How do Institutions Help Define our values?
Frank Dollar Assoc. CIPD
Coach, Facilitator, L&D Strategist, HRBP and Early Careers Lead
Take a library for example. As I child the library wasn’t my favourite place to be. I enjoyed the quietness, the smell, and the feeling of calm but I was always more interested in the butterfly collection or playing games on the vacuumed carpet rather than reading the books. To some people, the library is a sanctuary that has bestowed a love for reading and has acted as a conduit towards compounding knowledge that aggregated into a certain path of hobby or even work. If someone read the Harry Potter series as a young person, it is more than likely creativity and fantasy have formed some sort of purpose within them.
When I think about my purpose and values recently, I began my thinking by attempting to align them with institutions.
“Connection,” being one of them, derived from the family institution I was raised in sits up high within my purpose and way of being. Within that, a library isn’t necessarily the institution that proliferates my way of being, and therefore my institutional purpose may lie within something different. Like a coffee shop. A place to enjoy deep and meaningful conversation with the odd bit of gossip. Connecting an institution or place to a value may help guide you toward your purpose.
Often in interviews or books, people tend to simplify their values into three words e.g. Positivity, Honesty and kindness. When thinking about my own values, I found it quite challenging to grasp them out of mere thin air thought. I instead found it useful to place myself in a variety of institutions mindfully in order to feel the connection I have to that institution and what it does to my direction of value thinking. Give it a try. Think about a library, a coffee shop, an office, a Church, a Mosque. Does it give you energy or does it de-energise you?
A library in itself, is full of the potential that it may be a haven for one, but I prefer to select a book recommended by a friend, read it swiftly, then meet in a coffee shop to discuss.
How do you go about defining your values and does it help to institutionalise your feelings towards places, noticing the energy that bubbles within? ?
Senior Learning & Development Consultant at Easygenerator I LSE Alumni
6 个月Frank, thanks for sharing!
Solutions Architect, Epiq
1 年Wow, Frank Dollar Assoc. CIPD your article took me back to 1998; my freshman year at U.C. Berkeley when my 17-year-old self came to the realization that there were a dozen libraries on campus. There was one gorgeous library with a study room so beautiful that I decided I would always study there. The ceilings were decorated in such an ornate style that sometimes I would look up in awe and appreciate just how lucky I was to sit there and be afforded the luxury of a quietly magnificent place to learn. I wish I could still visit this sanctuary of higher learning, but as a 17-year-old when my imagination and curiosity towards life were peaking and the only smart thing about cell phones was that they flipped open. One could spend hours and hours tucked away in a magical library sans distractions and interruptions.
Summit Manager, One Young World | SheSays London Member | Strategic Marketer and Communicator | Impact-driven Brand Builder ??
1 年Love this thought Frank! Joining you right there in the coffee shop; do parks and outside spaces count? That's certainly a place of energy-giving and inspiration for me!