Values: Things we actually DO

Across the past 20 years, I’ve been part of more organizational “values” brainstorming sessions, curated announcements, and implementation tactics than I could begin to calculate.

Some organizations I worked for were better at aligning their values to leadership and employee behaviors than others. Many had an initial burst of excitement when rolling them out on endless email cascades, video calls, and website overhauls, before yielding to entrenched cultural patterns that made the latest values statements mere afterthoughts.

I was sometimes part of the solution or part of the problem, especially during my final years working for T-Mobile HR when I was responsible for the enterprise-wide leadership competency framework that we dared to call our Values in Action.

Some things I often hear leaders and employees say:

They’re not living our values

We don’t talk enough about our values

I need to check our company website because there’s one or two values I can’t remember

We have too many values, we can’t possibly achieve them all

Wherever a particular organization falls on the continuum between blowing off its stated values and driving them deep into culture and operations, to quote one of my former managers, I’m seldom surprised but often disappointed.

I’m far more intrigued by (and feel a lot more agency regarding) the ongoing discernment and practice of my own so-called values, paying attention to how they’ve shifted across time, noticing when I’ve actually “walked the talk” and when I’ve fallen flat on my face.

During the past year I’ve realized that values need a few years of consistent practice before becoming “Instagram official.” Not perfect living, of course, but ongoing, heartfelt effort across time, navigating highs and lows, successes and disappointments, complexities and tough choices.

An organization can’t merely slap their values statements onto a wall and declare with full truthfulness, these are our values! Neither can a human being.

Because of this reframing, I’m able to state with confidence (finally!!!), that three specific areas of my life have solidified as “values” across this decade of my 50s:

Self-care

Relationships

Vocation

For me, self-care is physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual engagement. It’s nutrition, exercise, and sleep. It manifests through curiosity, learning, reflecting, and writing, through ongoing leaning into things I’ve been unwilling to feel and trying to be mindful of my breath, body, and mind states.

Regarding relationships, I want them to be personified incubators of not only altruism, compassion, and kindness, but challenge; people bringing out the best of me and not holding back when they see me getting in my own way.

And vocation, as I wrote about here, is most satisfying for me when there’s ongoing flow states; not “non-stop,” because that simply doesn’t happen, but frequent enough that I know I’m playing in the right sandbox. Vocation is where I embrace constant growth and improvement, making things better for people by giving my best and “saying no” to what’s “not me.”

The interplay of these values matters.

The quality of my self-care has an outsized impact on my orientation to other people. And when I’m at peace with my self-care and relationships, I experience manifold clarity regarding my vocation and the meaning I make offering my strengths and frailties to the world. This motivates even more self-care. It’s a constant, reinforcing feedback loop.

Just like some all organizations, I don’t live my values 100 percent of the time. And that tells me they’re also aspirations.

I aspire to embody and demonstrate my values even more as I lean into the future. There are always fresh outcomes, new circumstances, and flashes of self-awareness when I’m more authentically living my values just a little more than I was yesterday.

I care so much about values having validity because of how wonderful they make me feel. When I can say without hesitation that what I value is generally what I am doing now, there’s a sense of having integrity, of being a decent person.

Looking back at my previous decades of life, I see choices I made that were incongruent with my self-proclaimed values. I made too many impulsive decisions, directly or indirectly hurt people, and was desperate to find a framework or blueprint in some thought leader’s book or institution’s theology that I could fully implement and have that be my ironclad, permanent values.

I didn’t want to do the heavy lifting. I wanted someone else to make the donuts so I could simply enjoy them, sort of like pulling into the parking lot at Krispy Kreme when I see the flashing lights and salivate like Pavlov’s dog.

In addition to my recent clarity about values being things I actually do, I’ve had an insight about “wants.”

I’d been viewing wants as separate but interconnected longings in juxtaposition with my values. For several years, I told myself and others that I wanted these three things most of all:

Joy

Meaning

Peace

But I’m no longer convinced that a separate set of wants is necessary. Because if my values have truly manifested out of the things I’ve actually been doing fairly consistently for several years, they are also what I want.

If they weren’t, I would have stopped by now.

When I observe myself demonstrating self-care, relationship, and vocation, I feel joy as an intimate engagement with funny, happy, or powerful moments.

I notice that I’m cultivating meaning; there’s a deeply felt, all-encompassing recognition that what I’m doing is making the world a little better for others.

And in those moments of values congruency, there’s an internal river of peace snaking throughout my body, an intuitive knowledge that I can manage and live with whatever has come before and whatever comes next.

What I truly value is what I truly want and what I truly want is what I truly value.

And any ostensible evidence must ultimately be grounded in how I’ve been living my life across time.

I find a lighter burden here. I don’t have to try as hard anymore to get clarity regarding what I value, and I’m certainly not looking for someone else or some institution to tell me what my values should be. To try and shame me.

Because that has never and will never work for me.