How do you roll?

If they stuck a plaque on the wall of your house to commemorate you, and they picked 3 words that you lived and worked by, what would they be?

It’s not something we think about every day, is it? Yet, these words determine how we respond to other people, how we go about our work, what work we choose to do, where we choose to live and what we choose to do in our spare time.

What words do YOU choose to live by?

These words, or values, are the principles or standards of behaviour judged as important in life, according to the Oxford Dictionary. They are formed through the influences of family, friends, society and life experiences and change over time. Clearly, the Iris in the picture lived in a very different era to mine.

Major life events, like the death of someone close, near-death experience, arrival of a new life, redundancy or divorce can bring about dramatic shifts in our values, yet rarely do we stop and consciously reassess them. Our life and work shifts, and we move in a different direction. Or sometimes we get stuck, feeling “off”, unhappy, resentful, angry, irritated and not really putting the finger on why.

Does your work feel a bit “off”? How are you living your values?

A few years back in my early 30s (OK, over 20 years ago. Blimey.), I had a marketing job in a small biotechnology company. My desk was located on the first floor of an open plan office and every day, Vicky, whose desk was at the top of the stairs, would announce my arrival before she even saw me. “Here she comes!”, she would laugh. She could hear my laboured trudging and heavy breathing. I was super-fit, so it wasn’t that. My foot-dragging was the sound of despondency. After nearly four years in this job, I was unstimulated and bored. My body knew it way before I recognised it and did something about it.

A few roles later, I was working in a team environment that was highly competitive. As we approached annual budget planning, my colleagues would resource-guard like dogs with a bone. See: my words are pretty judgemental. It still triggers me. I detested the behaviour to the point where I literally shook on calls about our budgets. Mine would be cut every year as someone used a better argument to claw in a bit more for their team. We literally held “Shark Tank” competitions to see who would win a lump of it. It was the antithesis of collaboration. I had to leave.

Periodically, I do a Values Audit on my work to see where I sit and if anything is out of alignment. At the moment, for things to be super duper, I now know that I need to be living and working with the following values:

Growth, Impact, Collaboration, Connection, Autonomy, Well-being, Trust, Faith, Creativity, Kindness.

It helps enormously if your values align with those that are embodied by your work culture (as opposed to the stated values, which might be just a plaque on a wall). Sometimes you can have influence over this, but sometimes you can’t. On both my examples, the values disconnection caused me to reassess and leave and this is the case with many people I coach. In fact, it’s a key reason that many senior women leave at higher numbers than men in current corporate environments.

What if we designed our life and work around our values?

If you were to use the knowledge of your values (and by the way, it helps to have an order of priority and reasons for having them), could you actually design a better life or vocation? How would it feel to live in your values every day without compromise? What type of work, team, environment would allow you to do that?

For many of us, the thought of placing our values ahead of things like the security of a steady income or convenience of working from home, seems too much of a leap. Yet our state of mental and physical health hinges on our happiness and rides on the foundations of our values. We need to take them more seriously.

So it’s worth doing the exercise and ask the question - what is important to me in my work? Then assess every few hours over the course of a month to see if you’re actually living them. What does that tell you? What do you need to do to get to a close alignment?