My sister recently asked me what’s important to me. What I hold as my guiding light.
A year plus ago, my coach had me focus on a Values exercise where I dove deep to try and come up with two value statements that reflected who I am at my core. The exercise was HARD, and took me almost 3 hours over the course of multiple sittings. And what bubbled up to the surface as core values surprised me, to be frank. There were things there that I didn’t think were as important to me as they actually are.
Today I had the privilege of working with a client to get through a similar exercise. Though it met with some initial resistance because it felt a little like a corporate exercise in coming up with a mission statement (more on that in a later paragraph), my client indulged me and went through the process. We went deep. There were tears. But boy, was there ever clarity.
So much of our lives are spent running on auto-pilot. We are constantly butting up against work deadlines, commitments to ourselves and others, keeping our homes up and running, managing and taking care of our families. We are stressed and anxious about all that’s going on and we fight to just keep our heads above water. There can be a lot of friction, a lot of hard things to go through.
Often, the source of our friction is misalignment with who we are at our core. Your why, your purpose at the core is your north star, your guiding light.
Go back for a second to the notion of a company creating a mission statement… Does a company without a core purpose really know who their clients are, what to build, what to sell, why they even exist?
How do we navigate life without understanding what’s really important to us?
Imagine you are someone who thrives on morning exercise, but daily early-start work commitments push you to move your workouts to the end of the day. “No problem”, you think… “I can make it work.” But each evening in the gym you find yourself exhausted and only half-heartedly making an effort. You begin to resist the gym, spending less time there. Your muscles start to atrophy and you feel even worse. There is suddenly friction. The misalignment: You are at your best in the mornings and your evening workouts are not having the same impact as the morning ones.
I remember once having to make the difficult decision to leave a workplace I loved, filled with people who had become good friends over the years we’d worked together. I lived with a lot of friction in that workplace for a long time, and eventually came to the conclusion that the job wasn’t worth an ulcer, so I had to leave. I felt the environment had become toxic. The once inspirational leader became immersed in managing up. I felt like I was merely a stepping stone on their climb to the top. I no longer felt valued or safe. While I watched others manipulate themselves into pretzels to accommodate the changing demands, it was taking a huge toll on me. I was less engaged in the work and the work I did was feeling hard, and no longer fun like it had felt before.
It was only years later, having done the work on recognizing my core values, that I realized I was so frustrated back then because the team’s values had become misaligned with what was truly important to me at my core.
Understanding your why will help you make better decisions and more easily. It will, as Simon Sinek says, have you stop talking about what you do and start talking about what you believe.
My client printed up his value statements to put up in front of his workspace as a reminder to remain aligned to his core.
I am taking the Simon Sinek “Finding Your Why” course now to dig even deeper into my own Why. Because growth and learning never end!
Lessons Learned:
Spend some time deep diving into understanding who you are at your core. It will be one of the best investments you make in yourself.
Understanding your why helps you make better decisions and more easily. It will, as Simon Sinek says, have you stop talking about what you do and start talking about what you believe.
The perspective we gain from understanding our purpose is invaluable in helping us maintain our peace of mind as we steer our ship though the sea of this crazy thing called life.
original artwork by gayle charach