Self-Worth Through Truth: Why Lies Are Destroying Your Masculine Identity
You've built something impressive. The career, the income, the life that looks good on paper. But here's the question you won't ask at dinner parties: do you actually trust yourself?
Not the performance version. Not the guy you show up as in meetings or social situations. The man you see in the mirror when no one else is watching.
Most high-performing men I work with can't answer that honestly. They've become so good at managing their image, at saying the right things, at performing competence, that they've lost touch with what's actually true for them.
I spent years doing the same thing. Chasing self-worth through achievement. Better results, bigger wins, more proof that I mattered. The math seemed simple: achieve more, feel worthy.
It never worked.
Then I started doing men's work. Got radically honest with myself and sat in rooms with men who wouldn't let me hide. That's when I learned what Connor Beaton, who's been a mentor of mine for years, articulates perfectly:
"Self-worth is the reward of a man who refuses to abandon himself through lies."
Not through achievement. Not through performance. Through refusing to lie.
This is what I see everywhere now. In my own journey. In every man I work with. The pattern is always the same: external success built on internal dishonesty creates a hollow center that no accomplishment can fill.
The Performance Trap
Beaton lived this too. Years of verbal and emotional abuse as a kid. A father who wasn't present. The deep belief that he could gain strength through emotional suppression.
"I really tried that to its max and it did not work," he told me. "It would sort of numb things out for a little while, but underneath that was this sort of... I don't like myself. I don't feel like I have any real purpose or meaning or direction."
Sound familiar?
Here's what happens: you learn early that your worth comes from what you produce, how you perform, whether you meet expectations. So you get really good at it. You build the career. You check the boxes. You become the guy who has it together.
But you're also lying constantly.
Not necessarily big, dramatic lies. Mostly the small ones that feel necessary to keep everything running smoothly:
"I'm fine" when you're not
"Sure, I can do that" when you're already drowning
Performing confidence in meetings while your internal experience is chaos
Agreeing to things you don't actually want to avoid conflict
Pretending to be present with your family while your mind is elsewhere
Each lie feels insignificant in the moment. Each one seems necessary to maintain relationships, keep your job, avoid disappointing people.
But here's what you don't realize: every lie fragments your psyche.
How Dishonesty Destroys Coherence
Carl Jung understood something most modern psychology misses: you cannot build a coherent sense of self through dishonesty.
"The first step in any therapeutic or spiritual process is confession," Beaton explains, referencing Jung's work. "If you are going to take any type of psychological journey where you're trying to develop a deeper level of strength psychologically or emotionally, you are going to have to cop to and take ownership of the shit that you've been doing that's out of alignment and integrity."
Because when you lie, your sense of self fractures. You create multiple versions of yourself for different contexts. The guy at work. The husband at home. The version you show friends. The man you are when you're alone.
None of them are fully integrated. None of them are completely true.
"You can never actually have a full, coherent sense of self through lying," Beaton says. "It will continue to fragment your sense of self."
Think about what that means practically. You're in a meeting presenting confidence while internally questioning everything. You're telling your partner you're fine while resentment builds. You're performing strength while feeling weak.
Your psyche knows the truth. And it responds by withdrawing trust from the man in the mirror.
Mental health, Beaton explains, comes down to two things: coherence and flexibility. "If you want to find any type of alignment within yourself or strength or fortitude within your own psyche or your sense of self and identity, it's going to come through doing the hard thing of speaking the truth."
Not just truth about your actions. Truth about your needs, your wants, your desires. Your actual internal experience.
The People-Pleaser's Paradox
This hits differently for high-performing nice guys. You've been conditioned your entire life to prioritize others' needs above your own. To be the good boy. The reliable guy. The one who doesn't rock the boat.
I see this pattern constantly. Men who can run companies, lead teams, make high-stakes decisions... but can't tell their wife what they actually need. Can't say no to requests they don't have capacity for. Can't express what they really think about something important.
"A lot of guys will have experienced this if they're a people pleaser, a nice guy," Beaton says. "You live in this state of chronically trying to gain approval from other people by apologizing for what you actually need and want."
So you never actually say: here are the things I need in this relationship. Here's what I want. Here's what matters to me.
Instead, you do this covert dance of trying to get your needs met without directly stating them. Hoping people will notice. Waiting for them to care enough to ask.
They don't.
And the whole time, you're sending yourself a message: my needs don't matter. My wants aren't important. My desires should be set aside.
That's self-abandonment. And you can't build self-worth by abandoning yourself.
The paradox is brutal: by trying to gain approval through self-abandonment, you ensure you'll never feel truly seen or valued. Because the version of you that people approve of isn't actually you. It's the performance you've crafted to earn their acceptance.
What Truth-Telling Actually Requires
When I started doing this work, the first thing I had to face was how much I'd been lying. Not dramatic lies. Just constant small adjustments to avoid discomfort.
Getting radically honest meant sitting in rooms with men and saying things I'd never said out loud:
"The thing I don't want you to know about me is..."
"Here's what's actually going on with me right now..."
"I've been pretending I'm okay with this, but I'm not."
It felt terrifying. Like I might lose respect. Like the relationship might not survive my honesty. Like my carefully managed image would shatter.
But here's what actually happened: I started respecting myself.
Not because everyone loved my honesty. Some didn't. Some relationships didn't survive the transition from performance to authenticity.
But I could finally look at myself in the mirror and see someone trustworthy. Someone who tells the truth even when it's uncomfortable. Someone who doesn't abandon himself to keep the peace.
That created something no achievement ever did: genuine self-respect.
Beaton describes it as finding coherence. "You start to take your internal experience and make it manifest into the world. And if you don't do that, you continue to negate the truth that is inside of you."
