The Value of Values

Are you headed in the right direction?

I've written and talked a lot over the last year and a half about the need for deeper things to guide who we are - about understanding the foundation of who we are and letting that determine what we do.

It's lead me to talk a lot about some things that might sound old-fashioned, like character and values, and I'm OK with that. We made a wrong turn when we decided to focus on outcomes without concern about how we arrived at them or who we are when we get there.

Outcomes matter

As a therapist and a coach one of the things I hear most often is that my clients appreciate that everything we do is practical and has a real-world impact instead of being theory or ideology-oriented. If a counselor or coach is not helping their clients change their lives in a real way, they are not doing their job.

That being said, I've also come to recognize that how we arrive at our goals matters, and on an even deeper level, those goals need to coincide with who we are and who we want to be. This is important because when your goals line up with your values, all you have to do is be yourself in a deep, authentic way and you will probably accomplish and even exceed them.

Values Matter

Knowing your values is like having a compass with you all the time. They allow you to stay on a straight path without wasting time chasing things that will not get you where you want to go. When people don't know their values, they don't know what's most important to them, and they wind up in places they don't want to be.

You can tell what your values are by what your priorities are, so I often ask people to list their priorities for me. Living in West Texas, everybody gives me the same 3 priorities in the same order: God, family, and work.

People rarely know (or want to admit) what their actual priorities are, so my next step is to ask them what an invisible person who followed them around for 30 days would tell me their priorities are, and this almost always changes their answer.

This works because you can know what your priorities are by how you spend your time. When people consider the invisible person question (and are honest with their answer), they usually realize that their priorities are things like watching television, drinking, video games (this is a big one these days), their hobbies, and their jobs. Time with the family up shows up for some people, but it's rarely in the top five or six priorities, and most people's spiritual life is even further down the list.

Being Honest About Your Values

There are a lot of values that are more socially acceptable than others. Sometimes, people don't like the priorities question because it forces them to acknowledge that their values are actually things like enjoyment and leisure as opposed to the ones they feel they should have.

It's important to be honest with ourselves about how we spend our time so we can be honest with ourselves about what our priorities are, because that will allow us to be honest with ourselves about whether or not our values are taking us in the direction we want them to. If you want to be headed north but your compass tells you you're headed south, and you refuse to acknowledge that, you're not going to wind up where you want to be.

I want to take the next few weeks to flesh out my own values as a way of illustrating what a deep dive into them looks like. I've had this idea bouncing around in my head for a little while, and while I have a clear picture of what my values are, I haven't refined and updated them in a while.

This is important whether you are a business owner, a leader of some kind, or someone who just wants to do cool things with the time they have on this planet. In the same way that companies that don't follow their values end up falling apart because they are unable to create a culture that sustains them, people need to have a solid foundation that they review and refine every so often.

I did the exercise I do with my clients myself and came up with four values that guide everything I do and that I can still claim to be true when I asked myself the invisible person question.

I have them ranked in order of importance to me:

· Freedom

· PMA (Positive Mental Attitude)

· Pragmatism

· Actual Compassion

These are not cookie-cutter values, and I don't think they ever should be. We have to make sure that the values we claim are particularly ours. They may revolve around a certain set of ideals that we share with most other human beings, but they must resonate with us as individuals if we are going to let them guide our choices.

For example, I know that some people would say that PMA is not actually a value, and say it needs to be something broader like positivity or optimism, but, as you will see over the next few weeks, PMA has its own set of beliefs and behaviors that do not always align with positivity or optimism.

Beyond that, PMA comes out of the punk rock community and I first heard of it through a band called Bad Brains. This is why it resonated with me and immediately had an impact on my life. Using the broader terms of positivity or optimism do not actually resonate with me and are oftentimes in opposition to what I mean by PMA. These nuances are important.

We'll dive into each of those over the next few weeks, but in the meantime I want to encourage you to formulate your own. You can make this as deep as you want it to, but I don't think you'll ever regret putting a lot of time and energy into your values. Here's a list I use to start this exercise with my clients.

