Figuring Out Your Values to Help Make Life Decisions
I remember the first time I learned about defining your values. It was on the Being Boss podcast with Kathleen Shannon and Emily Thompson. Probably this episode called Finding Your Values from July 2018. I didn’t think too much of it, and moved on with my day-to-day life.
In May 2019, I went on a roadtrip with my friend Taylor. We drove from Utah through Idaho and Wyoming to Montana and back over the course of a week. On our journey we spent time with awesome people and visiting unique museums. When we got to Bozeman, Montana, we settled in for a few days with my friend Lauren. From the day I met Lauren at the Yellow Conference in Los Angeles, California, she’d always been one to dive into the deep stuff really quickly, so while I was caught off-guard, I wasn’t exactly surprised when she asked, “what are your values?”
This came up in a conversation about life direction and goals I was heading towards. Essentially she was asking, by what framework do you evaluate all your life decisions in order to make sure you’re heading down the right path each day? No small question.
I knew my “why” thanks to attending the Venture Pop in 2018. My why was - I host parties & events for awesome & ambitious people who want connection so that they don't have to deal with the logistics, but instead can build meaningful relationships. I do this because I feel like everyone deserves to belong.
Even though it sounds like something that only applies outside of my professional life, it really is the answer to most of my “whys” for my day-to-day professional life too. Where I stand at my career right now, I work about 55-60 hours each week. Of those hours, there’s only a percentage that are client service, while the rest are made up of administrative activities, internal firm initiatives, professional development, and of course, coaching. If I gave up the coaching part, I could probably drop down to 50-55 hours a week easily, but honestly, that’s the best part of the week. Working with people to help figuring out what they want ot do in life so I can help them succeed.
Do your personal anr professional values need to be the same? No, absolutely not. Emily & Kathleen talk about this in that Minisode. But if you’re trying to bring your full, authentic self to the office, there’s probably going to be more overlap than not.
But these weren’t my values. This was my why. And while they’re related, they’re not exactly the same. So I set out on an adventure.
I took myself to a restaurant downtown for lunch, hunkered in on a bar stool at the counter for a delicious salad topped with avocado, and navigated my why to the Being Boss values worksheet that apparently stuck somewhere in the back of my brain. At the time, they had a worksheet, but now they have a fully built out website of values and a quiz. While I’m a huge fan of quizzes, this is one answer I prefered to come to manually.
I went through the list of values and wrote down every one that resonated with me. Then I made a list of additional words and phrases that I thought of while I was going through that list. Words I came up with included:
Honesty
Intimacy
Kindness
Leadership
Money
Openness
Passion
Rules
Sexuality
Teaching
Thoughtfulness
Tradition
Belonging
Celebration
Community
Connector
Cozy
Culture
Dependability
Diversity
Efficiency
Everything Having a Place
Having a Plan
Helpfulness
One of the hardest parts about this was being honest with myself. Did I want to admit that my values might be money or rules? No, absolutely not. How could I be that greedy? How could I have that big of a stick up my butt? But it was important to write them down to understand how my brain is making decisions.
Please note, there’s a million reasons why “money” might feel like a value - maybe it’s not about money at all. Maybe it’s about security or caring for others. And maybe rules is about having order and logistics. And sometimes you have a value that’s not always talked about in a positive manner, but you’re going to have to own it if you’re going to be true to yourself and find a way to make it work for you. In the Being Boss Minisode, Kathleen talks about valuing fame and celebrity. (She also talks about money, but the words above are my own.)
So I took the words I had written down and tried to group them to figure out what the bigger themes were. Then I circled the words in each grouping that one that resonated with me most in each group. Those words came down to: community, openness and cozy, passion, thoughtfulness, diversity, efficiency, teaching, and feeling special.
Key things I was able to find out by grouping items together included - rules were more about efficient processes, money was more about making people feel special and loved, sexuality was more about loving the openness and confidence I saw in people at burlesque shows, and leadership was actually more about mentorship.
From there I grouped things together again, and then started trying to write them down as motivation poster quotes for myself. (There’s a chance that I read too many self help books.)
