How to Keep Relationship to Your Pursuit in Harmony With Your Core Values
“There will inevitably be times when we need to try new ideas — release our current knowledge to take in new information — but it’s critical to integrate this new information in a manner that does not violate who we are.”
— with these words Josh Waitzkin, in his absolutely brilliant book “The Art of Learning”, inspired me to share my thoughts on relationship to my pursuit, it’s ups & downs as well as successful strategies on how to overcome serious obstacles, quite often not recognized as growth opportunities.
My world is falling down…
Remember the times when your inner voice had been into a long conversation with yourself about how difficult moment in your life you are in? Or how hard you try to accomplish your life goals and you are still nowhere, miles behind the others you see on social media — happy, successful, beautiful, powerful, brave “achievers”. You don’t see any solutions on how to move forward with your life, starting to feel helpless, sad and finally — depressed. Then ashamed of it, guilty and eventually not worth anything… It feels like your world is coming to an end, you failed and don’t know what to do — on the top of that this pleasant experience of having some sense of pursuit in your life nearly extinguished what drives you even more crazy (in fact this phenomenon is called “Downward Spiral”). It happens to us that we lose contact with reality in a very bad manner and for reasons that simply don’t deserve that much of our mental effort. Luckily:
- You are not on your own (there are millions of others feeling the same — does it help?)
- There is an end to this suffering
- I’m going to share my experience of pursuit-disappointment and strategies on how to exit it and get back into growing path
Strategy #1: Keep yourself in 3 “areas of excellence” at the same time
When I came to the point of deciding to arrange a meeting with a psychologist I felt both ashamed and intrigued. “Ashamed” as I was not able to help myself (that’s what I believed at least). “Intrigued” because I have always been fascinated by psychology and it was my first time to meet such a professional. Later on, it turned out to be a very efficient way for me to discover some truths about myself, but one of the lessons was particularly interesting. At that time I had a vision of me getting stuck in growing my company with no further results and I really felt like I failed and disappointed my friends, business partner, then wife & eventually also myself. What was a terrifying vision of future for me, my coach (as I used to call him once I realized I’m not “sick”) just simplified into not spending enough time into 3 areas of excellence at the same time.
- Routinized. These are all activities & skills that you are already good at and perform more subconsciously. They are giving you stability in your life, sense of value & confidence (needed to learn new things).
- Learning. Things you are exploring at the moment, new skills you are learning, new knowledge you try to get in order to accomplish something, new relationships. They are giving you a sense of growth & progress (very important to your daily happiness).
- Planning. Visions, plans for the future, goals — all sorts of future-oriented thoughts that are feeding your imagination with a sense of purpose & inspiration (they bring you fulfillment).
In order to remain happy, satisfied and simply at the right place mentally, you need to be in these 3 areas at the same time with different skills & activities in your life. More importantly, focus on having a balance between them.
Otherwise:
- If you are consistently spending too much time on routinized activities, eventually you get bored with your life, start becoming afraid of new challenges, you feel like left behind (that’s what precisely happened to me!)
- If you focus too much attention on skills you are learning, eventually you lose your stability, trying too many things at a time, they start to be too difficult, you become less confident & start getting depressed with that. It’s a feeling of not being “good enough” (does it ring a bell for you?)
- Remaining for too long in planning activities is also harmful — there is a high risk of losing contact with reality. Dreaming about things and not getting them done makes you feel powerless, losing control over your life, not impactful enough to accomplish. It’s a highway to depression and “living by the image” of who you want to be without fulfilling it.
In order to grow, feel secure, joyful, purpose-driven, achieving and just simply happy about yourself, you need to be present in all these 3 areas in a well-balanced way.
Strategy #2: Stick to your core values
Facing new situations in life and overcoming obstacles requires us to get out of comfort zone, learn new stuff, discover something new about ourselves (which we may not like). Sometimes it feels more depressing than exciting, but the key to success it the right mindset, approach and strategy.
Yes, but what’s “right” here?