When you chronically negate your internal experience, whether that's a want or a need or a desire, you're telling yourself you don't matter. You're devaluing your own reality.
The Uninitiated Man Problem
There's a deeper layer to this that most men don't see: you were never taught how to do any of this.
"We are living in one of the highest rates in human history of fatherless homes," Beaton points out. One in four kids in America grow up without a father figure. And for the ones who had dads physically present, many experienced what I call the "ghost dad"—there but not really there. Present but emotionally absent.
I never heard my father verbalize a single emotion. I could feel things in my body when he was upset or stressed, but I never learned what was actually happening. No modeling. No transmission of how to handle difficult emotions, how to speak truth, how to be a man who can be trusted.
So you figure it out yourself. And mostly, you figure out how to perform masculinity rather than embody it.
Traditional cultures understood something we've forgotten: boys don't automatically become men. The transition requires intentional process. It requires what Richard Rohr calls "a journey of powerlessness"—an encounter with something greater than yourself that fundamentally reorganizes your identity.
"Unless a man goes on a journey of powerlessness, he will always abuse power," Beaton says, quoting Rohr.
Modern men don't get this. Instead, we get educational systems dominated by women, cultural narratives suggesting masculinity itself is problematic, and no clear pathway to mature masculine identity.
The result? Beaton calls it the puer aeternus—the eternal boy. Men who are successful on paper but feel internally adolescent. Who carry massive responsibility but feel woefully ill-equipped.
"An uninitiated man is actually a danger to the culture and the community," Beaton explains. "He doesn't have a right relationship to risk. He's far more likely to take really wild, really stupid risks. And uninitiated men are far more likely to seek out positions of power to try and disprove the internal knowing that they are not mature."
I see this constantly. Men climbing corporate ladders not because they're passionate about the work, but because they're running from the insecurity that they're not really men. Men making reckless decisions. Men unable to sit with powerlessness or uncertainty. Men who either abuse power or completely avoid their own potency.
Why You Need Other Men (Even Though You Don't Trust Them)
Here's the catch-22: healing requires other men. But most men deeply distrust other men.
For good reason. Maybe your dad left. Maybe he was there but emotionally unavailable. Maybe you experienced betrayal from a friend, shaming in male spaces, or violence that was never addressed.
"For a lot of men, the reason why we don't trust men is because when we went through a hard time with another guy, we didn't come out the other side okay," Beaton explains.
The conflict happened. The disagreement blew up. Maybe there was abuse. And then... nothing. No repair. No conversation. Just pretending it never happened and moving on.
So you learned: men aren't safe. Vulnerability with men gets weaponized. Better to keep it all locked down.
But here's what I've learned through years of this work: if you can't trust men, you can't fully trust yourself as a man.
Your mistrust of masculinity includes your own masculine identity.
The repair happens relationally. You have to get in rooms with men who can hold you accountable with love. Men who won't let you hide behind your performance. Men who can go through hard conversations with you and come out the other side okay.
That's what changed everything for me. Not the insights. Not the frameworks. The actual experience of being radically honest with men who didn't abandon me, shame me, or weaponize my vulnerability.
Every time I see a man go through this in the work I do, the pattern is the same. The performance cracks. The truth comes out. The self-respect begins.
What You Can Do This Week
Stop waiting for the perfect moment. Stop thinking you need to have it all figured out first.
Pick three questions from this list and answer them honestly. Not the polished version. The raw truth:
Where am I lying in my relationship? (Include what you're pretending to be okay with)
What do I need that I'm not asking for?
What truth am I most afraid to speak, and to whom?
Where am I saying "yes" when I mean "no"?
What's the gap between how I appear and how I actually feel?
Write it down. Don't edit it. Just let the truth land on the page.
Then tell one small truth this week. Not the biggest, scariest one. Start smaller. Something that makes you nervous but won't blow up your life.
"The thing I don't want you to know about me is..."
"Here's what's actually going on with me right now..."
"I'm not actually fine with how things are going."
Notice what happens in your body before you say it. Notice what happens after.
Most men discover the anticipation is worse than the actual truth-telling. And they discover something else: the quiet satisfaction of not abandoning themselves to keep the peace.
That's where self-worth begins. Not in achievement. Not in performance. In the steady accumulation of moments where you refuse to abandon yourself through lies.
The Path Forward
Self-worth isn't something you achieve. It's not another box to check or milestone to hit.
It emerges naturally when you stop fragmenting yourself through dishonesty, people-pleasing, and approval-seeking.
This requires courage. Not the performative kind that looks good on social media, but the quiet courage to tell the truth when it would be easier to lie. To state your needs when it would be more comfortable to stay silent. To risk disapproval by being honest rather than earn approval through performance.
The men I work with who make this shift describe it the same way: it's like finally living in their own skin. Being able to trust themselves. Making decisions from a coherent center. Building relationships based on genuine connection rather than careful performance.
"Any man who is living a life that is riddled with lies, with fabrications, any man that's living a life that isn't aligned with a deeper sense of integrity for himself and his values—it's going to erode his sense of worth as a man," Beaton says.
The inverse is also true: any man who refuses to abandon himself through lies, who aligns his external expression with his internal truth, who stops performing and starts being... that man builds genuine self-worth.
Not the conditional kind that depends on achievement. The real kind. The kind that lets you look in the mirror and trust the man looking back.
Your move.
Ready to Stop Pretending Everything Is Fine?
Get my 7-Day Reset: seven questions that expose the gap between who you are and who you're pretending to be. No fluff. No therapy-speak. Just the hard questions high-performing men need to ask themselves.
It's designed for men who are outwardly successful but inwardly off—and done with the performance.