After writing down a handful of phrases such as, “we’re all in this together” (thanks, High School Musical), give a damn about something, don’t waste precious time, hygge, hive mind, time is precious, good people are the gratest, be thoughtful to yourself and others, and openness is the best policy - I settled on something more simple.
Be open
Be thoughtful
Be mindful of time
Be available for others
Admittedly, “be mindful of time” was the positive spin I put on efficiency. Turns out that being efficient is actually a highly important value in my world. There are too many things to do and people to see to waste time doing things that don’t need to be done.
In summer 2020 I started working with a leadership coach, Jessica Kent. In one of our early sessions, she pulled out a values worksheet. Never being one to turndown a reassessment of who I am as a human, I dove in again. I started with her list of words, circle all of the ones that felt like me, and narrowed it down to two values; this time, community and efficiency.
Since being able to articulate these values, making decisions has gotten easier, so has understanding my emotions. I know that as a human, I will always need to build deeper connections with people around me. I also know that if I find myself getting annoyed during a meeting that’s taking too long, that it’s because there is misalignment with my current values.
Most recently, I made a big change at the office and applied for a transfer from one group to another. I have worked across two different groups for my entire 10-year career. Most of the time, it felt like there was a good balance, but recently, I started feeling like instead of having two communities I belonged to, I had zero. I was missing out on important things on both sides of the fence, which was making me feel incredibly lonely.
For somebody who has a value like flexiblility or innovation or freedom, living in the middle of two groups might be the dream - you can hop back and forth between two spaces, make a huge impact in both, and innovate and create connections between the two of them. For me, this felt like my nightmare, I didn’t feel grounded in either direction, all my client activities were happening on one side of the fence and my initiative activities were happening on the other side of the fence, so I was never getting the whole picture, and was rarely the first person anyone thought of to have around. I had worked myself into a role where everyone liked working with me, but it was always a bonus that I was there, never expected. Not great for someone who wants to feel like they belong.
So I decided to make a change. I can’t tell you how that change has gone yet, but I can tell you that having words to talk about my decisions and a framework under which to make those decisions (thanks, Lauren - and Jessica) was really beneficial.
Now when I meet up with coachees and mentees, I always ask them if they know what their values are. Have they done this exercise? Have they taken the time to figure out what is important to them? And if not, I send them to the Being Boss website to narrow down the list of words to the ones that are important to them.
Here’s how to begin:
Grab a sheet of paper
Write down all of the words from the Being Boss Values page that resonate with you
Group them into categories to see if there are common themes
Pair them down until you find the ones that are most meaningful
Think about how you’ve been using these words to make decisions in your life
Ask yourself, are there enough places in my life that I am honoring these values, or do things need to change? Is there anything I’m doing that does not support these values? Are you able to use these values to help you make some upcoming big decisions in your life?
And then there’s one question that Jessica asked me that I thought was really good to think about, what are the early warning indiciators or signs that you’re living outside your values? 2020 was a rough year of working. There were a lot of long nights and by the end of the year I was burnt the eff out. But in retrospect, I should have realized this was coming. In September and October 2020 I stopped doing icebreaker games with my team. For somebody for whom community is a top value to stop doing icebreaker games, there has to be a serious problem.
Now that we’re in 2021, when I notice myself getting too burnt out, while I push through whatever needs to be done, I’ve been trying to make sure that I have some vacation time scheduled on the other side of the big push to reset. I’ve found that time allows me to feel more like myself and organically come up with new ideas that feel like myself. It also allows me to connect more wholey with my community outside of the office for a little bit as well.
So far, 2021 has felt like a much healthier year than 2020 did. Thank goodness.
Overall, I encourage you to set aside the time to figure out your own values. Take some time to answer Lauren’s original question to me from May 2019, by what framework do you evaluate all your life decisions in order to make sure you’re heading down the right path each day? And once you have an answer to that, hopefully you find that you can breathe a little bit easier at the end of the day knowing that no matter what’s happening, you’re at least going the right direction.
