Defying Gravity
The life changing magic of leading with your values when making life decisions.
What do you value? This is a simple question, but depending on how much you’ve sat with the concept, it may not be an easy one to answer. We have been reflecting on our values in my intensive outpatient therapy program and how they can influence our overall happiness. The concept has been inspiring. I now know that the persistent guilt that creeps into my head tends to come up when I am living inconsistently with my values.
Our values can serve as a compass during personal decision making. Many of us make decisions based on how we feel about the different options. If you’ve been reading my blog, then you know that I consider feelings or emotions as an important tool for communicating information to us. Unfortunately, feelings are not always a reliable metric for making important decisions.
Feelings can be temporary. You certainly should not ignore your emotions but they can change from moment to moment depending on whether (1) you’ve had sufficient sleep, (2) your glucose and hormone levels are stable, (3) you’ve consumed mood altering substances (e.g., caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, or other drugs/medication), and (4) you’ve allowed sufficient time to process the event that prompted the emotion. Despite this, our feelings signal critical information for consideration when pondering an important question, especially when we experience the same feeling repeatedly in response to the same issue.
In contrast, our values tend to be fixed absent a life-changing event that fundamentally shakes us to our core. I am essentially the same person I used to be when I was a child. Certainly, I have added to my value system following major life events. My experiences also have helped to sharpen the focus of my value system. A person in their twenties may prioritize their education, career, or economic pursuits over love or family simply based on where they are in life. We reprioritize our values as we age.
This year is different. It has fundamentally changed me. Although I am an unabashed theater fan, I couldn’t previously relate to Wicked’s “Defying Gravity,” but the repeated life challenges I’ve experienced this year have given new meaning to the song lyrics. Now, I feel them in my soul:
Something has changed within me
Something is not the same
I'm through with playing by the rules of someone else's game
Too late for second-guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It's time to trust my instincts, close my eyes and leap
I have been living my life reactively and have been making decisions based on the influence of external forces and not my core values. Maybe it’s time I take a page out of the lessons I’ve learned in Corporate America, trust my instincts, and make decisions according to my core values.
I already have a practice of checking-in with myself periodically to identify and weigh my values when setting personal goals and crafting boundaries to manage my time. I just struggle with the execution and follow-through. The micro decisions I’ve made in past years haven’t always been consistent with those identified values and the boundaries I’ve identified to protect them.
This week, I’ve reflected on my top three core values with the goal of crafting the life I want. First and foremost, I value love and live my life accordingly. Love takes many forms. There is the romantic love, familial love, and platonic love. Regardless of the recipient, I lead with my heart. The people I love matter. This approach to life can leave me vulnerable to heartache. People with negative intentions can use it nefariously. I certainly experienced the downsides to this approach when I was younger and dating. Still, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Only this year, I am adding myself to the top of the list of people I love.
This brings me to my second core value, authenticity. I wear my heart on my sleeve because it is difficult for me to hide who I am, warts and all. It doesn’t make me a particularly good poker play, but I also wouldn’t want to hide who I am. The people I welcome into my life frequently are authentic, sometimes to a fault. Honesty can be hard to hear, but it is important to know with whom or what I am interacting. I retract when I encounter people who are unable to present their true selves. It is unsettling when I interact with people who wear a mask and share a different facade depending on which way the wind blows. I want to know the reality of the people who enter my lives, certainly within limit of their boundaries, but I want to trust that what they are telling me is true.
Next, I have come to recognize that it is essential for me to experience safety and security. This is probably why authenticity is so important. Safety and security are broad terms that can encompass so much in life. As a Taurus, it is important that I have financial security but that security only comes in response to my actions. I also detest change. I need to feel grounded. For these reasons, it is difficult for me to entrust or rely on another person to provide that security. I never aspired to marry a wealthy man and was too afraid to put my career on pause when my children were small. As a child of divorced parents raised in a family where marriage was rarely “until death do us part,” I understood that such a lifestyle would be impermanent. I was raised on the edict of “God Bless the Child that Has It’s Own” and I live my life accordingly.
Knowing these core values, it is not surprising how I struggle with reconciling my home life with my professional ambition. I write a lot about how my chosen career requires me to invest significant time and energy. It’s no wonder that I am repeatedly digesting resources on how best to set and hold boundaries, and manage my time. These core values can run in opposition. This is when the guilt sets in.
To remedy this, I will continue to reflect annually on what is important and try to rank those values according to priority. This accounts for the fact that the priority of my values may be in flux over time. Once I know how I prioritize my values in the present moment, I can check-in with myself on whether my goals, actions, or decisions align with those values. To help me with this, I have been working to refine my goals into bite-sized actionable habits using the SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound) goal framework so that I can take action consistently and achieve wins.
What about you? What do you value? If you aren’t sure, here are some questions that can help you calibrate and steer your life according to what’s most important:
What qualities do the people you most admire possess?
What qualities do the people you least admire share?
What personality traits do you possess that fill you with pride?
What are the people, concepts, or ideas that consistently fill you with the strongest emotion (e.g., happiness, fear, sadness, disgust, anger)?
What qualities do you look for in a life partner?
What legacy do you want to pass onto your children or leave behind in this world before you depart it?
What do you want your loved ones to say about you when delivering your eulogy or writing your obituary?
Once you have assembled your list, rank these qualities from 1-10. It may be helpful to arrange each in index cards so you can compare them against one another. Memorialize your values in writing. What actions can you take to live life according to these values? Can you plan them into bite-sized achievable pieces? How long do you think it will reasonably take to achieve them? The next time you are wrestling with an important and difficult decision, return to your value list. Break up the decision into bite-sized manageable questions. Then, take action in response to those answers so that you are closer to achieving the life you want.
The questions you pose to identify our values are helpful to define the values we hold dear and maybe never articulated. Two of my core values are trust and safety and they often go hand-in-hand. Thanks for this thought-provoking piece, Gwen.