Making value based transitions during complex times

In life and in your career, the offers you make are an invitation to develop deeply meaningful relationships with others.

What’s true about any offer is that it’s based on the intersection of value and relationship -- the space between what we value as individuals, our shared values and what we can manifest in relationship to one another. The ideas that hold meaning for you shape what attracts you to an offer, and what comprises the one you’re making to your community.

A key to bringing yourself into alignment, is to resist the offers that are not aligned with your values and identity. As many scholars have articulated in different ways, one of the greatest tools of colonization is the rejection of multiple identities, diverse cultural norms and non-linear ways of knowing and taking action.

For women of color and immigrant women, some of these cultural norms sound like:?

1. Wait your turn to lead, to be heard, to be recognized until the systems we belong to say it’s our turn. This idea has dominated the professional space for decades. The rise in Black, Latina and Native American elected leaders in the United States is proof that when we set our values over our loyalty to structures first, we see the cultural shifts we want. The rise in black and brown owned businesses and co-directed NGOs is proof we can do it differently.???
2. Real success is done alone by pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps is another major cultural belief that is being deconstructed as a result of the pressures of a pandemic and the reality that this belief is unsustainable. Community-oriented ways of operating in indigenous communities and cultures is not new. We simply are remembering that collective ownership, both online and in-person, are foundational to how we move forward. We see this in the small business, nonprofit and online spaces.?

Even as we begin to move away from these cultural beliefs and into inclusive, incremental change process, one important thing to remember is that this isn’t going to be a utopia. Our human race has caused a lot of harm and damage to one another and to the surrounding environment. Repair takes time at the systemic level. In order to engage in this repair, we must foster ongoing authentic connection and communication and we must be willing to reimagine our relationship with systems.?

As you discover your own realignment, remember that perfection is not at the intersection of community and interconnection. The shift happening right now is making space for a collective re-imagining of how to be in relationship and community with each other and our surrounding environment. This shift is evident in the #greatresignation which shows us that there is no perfect opportunity. Instead you can manifest the right transition spaces for you, whether that be a job, a business, a collaboration, or a thought partnership without limiting yourself to permanence.??

Your unique journey holds the elements that will help you connect to the energy of your purpose. In this practice of embodying and shaping, you’ll be able to hone in on the values you want to reflect at this point in your life.?

Here are some elements to find that next transition:?

1. Clarify your values. Clarify what you truly value outside of cultural expectations in your society. Knowing what you truly value will help you begin to move forward on your transition journey and decipher what is for you and the planet and what is out of alignment.
2. Don't be afraid to be different. Defining your offer equals identifying an opportunity to do something differently. This opportunity may present as a challenge, as a chance to share values and practices, or a call to integrate emergent strategies that serve the situation at hand.?
3. The law of attraction isn't enough. When you understand the language of connection, you will magnetize yourself and attract people that will benefit the most from your gifts.?if you are unclear about your values and offer and you aren't doing the work of deconstructing trauma and colonization in your soma, you will continue to attract people in your old values system, no matter how good it sounds on paper.
4. Be conscious of influence. Be inspired by those who have influenced you, and remember that what you create does not need to be 100% unique, perfect or the end-all-be-all solution. We are in a major transition period. Make your offer from a place of alignment, agility and love, and you’ll begin calling in those who will walk alongside you.
5. To truly center love, we must be willing to do the change work. In her work, Love as a Practice of Freedom, Bell Hooks reminds us that, “[in] choosing love we also choose to live in community, and that means that we do not have to change by ourselves. We can count on critical affirmation and dialogue with comrades?walking a similar path.”?

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