On what values can do, what virtues can do, and the identity that forms when you practice both

I recently found myself coaching a business leader through articulating their company values, a process I’ve guided many times at MAC6. We identify what matters most, then build behavior statements: “We do X” or “We do Y,” concrete examples of living those values as a team.

It works beautifully for values like honesty, transparency, or customer focus.

But when I applied the same framework to virtues, I hit a wall. How do you create a behavior statement for wisdom? What does “We do wisdom” even mean?

That struggle led to an insight I want to share with the Human Flourishing community, one that has changed how I think about the inner work each of the Seven Pillars asks of us.

The Crucial Difference

I worked through this question with bri.ai, the AI trained on the teaching of Brian Johnson at Heroic. Human Flourishing is developing a partnership with Heroic, and I am an investor in the company, worth knowing before you weigh anything I say about them. Their eight virtues gave me the clearest language I’ve found for this distinction.

Virtues are the essence of qualities we aspire to embody, rooted in ancient wisdom and confirmed by modern science. They are universal and timeless: wisdom, courage, love, self-mastery. They form the foundation of a flourishing life.

Values are more personal and contemporary. They reflect what matters to us individually or collectively, as a family, a team, an organization. They guide our priorities and choices in the modern context.

Here’s a practical way to understand the two together: values tell us where we’re going; virtues shape how we get there.

Values answer “What matters to me?” or “What matters to us?” Virtues answer “Who am I becoming?” or “Who are we becoming, together?”

Values Work at Every Level

Values scale from the personal to the collective.

Personal values might include family, health, creativity, or service. Behavior statements begin with “I”:

• “I spend quality time with my family every evening”
• “I exercise for at least 30 minutes daily”

Team or organizational values might include innovation, customer-centricity, or transparency. Behavior statements begin with “We”:

• “We allocate 10% of our time to experimental projects”
• “We respond to customer inquiries within 24 hours”

The framework works whether I’m coaching an individual or a leadership team. Values provide direction; behavior statements make them concrete.

Values as Decision-Making Tools

Values do more than point us somewhere. In my coaching, I use them as the first thing to check whenever someone faces a hard decision.

• If you value “family” and a job requires extensive travel, your values clarify the tradeoff.
• If your team values “transparency” and you’re debating how to communicate a setback, your behavior statements show the path.
• If you value “integrity” and face a tempting shortcut, your values resolve the tension.

Well-articulated values turn abstract priorities into concrete decision-making criteria.

Can Virtues Work the Same Way?

This raises a real question: can virtues serve as decision-making tools the same way values do?

Partly. Values help you decide what to do; they clarify priorities and commitments. Virtues help you decide how to do it; they develop judgment and character.

Say you discover a team member has been cutting corners on quality to meet deadlines.

Using values as a decision-making tool:

• You check your team value: “We deliver exceptional quality to our customers.”
• You check the behavior statement: “We never ship work we’re not proud of.”
• The decision becomes clear. You need to address this.

Using virtues as a decision-making tool:

• Wisdom asks: What’s really going on here? A training issue, a pressure issue, a character issue?
• Courage asks: Am I willing to have the hard conversation rather than avoid it?
• Love asks: How can I address this in a way that serves this person’s growth, not just corrects the mistake?
• Humility asks: Have I created conditions that made this likely? What’s my part in it?

Values give you the standard: a clear enough line that the answer is almost binary, aligned or not. Virtues give you the judgment to navigate the territory the standard doesn’t cover: understanding context, finding the courage to act, doing it with love, seeing your own contribution honestly.

Both Are Essential for Difficult Decisions

Values without virtues can produce rigid, unwise application. Your value might say “transparency,” but without wisdom you might share information prematurely, or without love you might deliver honesty in a way that damages rather than builds.

Virtues without values can produce a wandering sophistication: real wisdom and courage, but pointed at no clear priority.

A workable sequence:

1. Start with values. What do my values, or our values, say about this situation?
2. Apply virtues. How can I approach this with wisdom, courage, love, humility?
3. Act. Make the choice that honors what matters and reflects who I’m becoming.

Why Virtues Need Reflection Questions

This is why my original coaching framework broke down with virtues. Virtues are context-dependent and require judgment. Wisdom isn’t a single behavior; it’s the capacity to recognize which behavior fits which situation.

Values can carry clear behavior statements because they represent commitments. Virtues require developed judgment because they represent capacities. Instead of behavior statements, virtues call for reflection questions, prompts that help us track whether we’re developing these capacities over time.

Here are examples with Heroic’s eight virtues, applicable personally and as teams:

Wisdom

• Am I/Are we seeking multiple perspectives before deciding?
• What am I/are we learning from this that applies going forward?
• Is ego or fear clouding my/our judgment?

Courage

• Am I/Are we avoiding this conversation out of fear?
• What would I/we do if I/we knew we couldn’t fail?
• Where am I/are we being called to step up?

Self-Mastery

• Am I/Are we doing what I/we said we would, even when we don’t feel like it?
• Where am I/are we making excuses rather than progress?

Love

• Am I/Are we showing up with genuine care?
• How can I/we serve this person’s, or these people’s, highest good right now?

Gratitude

• What am I/are we taking for granted that deserves appreciation?
• Can I/we find something to appreciate even in this difficulty?

Hope

• Am I/Are we approaching this as a problem or an opportunity?
• What possibility am I/are we missing because we’re fixated on obstacles?