You need to stick to your center of gravity — core values. If you are a tree, they will be your roots, keeping your very stable, calm and ready to face the difficulties. Let me bring you an example from my life:
I have been recently struggling with very difficult client — cheating me, using some dirty tricks to prove me wrong, trying to manipulate situations to make them more favorable for him. At the same time, he’s bringing my company significant income. The atmosphere was getting more and more intense, the air around was very thick. The whole thing sucked and was causing me some mental pain — on one hand, I wanted to stick to this client as he was paying well, on the other hand, it was consuming more and more of my vitality & energy and I started to think if it’s worth it. Since I could not find the right solution and had no clue what is “right” and what is “wrong”, I have been sticking to it until I decided that I should find a solution that will be aligned with my core values.
One of my personal core values are independence & freedom. That’s why I decided very early in my life to become my own boss, that’s why I’m studying lots of Buddhist teachings, that’s why I always think how to get things done my way, that’s why I also seek to be creative (yes, core values have this magical feature to empower one another).
The very moment I decided to “use” this approach has made my next steps very clear:
- Instead of struggling and sticking to this situation I needed to focus very intensively on finding new prospects (or reducing costs) to feel more independent of income generated by this specific troublesome client
- Being manipulated, cheated, sometimes abused just simply limited my sense of freedom which I didn’t accept and decided to end it by simply giving this client up and resigning from further development for him (yes, I’m running an IT company).
Eventually, it turned out he’s quite ok with our proposal and my world didn’t fall down as I could have thought about it before. What’s more, I feel relieved & empowered with self-confidence and new energy to changes. I already spotted some similarities in different areas of my business and private life.
But here’s the tough part:
What’s the most important and difficult part of making benefits of out “stay-aligned-with-your-core-values” strategy? Recognizing your core values.
Don’t worry — there are strategies for it (it looks like I’m a strategist). Whereas it’s a brilliant topic for another article, let me briefly share with you a couple of them — if you give them enough thought, results may exceed your expectations. Life just gets much much easier when aligned with your core values:
Strategy #1 Just name them.
The simplest strategy of recognizing your core values (yes it’s that simple) is to ask yourself a question: “What Are My Core Values?”. And then write them down. But that’s not enough. The trick that your mind serves you while enumerating values that seems to be your core values is that it’s producing a mix of your true core values with values you think it’s good to have as core values.
How to distinguish them and keep only what’s yours?
To each value try to come up with as much as possible situations and behaviors from your life that seem to prove and support this value. Now please come up with all situations and behaviours that seems to be in contrary to these values (i.e. when you claim that honesty is your core value, yet you feel like there is no problem in small lies from time to time to get some benefits, or that if no one knows then it’s not a problem — then most probably “honesty” is not something at your ground).
I know how painful it is to discover that some of the values that you want to be your core values are in fact not — I’ve been through it already.
There is another pitfall of this strategy of naming your core values — we tend to think about adjectives for ourselves (like “I'm: honest, intelligent, easy-going…”), while questions about values should be more focused on what we believe in and why it’s so important for us so that we can call it a “guiding principle” of our life?
Strategy #2 Memorize impactful people & situations from your childhood.
Another strategy to discover your core values is bringing your childhood memories… think of people in your life that you believe they impacted your life in some significant way (especially when you are very young as it’s this magical period of time when your values are born). What did they teach you? What did you learn from them? Now please think also about situations from your childhood that are very vivid memories — how did you act then? And why this way?
As you may notice, this strategy is coming from “evidence” to naming your values, while the previous strategy was the other way round.
In exploring your core values it’s equally important to understand WHY particular value is significant for you. Very oftent this justification helps you distinguish if you are talking about value or rather some kind of behaviour.
Surely in your life there will be times when you need a strategy on how to take another step forward without knowing all the answers up-front or get out of the downward spiral of mistakes, mental self-destruction loop and helplessness. In times like this, remember about staying in 3 areas of excellence at the same time and stick to your core values as lighthouses on the relentless ocean of your life.
P.S. Enjoy this type of content? You can find more of it in my “The Inner Game” publication where I am writing to help entrepreneurs win their inner games.
