Make Values worth your time...

I’ve done a lot of work with values. In-fact I often tell people marry for values because they don’t change like looks, hobbies or jobs.

But talk is cheap, the most important thing about values are learning your own and how the hell to use them.

Let’s first start by defining what I mean by values. 

Morals are behaviours that we find acceptable, ethics are, simply put, a collection of all of our morals and the morals that we feel others should live by.

Values on the other hand are those things that we feel are necessities for living our best life.

I value adventure, but that comes out in skiing, bike and travel but also as an entrepreneur and in daily life. It might be expressed in many ways but to me, it’s a necessity.

 By the end of this article I want you to have some direction for discovering values but also some ways to put them into action.

There are many ways to discover your values and recently I’ve been doing workshops for remote workers on values discovery, but I’ll give you a Coles notes version. 

Your values can be found in a number of areas of your life:

-      Must Haves: values that your life needs to be fulfilling (not food or shelter but things like friends/family/learning/travel)

-      Obsessive Behaviour: behaviour that express a value (hard work) but might be unhealthy (workaholism)

-      Supressed Values: those values that are important but are being ignored (think about being disrespected - what is the root of that frustration?)

-      Invisible Values: those values that you live so easily they are hard to recognize (often these are values that we would diminish, and others would admire like courage or honesty)

A couple other ways to discover your values are by looking at your role models and asking what values do they have? What do they do that you try to emulate? And, lastly, think of a moment where you were proud of yourself, having a peak experience or living a moment that you would call a highlight (even if that is performing at your best during a struggle). What values were you living up to?

Write these down, what does this list look like?? How do you live up to these values?

Now, for the doing part. How do you do it. Live up to those values and use them to make your life better. A large part will depend on the values that are most important to you! But I will give you an example from my own life.

A couple years ago my brother decided to get married in Italy. A chance for me travel there again and a chance for my wife and our daughter (18 months old) to go for the very first time. You would think this was all good. But, a new family, with me putting down the foundation for my company while often working on the road and my wife taking on a full-time school schedule in addition to work and a part time consulting gig. We had some hurdles: timing, financial, dogs, lost momentum.

We had to make a call.

Do we make it a quick trip (just the wedding) or do we make it a more of a memory (wedding plus travel)? We discussed at length what values we wanted to embrace and decided to spend the extra time and money it would take to make the trip more valuable. Once we decided to go, we had to decide how to travel while we were there? With an 18-month-old it wasn’t going to be a cake walk but we knew that solutions would be found in what we valued. Fun, adventure, ease, being thrifty, new experiences. So, we ended up spending 3+ weeks traveling in a Westphalia van. Eating out one meal a day seeing sights in Italy, France and Switzerland and otherwise living like we had never done before.

It was a highlight of my life.

But not just because we had an amazing trip but because we had decided on what mattered and made informed, proactive decisions on how we wanted to live. And in the process honoured something that my wife and I still hold dear.

Discuss Values and Solutions not what we “want”. Because, when you discuss what you want you might be sacrificing something else to get it and judging if it’s good enough. But when you discuss values, you are living up to the ones that are getting amplified and finding satisfaction instead. 

The one challenge that will net more results than anything else regarding values is learning to listen to other people’s values and trying to understand those values, directly or indirectly.

Work is another place to put values into action, but you don’t need to be imposing or spend a lot of time on this. 

Ask someone: Are you more concerned with this being perfect or making sure it’s done on time? Listen to their answer and trust what they say.

Or, take some time to reflect on how someone has behaved in the past. Ask why? and what was going on that could have made them behave that way? Be objective, understanding and empathetic but most of all listen for the values that aren’t being spoken.

 I was in a meeting once where an employee had been called in to answer for a huge mistake. The mistake could have been made by anyone, it was honest and after a little math everyone realize that in an entire career of decision making this was an extremely small hiccup. The value that was being honoured was fairness. What was fair in the face of a costly mistake. And in this case, it was forgiveness, compassion, learning and ultimately - courage -  by the people in the room that stood up and decided not to pursue punishment and instead grew form the experience.

 Discover your values. Spend time reflecting on them, access them to solve your own problems and to live your best life. But, don’t forget that you can use those values to solve problems at work and to make an impact there as well.

We are communicating our values all the time regardless of how well they are being lived up to. If you are not living up to a value of honesty, you might be getting angry at the wrong people. If you are listening, you might just hear that in someone else. 

If you’re part of a team (and a family counts) or you’re a leader in an organization start listening for values, you might be surprised what you hear.

Don’t hesitate to reach out, comment etc. I’d love to hear you thoughts.

Neil Pretty