What Values Have to Do With It
I’ve been sitting with this question alongside the theme we’re exploring this month at Bloom Social Club: values.
Specifically — the gap between the values we say we hold and the life our decisions have actually been building.
For many of the men I’m describing, the What’s Next question is, at its root, a values question. Not a career question. Not a strategy question. A values question.
Because when you have been in survival and achievement mode for long enough — when the goal has always been the next thing, the next level, the next room — your decisions get made from a very particular set of values. Resilience. Performance. Advancement. Endurance. Safety through excellence.
Those values got you here. And they are real, and they are yours, and there is nothing wrong with them.
But they may not be the only values you have. And they may not be the values that are going to build the next chapter of your life in a way that actually feels like yours.
The What’s Next question, underneath all its complexity, is often asking: what do I actually value now? Not what did I need to value to survive. Not what do people expect me to value. What do I, this man, in this body, at this point in my life — actually value?
And when was the last time I made a decision from that place?
The Conversation That Changes Things
I don’t think this question gets answered in isolation.
I’ve seen men sit with it alone for years — circling it in journals, half-addressing it in therapy, carrying it in the back of their minds like a tab they keep meaning to close. And there is value in all of that. But the thing that seems to actually move the needle, again and again, is a specific kind of conversation.
Not a conversation with a coach who doesn’t share your experience. Not a conversation with colleagues who can’t hold the fullness of who you are. Not a conversation with a mentor who climbed a different kind of mountain.
A conversation with men who know. Who have climbed the same climb, navigated the same intersections, carried the same weight. Who don’t need you to translate anything. Who can reflect things back to you that you can’t see from inside your own life.
That conversation — peer to peer, across the table of shared lived experience — is where I’ve watched the What’s Next question actually start to open up. Not get answered, necessarily. But open. Breathe. Become something workable instead of something heavy.
What I’m Building
This is why I’m creating After the Climb.
It’s a virtual 90-minute session — intimate, capped, curated — for gay and queer men of color in senior and executive leadership who are in this question. Who are at the top of the ladder and starting to wonder what the view is supposed to mean.
We’ll spend 90 minutes in real conversation. About values. About identity after achievement. About what ‘what’s next’ actually looks like when you’re finally free to choose it, not just earn it.
It’s not a webinar. It’s not a networking event. It’s the room I kept wishing existed — and decided to build.
If you’re in the What’s Next question right now — or you feel it approaching — I want you in this room.
Join the Waitlist
After the Climb is currently in development. I’m building the first cohort thoughtfully — by hand, almost — and I want to make sure the right men are in the room.
If this piece landed for you, add your name to the waitlist below. You’ll be the first to know when registration opens, and you’ll have access to early bird pricing before it goes public.
And if you know a a gay or queer man of color who needs to read this — send it to him. Not with a long explanation. Just send it and let him find himself in it.
That’s usually how these conversations start.
Noris
Founder, Bloom Social Club
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