Humility

• Am I/Are we open to being wrong about this?
• What can I/we learn from this person or situation?

Humor

• Am I/Are we taking ourselves too seriously right now?
• Can I/we find lightness here without diminishing what matters?

These questions build capacity for finding the right answer in each unique situation, whether individually or as a team.

Values, Virtues, and the Self We’re Building

There’s a deeper layer to this, and it’s where I think Human Flourishing has something distinct to offer: values and virtues, practiced consistently, don’t stay separate. Over time they fuse into identity, the working answer to “who am I” that we carry into every room, every conversation, every hard decision.

That matters more than it sounds, because identity built this way is fundamentally different from identity built on beliefs.

Beliefs are conclusions: about politics, economics, religion, how a given problem should be solved. Good beliefs update. New evidence should be able to move them. That’s what makes them useful.

But most of us don’t hold our beliefs that way. We let a belief, especially a contested one, become a marker of who we are. Once that happens, changing the belief stops feeling like learning and starts feeling like losing ourselves. This is a big part of why people dig in on gun control, immigration, or a hundred other divisive questions, not because the facts don’t move them, but because the identity wrapped around the belief has more at stake than the belief itself.

This connects directly to the fear-and-love neuroscience our pillar essay Fear Is Not the Enemy explores. When a belief is fused with identity, a challenge to that belief reads to the fear brain as a threat to survival, and it responds the way it responds to any threat: defend, dig in, dismiss. When identity instead rests on virtues and values, a challenge to a belief can be received by the wisdom brain as simply new information. Nothing about who you are is on the line.

I try to build my own identity this way now: a person practicing wisdom, courage, love, and self-mastery; a person committed to family, integrity, and generosity. Someone can disagree with me on tax policy or gun control, and none of it touches that identity. I can hold the position loosely enough to test it, update it, even abandon it, without any sense that I’m losing myself in the process.

I think this is the real reason Human Flourishing asks people to sign the Pledge to a set of virtues and commitments, not a platform of positions. It builds identity on ground that doesn’t move, which is what frees us to keep learning on the ground that does. Separating identity from belief may be one of the most practical inner-work skills a person can develop, and one of the most useful things Human Flourishing can teach.

We Need Both for a Flourishing Life

Values give us direction and decision clarity: what matters, and the criteria to apply when the path is unclear. Virtues give us the character to navigate well: to decide wisely, act courageously, lead with love. And together, held consistently, they give us an identity sturdy enough to survive disagreement.

Values are the compass, pointing toward meaningful destinations and clarifying decisions along the way. Virtues are the strengths that let us walk the path with integrity. Identity is what forms when we’ve been walking that path long enough that it becomes who we are, rather than something we’re still deciding.

How This Changes My Coaching

This is transforming how I approach coaching at MAC6, with individuals and with leadership teams.

For values, I keep using behavior statements: “I do X” for individuals, “We do X” for teams, applied as decision-making tools.

For virtues, I now add reflection questions: identifying which virtues need development, building a regular practice around them, using them to guide how we navigate hard decisions.

And now, for identity, I ask a further question: is this person, or this team, building a sense of self on virtue and value, or on a set of beliefs that could just as easily be wrong? The first is stable ground. The second is a foundation that will eventually crack under pressure.

A Practical Example

An individual who values health and vitality might have behavior statements like “I exercise for 30 minutes every morning” and “I get 7 to 8 hours of sleep nightly.” Facing a high-stress promotion, they can check their values: does this align with my commitment to health? Will I still be able to maintain these behaviors?

But they also need virtues: wisdom to see the full implications, courage to accept the challenge or decline it gracefully, self-mastery to maintain boundaries once the pressure hits, hope to trust their own capacity to grow into the role.

A company valuing innovation might have behavior statements like “We allocate 10% of our time to experimental projects” and “We celebrate intelligent failures.” Facing a strategic pivot after a failed initiative, they check their values: does pivoting align with celebrating intelligent failures? And they need virtues: wisdom to draw the right lessons, courage to make the change, humility to acknowledge what didn’t work, love to support the team through the transition.

A Developing Partnership

Human Flourishing holds that inner work of this kind, the fear-and-love neuroscience, the virtues that steady identity, cannot be separated from the outer work of building a flourishing society: family, governance, economic freedom, the questions that matter and our capacity to stay in them across real difference. That’s the full arc the Seven Pillars are built to cover, and two of the essays still to come go directly at the ground this piece stands on: one on the pillar that takes up ancient wisdom and modern science together, and one on the Seven Commitments themselves.

We’re grateful to be building a partnership with Heroic as part of that work. Brian Johnson’s eight virtues give people a practical, science-backed language for character development, and that language is proving useful as we develop our own thinking on identity, belief, and what it takes to hold a belief loosely enough to keep growing.

If this resonates, I invite you to explore Solid Ground, Human Flourishing’s identity companion. Where this piece examines how values and virtues shape identity, Solid Ground invites you to examine your own: what you stand for, who you’re becoming, and how to build a sense of self sturdy enough to remain open to learning and change.

Scott McIntosh is Co-founder and Chairman/CEO of Human Flourishing and Co-founder of MAC6 Entrepreneurial Center, working toward a world where people can disagree about almost everything and still recognize each other as fellow travelers toward a flourishing life.