Living in Alignment
How taking some time to tune into our values can help us feel greater degrees of purpose in our lives
I recently ran a small session for my team offsite on motivation. The core essence of the session being that we feel motivated when we’re living in alignment with our values.
The problem is, when we hear the term values, we so often get tripped up in the semantics. I’ve heard values expressed as:
Material objects
Feelings
Attitudes
Desires
Fundamental needs
Generally speaking, I like to stick to a simple definition of values, as I think they are something we should re-visit and re-evaluate regularly throughout the year. Having a concise definition aids in the revisiting.
Simply:
Values can be defined as a set of beliefs or principals we use to guide our behaviour and decision making.
Whether we’ve taken time to identify our values or not, we can likely all relate to the feeling of living in alignment with them.
You feel more resolute in your decision making, more confident in your opinions, more satisfied with your achievements and generally more filled with purpose in your day-to-day.
Conversely, misalignment can fill us with a generalised dissatisfaction, existentialism and it will create a lot more resistance in the decision-making process!
In absence of proper consideration, we may put a lot of energy into attaining idealised states or coveted material objects that we believe will bring us fulfilment, only to be brought up short by how much resistance we find in the journey. Or finding we attain these things, only to feel empty or unsatisfied.
Often with the material, asking ‘what does this bring to my life?’, can help uncover the real motivation that lies behind attaining this thing.
I like to use the example of money as it’s controversial; people often blindly orientate themselves towards attaining more of it, because well, we live in a capitalistic society where more is more!
But our desire to earn can help us shine a light into our values. Take the following statements:
By earning more, I can work less and travel more
Money gives me the ability to spend more time with family and friends
Money let’s me visit beautiful places and connect with nature
The more I earn, the more I can help others by giving it away
We can easily abstract values from those:
Travel / Freedom
Quality time with family and friends
Connecting with nature
Helping others
You’ll notice everything in the first list is tied to money, whilst nothing in the second list is.
It’s pretty much a sure thing that money will come and go, but knowing what we valued behind it, can help us stay true to ourselves and maintain alignment.
Two ways of identifying values
Deriving your values from others
Bring to mind 3 people you admire and respect. This could be anyone; family member, celebrity, favourite author, inspiring activist …
Spend time (anything from a 2 - 10 minutes should be adequate) answering the following questions:
What do I admire in these people?
In which context are they displaying the behaviours/values that I admire?
After this, spend the same amount of time again writing out a list of values based on your previous notes.
Try and follow this format:
Value - brief description / explanation of what you specifically mean (I’ll give an example of 2 ways of interpreting the same value)
Ex: Freedom - Wherever I live I want access to the ocean within 1 hour. It grounds me and brings me a sense of peace and freedom.
Ex: Freedom - My career has to enable travel. Any job I take should allow me the ability to move place within 3m notice but ideally is remote
Aim to condense this list into 3-5 core values. These are your values!
Follow-up:
Follow-up this exercise with weekly check-ins for 1-2 months after to see how your daily life aligns
After this make it something you come back to 4 times per year (or once per half, at minimum!)
Remember:
Typically the deeper you go when evaluating, the more generally applicable your values will become and this, in turn, will make orientating yourself and your decisions much easier.
Deriving your values from past experiences
Bring to mind a list of as many significant moments throughout your life as possible and write them down - these can be positive or negative
Write down what you learnt from each and how it changed your thinking. If you’re struggling to recall one then it might not be as important, so don’t worry
Ideally you’ll end up with a list of around 10
Example: The first time I spent a prolonged period of time travelling, I realised I’d sheltered my thinking and should endeavour to live in a multicultural environment wherever possible.
Condense this experiences into values
Taking the above example, my value would be: Diversity - having diversity of opinion, of culture and of opportunity is fundamental to me.
Follow-up in the same way as above!
If you’re struggling during these exercises and need some inspiration, the Values Institute published a great resource which lists out different types of human values.
I’ll end with a great quote from the notorious podcaster, Rich Roll:
“Pursue what’s in your heart, and the universe will conspire to support you.”
Your values lie deep in your heart. Find them and find alignment. It won’t be easy, but it sure as hell will be easier!
Thanks for reading!