How Discovering and Sharing my Values Brought Clarity to my Work
A breakdown of my newly discovered values and the behaviors that support and hinder my living out my values.
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This article is the overflow article from another article from last week. Feel free to check that out to understand the process that got us here.
After going through the exercise, our team had a collective set of values that I’m really proud to share: Order, Development, Inclusion, Practicality, Generosity, Gratitude, Openness, Trust, Efficiency, Creativity, Positivity, Nurturing, Personal Fulfillment, Happiness. I don’t want to speak to others’ values, but I’d love to elaborate on my chosen values and the behaviors associated with them.
It was a tortuous couple of hours and days deciding on which words I wanted to assign to myself. Brené Brown provided a long list of words to start with, but I struggled to find the just right words within it. I really wanted to reach out to my partner and run ideas by her, but was on a 6 hour flight, leaving me alone to wrestle with the options. I thought about what I felt drove me, and when I felt most comfortable. Gratitude and Compassion for others are a huge part of who I am, but I couldn’t map them to all of the decisions I tend to make. I enjoy teaching others, which maps, but I also enjoy board games, and single player video games, which didn’t align with either potential value. I swapped Gratitude for Control to incorporate my love for board games, where you have a structured interaction with others, but it didn’t really feel like it captured me “at my best.” The word itself has negative connotations of micro-managing and power-grabbing. I thought harder and after several days found Order to touch on the same feeling I get while playing games, without all the negative associations.
After that, I revisited Compassion. It felt a little too generic, and I didn’t feel it fully aligned with me. Something else was driving my compassionate behavior, and there were other crucial behaviors of who I was that weren’t accounted for yet. After another week of pondering on and off, on my train ride to work one morning I realized that Development, the drive to make things better, drove my interactions with my work and those around me. Now, let’s dive into my final reasoning behind these two values, Order and Development.
My Values: Order
Order perfectly captures my love of board games, passion for improving processes, and interest in understanding patterns. I am energized by planning and structure and am made uncomfortable by chaos.
Good Behaviors related to Order
- Kind follows kind. I am kind to those I interact with, and I know those acts of kindness will breed further kindness in the world.
- Find peace in the patterns. Enjoy the challenge of identifying patterns in my life and surroundings.
- Search for opportunities to reduce uncertainty & chaos. Order and certainty help to reduce anxiety and stress. I identify areas where I can reduce chaos to feel better about my approach to problems.
Slippery Behaviors related to Order
- Letting anger or stress cause me to escalate the chaos in a situation. I can sometimes miss opportunities to reduce chaos when I’m frustrated or aggravated. These situations tend to continue to spiral and require more effort to resolve later on.
- Having my assumed order interfere with others trying to understand/engage in their own way. I can get too focused on my own perspective of a situation, and get defensive when others introduce their own interpretation. This can lead to me ostracizing others for not committing to the rules I already have in place.
- Conflating “how it’s been done in the past” with “how it should be done.” It can be easy for me to become comfortable with the order of the status quo and feel uncomfortable when someone challenges it. This discomfort can cause me to not participate when there is a push to improve our systems.
This Value in Action
I channel Order when I’m at home with friends (pre-quarantine), and we break out a cooperative board game to play together. One of my friends hasn’t played before, so I walk through the rules, using game pieces as visual aids to explain the different concepts. We enjoy the quality time together strategizing how to beat the game, leaning on each others’ character’s strengths. The new player is able to contribute and help us win as a team.
My Values: Development
Development is the other half of who I am, at my core. I am driven and excited by personal and peer development. I love the feeling of mastering combat against a specific enemy in a video game, or teaching a new concept to a coworker.
Good Behaviors related to Development
- Move to improve. Take action, and have that action make my community better. Avoid decisions that cause hurt or destruction. Lastly, being passive when faced with unfair or broken systems is choosing to let them cause pain and discomfort. Do something to make a positive difference.
- Everyone has potential. Every single person has the capacity to do more. I must work to find individuals’ passions and potential, and highlight when they are being used to do great things.
- Welcome feedback. To develop myself, it is imperative I welcome and process both positive and constructive feedback.
- Seek understanding. To be able to help others, and help them develop skills, it is important I understand their strengths, weaknesses, passions, and preferences. This information will help me better help others develop themselves.
Slippery Behaviors related to Development
- Closing myself off to feedback that will help me develop. I can take constructive feedback personally which can lead to me ignoring the feedback or feeling negatively about the person providing the feedback.
- Ignoring someone who feels that they can’t improve. It can be difficult to help others that struggle to help themselves. Writing them off can be especially hurtful for them and their future.
- Letting a “just okay” process continue uninvestigated. It can be easy to keep my head down in day-to-day work and not realize that the process I am working within could be improved. This leads to ongoing inefficiencies and a wearing down over time for everyone involved in the system.
This Value in Action
While directing the entire onboarding experience for my team’s new hire, I sit down to review a specific subject, the deliverables our team is responsible for. I work through my agenda of topics to cover, and am able to answer clarifying questions as we walk through. At the end of the training session, the new hire says the session was extremely helpful and exposed them to certain subjects that hadn’t yet been touched on in their other trainings so far.
Conclusion of the Exercise
It felt great to see everyone taking the exercise seriously, and arriving at some really genuine realizations about themselves. This exercise was a true exercise in vulnerability, and I gained valuable insights about my peers and their motivators. Personally, I appreciated the opportunity to introspect and realign myself with my job and extracurriculars. It is more impactful to make decisions driven by my values, and having those explicitly stated to guide me as I continue to navigate adulthood.
I encourage the reader to find a copy of Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead to further engage with concepts discussed in these articles and go through these exercises yourself!
