't about being perfect Because you're going to mess it up, you're going to forget your values in the moment. You're going to make the wrong call. Sometimes that's part of being human. But the difference now is that you know what alignment feels like. You know what it looks like to be in integrity with yourself. You've felt it and once you've felt that that's not something that you can just unfeel. It becomes your internal reference point, your reset button and your way back home.

Speaker 1: 12:01

Here's the other thing that I've learned you don't have to get your values right per se. The first try right, and that's where I really got stuck. Early on, I thought that picking my values was like etching commandments into stone, like if I picked the wrong ones, that I'd be locked into a life forever that didn't fit who. It was that I was right, but the truth is your values evolve over time. Right, they get refined over time, and the more honest that you get with yourself, the clearer they become. The more life that you live, the more you learn what actually matters to you.

Speaker 1: 12:45

So don't get paralyzed trying to pick the perfect list. Just start with what feels true today, because the the power isn't in the actual words themselves. It's in the way that you live them and you. You do them in everyday life, and when you live them, when you align your actions with your deepest values, you start to feel something that most men are starving for, and that's peace. Not the absence of conflict, but the absence of that internal war. You stop feeling like you're at odds with yourself. You stop questioning every decision, every instinct, every desire. You stop trying to outrun guilt or explain your choices to other people who don't share your vision. You just show up grounded and honest and clear. And that's when confidence kicks in. And honest and clear, and that's when confidence kicks in, not ego, not bravado, but real, earned, quiet confidence, the kind that doesn't need to be loud because it knows where it stands.

Speaker 1: 14:10

So here's the question that I want to leave hanging in the air for a second Do you know what you stand for? And, if not, are you ready to find out? Because, no matter where you've been, no matter how long you've been guessing, it's never too late to lead yourself differently. You don't need a life overhaul, you need an anchor. So let's get there.

Speaker 1: 14:29

So here's the shift that hit me like a brick the first time I really sat with this. Nobody is coming to tell you who you are. No one's handing you a list of values that perfectly fits your life. No one's going to define your integrity for you or tell you what to fight for when things get hard. That's your work. And at first, man, that felt like a lot right, like I was being handed the keys to a machine that I didn't even know that I was driving. But once it settled in, once I realized that I had the authority to decide for myself what my life stood for. It changed everything. Because now the question isn't well, what should I do? It becomes what do I stand for?

Speaker 1: 15:22

And when you start asking that, you begin to see your entire past in a new light. All the times that you hesitated, betrayed yourself, avoided the truth or followed the crowd like those weren't just mistakes. They were moments made by a man who didn't yet know what his values were. And that's not something to beat yourself up for. That's something to be proud of, because now you see it. And once you see it, you can't go back.

Speaker 1: 15:55

And that's the turning point. That's the quiet, solid, powerful shift where a man stops drifting and starts leading. You move from reaction to direction. You stop trying to do what looks right and you start doing what feels right, according to a compass that you created. You start asking harder questions and giving truer answers. You don't need a rule book or someone else's checklist. You need your own set of internal standards, your own North Star, your own code of conduct, if you will.

Speaker 1: 16:37

And the moment that you start to live by that, imperfectly, inconsistently, clumsily at first right. You start to trust yourself in an entirely new way that you hadn't before, and you stop outsourcing your decisions to other people. You stop performing for acceptance, you stop explaining yourself Because you know why you're doing what you're doing. You've chosen it, it's yours, and that's not ego, that's not defiance, that's alignment, and that's where real confidence comes from Not pretending that you always know what you're doing, but standing firm in the fact that you know who you are. This is the moment that you stop waiting for someone else to define you. You've got the pen in your hand now. So the only question left is what are you going to write? So, now that you've seen it, now that you've felt what it means to choose your own compass instead of borrowing someone else's, the only question left is this what do you actually do with it? How do you take this shift from realization into alignment?

Speaker 1: 18:00

So let's keep it simple, because the real power here doesn't come from creating a perfect list. It comes from taking one grounded, honest step. I want you to set aside 30 minutes this week. That's all. Just 30 minutes of uninterrupted space, Phone off, distractions down and give yourself permission to just reflect, not to impress anyone, not to get it right, but to get real.

Speaker 1: 18:31

And I want you to start with this question what do I actually value? And you can pull up a list if you want, if you want to spark some ideas, right, and some words will probably come up, like honesty and discipline, faith, courage, freedom. You know there's a lot of different words that you can use, right, but the point is, let your gut guide you. Which ones feel like home for you, which ones stretch you in the best way? And then, after you've done that circle, the ones that you feel like really matter to you, and that's not the ones that you think should matter, right? So then, after that, narrow it down right, push yourself to get really, really clear about what you think those values are, and in the end, I want you to choose five, no more than that. These aren't just nice ideas. They're going to become the backbone and the spine of how you lead yourself.

Speaker 1: 19:41

And here's where it gets powerful. Define each one in your own words, not a definition that you find online. What is this definition in your words, in your everyday life? So, instead of just writing integrity, you might say I keep my word, even when it's inconvenient, I don't ghost, hide or play small. Instead of writing presence, you might write something like I turn toward my life. I look my kids in the eyes when they speak. I leave my phone in the other room when I'm connecting.

Speaker 1: 20:26

So now that you've done that, I want you to take those five and write a value statement, one paragraph, one bold claim about who you are and how you live your life. And that would go something like my life is guided by truth, growth and courage. I speak honestly, growth and courage. I speak honestly. I choose the path that stretches me and I take full ownership in the man that I'm becoming. And once you finish that, I want you to print it off, post it and look at it every day, because this is your compass now, and it won't be perfect and it might evolve, but it's yours and that's what matters. So here's your challenge this week Define your values, write your statement and take one small action to align with just one of them. And it doesn't have to be big, it doesn't have to be public, it just has to be honest, because confidence doesn't come from talking about who you want to be. It comes from showing up as that man, one decision at a time.

Speaker 1: 21:49

And here's what you'll start to notice when you do this work. When your life begins to line up with what you truly value, when your actions echo your core, you start to feel less noise inside, less second guessing, less regret and more steadiness. You begin to walk into conversations with clarity instead of anxiety. You stop feeling like you have to explain or justify yourself, because you're not acting out of guilt or confusion anymore. You're acting from something solid. There's less drama, less resentment and you feel more proud of how you handle things, even when it's messy. And that pride, that grounded, quiet pride, is one of the most powerful things that a man can feel. It doesn't just change how others see you. It changes how you see yourself. And if that's something that you've been longing for, if you're tired of feeling like a stranger to your own life and you're ready to come back to yourself fully honestly, then here's where that work begins. Book a free discovery call with me over at evolvemenprojectcom. That's where you'll find free tools, resources and ways to start doing this work for real. No pressure, no pitch, just a conversation to explore what leading yourself could look like in your actual life.

Speaker 1: 23:30

Most men never do this work. They never stop long enough to ask what they actually stand for. They stay in motion, they stay reactive, stay disconnected from themselves, their families, from their choices, from their deepest truth. And it's not because they're weak or they're broken. It's because no one ever showed them how. But you're here, you're listening, you're reflecting and you're starting to lead yourself in a different way, and that's rare that matters. So, whether you define your values today or you wrestle with them for the next few weeks, just know this You're already doing something that most men avoid their entire lives You're choosing to live on purpose, and that's how everything begins to change. All right, men, that's what I've got for this episode. If this spoke to you, leave a five-star review and follow the show and share it with someone that you feel could use this. That's how this message spreads, one man at a time. We'll be you next time.