Kingdom of Conscience

Michael Ivan Skye has spent decades building Honor Work. It is an integrated system of transformation — ways of thinking, ways of speaking, rituals, trainings, conflict resolution and agreements — and it reorients a life around one thing: honor, and the act of honoring. Through it we restore our relationship with honor as sacred, and welcome ourselves and each other into our rightness for life on this earth.

The foundation

Honor is earned through achievement, and it is also offered as a blessing — a deep welcome to a person’s being. It is the feeling that arrives when you hold something or someone sacred, when you witness an act of virtue or sacrifice, when you stand for your people in the face of fear and opposition. It is warm and expansive and it happens in the chest, and it is how the body reports that you are being true to what you hold sacred.

Without honor we suffer. A man without it is lost, cut off from deep purpose with and for his people, and the natural trajectory of a life without honor runs toward shame, judgment and conflict — toward humiliation, betrayal and abandonment. Honor Work exists to reverse that entropy: to restore a culture of honor inside a life, in a world that has largely abandoned that virtue.

The practices

The body of work is large and includes:

The Honor Window

A diagrammatic process for breaking through walls of judgment and seeing the truth of who another person is underneath our defensive reactions.

Honoring Conversations

Structured dialogues that generate the spirit of honor between the people speaking and the people witnessing, by acknowledging what each one is facing, feeling and standing for.

Relationship Transformation Conversations

Intensive facilitated dialogues that restore honor between people in conflict.

The Inner Conflict Diagram

Making conscious the automatic thought patterns that compromise your honor, your power, your integrity and so many of your most important values, such that you feel ready to make a stand and make a change.

Taking A Stand + Vision Exercises

Transformation happens when we face what we have not been facing and make the stand we feel called to make, presencing a felt honor-based identity which yields a new vision we feel called to bring forth.

Every one of these was built for people, and every one of them works. The Real Frontier makes the wider case for tools like these: open, shared, and built to help people work together.

Honoring as an offering

The move that makes the rest of it possible is honoring another person as an offering: holding them as sacred whatever their behaviour has been. We still draw boundaries, still use discernment, still address what causes harm. And we hold that who someone is, is their light, their spirit, the best that is in them.

The restoration

What Honor Work offers is the restoration of culture by way of an honor-based identity, one person at a time. That identity calls each person, by honor, to be the one for their people — and supports them in restoring honor in the world and in all their relations, through their thoughts, their words, their rituals and their actions.

It restores the archetype of the Chief: the one who carries all of his people in his heart, who weeps for them, whose authority is granted moment to moment through deep trust. The wise guardian, leading through sacrifice and through alliances built by the heart. The journey runs from warrior — the one willing to face any threat for their people — to chief, and then to elder, holding the collective future as sacred. In a world that has stripped men of their sacred roles of honor and responsibility, as protectors, providers and patriarchs, this is a path home.

A life reoriented this way measures success by how faithfully you hold your people and your values sacred, and finds happiness in the feeling of honor that arrives when you stand for what is sacred in the face of everything that opposes it. That is the path of restoring honor in all our relations — and through us, in the world itself.