Working on yourself by mastering a skill women don't generally appreciate may literally be self improvement but it's clearly not what women mean when they say guys should work on themselves. If you want guys to adopt your values and improve at being what you want, 'for themselves', isn't that just wanting to control what men aspire to be but without taking responsibility for that?

Women generally don't count improving your Warhammer 40000 action figure collection as working on yourself. Most don't count improving actual intelligence out specialized knowledge outside of a degree or job title you can show off with our a boost in earnings as working on yourself, even though learning more in any field is objectively self improvement. Even the things women might want you to improve at, like physical fitness only count to the point that the woman sees it as useful to her, gain muscle past a certain point and you're no longer self improving, you're a douchy gym bro.

How can with define what male self improvement is by the metric of what gives them the tingles or impresses their friends and not on whether it actually improves the lives of the men involved in ways the men value?