(In Both Life & Leadership)
Imagine you’re sitting at your desk, with a list of your core values on a piece of paper in front of you. Maybe you’ve scribbled them on a sticky note and stuck them to your computer monitor. You can see them every day. But you notice they’re not doing you any good.
Core values play a key role in intentional leadership, and over the past month I’ve broken down my “Mining for Values” exercise into a three-part series that ended last week.
But discovering your core values is really just the beginning.
The true “value” in knowing your values comes when you start using them as a tool. You see, when you know your values, you can make decisions to intentionally live and lead in a way that is aligned with who you are at your core.
I think about using values to live in alignment with your true self in three ways:
- Looking Forward: You can use your values to look forward and be intentional about life’s big choices, or choose a path of action when you’re feeling stuck.
- Looking Back: You can use your values by looking back at your decisions, and using your values to get back on track when you’ve strayed from them.
- Every Day: You can start to form new habits or ingrained ways of thinking and behaving that operate behind the scenes, so that your auto-pilot decisions are aligned with your values.
Let’s explore how these strategies work in the real world.
Looking Forward: Making Big Life & Leadership Decisions
There are moments in life that feel like inflection points, where our decisions seem weightier and more significant—like choosing where to live, who to partner with, or what to do with your career. These are perfect opportunities to check in and align with your values.
When I chose to leave my marketing career and start over as a coach, it was one of those milestone decisions that took a lot of deliberation. From the outside, this decision might have looked risky, and in fact, it was risky. More than one well-meaning person advised me to stay the course and stick with the successful career I had built.
But my top values of connection and impact were not being fully expressed in my marketing career. I felt a growing cavern in my soul that longed to align with these core values. And so, I took the risk and never looked back. Now, I’m vibrating daily with the energy that comes from doing work that truly lights me up.
When you’re feeling stuck or you have an important decision to make, check in with your values and see if there’s an option that feels fully aligned.
Looking Back: Getting Back on the Right Path
We all know that life is busy. You get pulled in dozens of directions. You have countless distractions fighting for your attention. It’s easy to get off track and make a choice in the moment that isn’t truly “you”.
Because life moves so quickly, you might not even notice right away when you start to drift. Then one day you wake up and realize you’ve gone astray. An airplane that gets just one degree off course can eventually end up on a different continent if they don’t course correct!
The likely indicator that you’re off track may be a sense of friction, tension, or longing. You can feel that something’s not quite right, but it’s not immediately clear what it is.
This internal friction is your invitation to check where you are against your values. Have you been making choices that reflect what’s most important to you? Or perhaps you’ve been choosing to please someone else or to satisfy society’s expectations of you?
Looking back, you may have a sense of perspective that wasn’t available to you in the moments when you made those choices. Use that perspective as the gift that it is and check where you are against your unique and very personal core values.
Every Day: Auto-Pilot In The Moment
This third way to use your values to live in alignment is to make them habitual.
It’s estimated that we make about 35,000 decisions every day and only about 70 of them are conscious choices. That leaves 34,930 decisions to auto-pilot!
When we consciously practice and reflect on our core values, they become more fully woven into our habits. And those habits are the stop-gap that can hold us in alignment with our values in spite of our busy, non-stop lives.
When your values are habitual, you minimize the friction of all the many choices where you have both options that align and those that don’t. Aligning with your values becomes automatic.
Putting It Into Practice
With any of these three alignment practices, the first step is to know what your core values are. You can’t align with them if you don’t know what they are!
If you followed my “Mining for Values” email series, you have already learned how to extract your values and narrow down your list to the top 4-6 values that define you the most.
But if you’re new to my newsletter or missed part of the series, you can find the whole series on my website. Just click on the links below to start from the beginning, or pick up where you left off:
Are you excited about discovering YOUR core values? If so, let the world know on LinkedIn and tag me @Wendy McManus, PCC, CPCC.