Core Values

· Acceptance

· Accountability

· Achievement

· Adventure

· Authenticity

· Balance

· Beauty

· Belonging

· Calmness

· Caring

· Challenge

· Collaboration

· Commitment

· Compassion

· Confidence

· Connection

· Contribution

· Courage

· Creativity

· Curiosity

· Determination

· Diversity

· Empathy

· Enthusiasm

· Equality

· Excellence

· Fairness

· Faith

· Family

· Freedom

· Friendship

· Generosity

· Growth

· Happiness

· Hard Work

· Harmony

· Health

· Honesty

· Humility

· Humor

· Independence

· Integrity

· Joy

· Justice

· Kindness

· Knowledge

· Leadership

· Learning

· Love

· Loyalty

· Open-mindedness

· Optimism

· Passion

· Peace

· Perseverance

· Personal Development

· Positivity

· Power

· Reliability

· Respect

· Responsibility

· Security

· Self-discipline

· Service

· Spirituality

· Success

· Sustainability

· Teamwork

· Trust

· Understanding

· Wealth

· Wisdom

Go through this list and cross off the ones that you immediately recognize as not being one of your core values. Be super honest about this, and do not give in to social desirability or some kind of morality you feel like you must fit into. We're going to get this down to a list of three to five values, so nobody can embody this entire list (especially since some of them exist in tension with others).

The Trap of Social Desirability

When I look at the list, I can see that I do not care much about belonging, balance, fairness, or teamwork. It's not that those are bad things or that I do not think we should strive for them, but they are not driving factors for me. By acknowledging this, I can make decisions that will take me where I want to go.

If I tried to force myself to prioritize belonging and teamwork, I would end up becoming frustrated by putting myself in situations where I constantly had to work in ways that do not fit my nature.

I love intentional one-on-one conversations. The older I get, the more I love working with teams of competent people. But, I also need time alone to create and process and, at the end of the day, I like to be in charge of what I do. I am not pathological about it, but it is how I am wired.

I care about what people I respect think of me, but getting too focused on belonging would end up compromising some of the value I offer people because I am honest even when it might be costly. I do not think I am ever unkind, but I need to remain objective enough to tell people the truth.

The idea of fairness is strange to me. We do not live in a fair world or universe. We should strive to be fair with each other, but to believe that you will receive fairness from everyone or to expect it from the world at large is a recipe for failure, so I do not pay much attention to it. I try to offer it, but I do not get upset when it is not offered to me.

Lastly, I tend to be obsessive about the things I do, and trying to have balance in my life was frustrating and debilitating. I do not have much of a work life balance because I love the work I do, and I look forward to doing it. I am most at peace when I am helping people or creating things that help them. I do not feel the need to balance this with the things other people say I need.

I enjoy thinking about these blogs and the podcast, I love coming up with new programs to help my clients, and I enjoy the intentional conversations I get to have with people. When I try to force myself to go on a vacation without any work, I get bored and it eventually makes me unhappy.

I understand that there are people who would take issue with me not loving these values, and that's cool. If those are their values, I would encourage them to pursue them wholeheartedly because that is what will give them the energy to carry out something great.

Be honest with yourself about what you value and what you don't. Whittle that list above down to 3-5 values that are 100% yours, and then explore the nuance that makes them particularly you.

After that kind of pressure testing and having to cut some values that you care about in favor of only leaving the ones you love, you will have a good list of the things that mean something to you in a deep way. This is what it’s all about.

Housekeeping

The podcast is on a brief hold while I improve the production values. I've gotten a lot of positive feedback about the content, but a few people have told me it does not look good, and they are right. I did not know how to fix it because I don't know much about that world. It looks like I am doing an instructional video for YouTube or something.

I had a professional photographer and videographer come by the house and help me set things up differently and I'm excited about the results. I'm waiting for one piece of equipment to come in the mail, and I will start releasing episodes again. I'm hoping to release 5 or 6 this month in preparation for starting to have guests on in February.

Since I don't believe in balance and I'm not good at waiting, I launched the newsletter again this last week while I was sorting out the podcast stuff. I had a pretty good size mailing list back when my thyroid went haywire, but the immediacy and engagement that comes with a newsletter was a little too much for me when my brain was on fire and the whole world was a terrifying place.

I'm past all of that now, and I miss the direct engagement you can have through a newsletter. This all started because I was curious about the lack of engagement here on Substack so I was looking at my posts as a subscriber would see them and realized there is no direct way to contact me or reply.

It's irrational to expect people to read something and then go out of their way to start a whole new email to respond these days, so I re-launched the newsletter. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet - for now I'm going to use it as my less-planned and less-structured place to share things. I've already gotten a few dozen emails in response, and it's been fun reconnecting with the people from that list. You can join us here.

Until Next Time

As always, thank you for reading.

Take care,

James