Values 2.0
Tags: Personal Development, Organisational Design, Organisation Development, Values, Coaching

Defining your values gives you confidence, stability, consistency and helps you to make decisions. I first defined my values when I went freelance, in May 2017, over three years ago. The end of this strange year felt like a good time to revisit my values, with the help of my wonderful coach, Lou Shackleton.

How I defined my values

I did some prep work with Lou, capturing significant moments of my life. Lou then posted me a pack of about 150 potential values, with some instructions for sifting through them to find the right ones for me.

When I got down to the clusters you can see above, I went through each value and tested whether I could immediately call to mind multiple instances of when I’ve lived by that value. If I could, then it was authentic. If not, then I was attempting to be someone that I’m not (oh, to be the kind of person who can claim “contentment” as a value!). I also wanted the values to feel stretching, like fully embodying them might cause me a little discomfort at times, might encourage me to be bolder, more uncompromising. When I had about twenty words left, I tried to sense how they felt in my body. Which felt surprising, energising, thrilling? Which felt like home? I also tried saying them out loud, as if to a friend or client (“my values are X…”) to sense if any of the words held embarrassment or fear for me.

Updated values

2017 values: Caring, Growth, Freedom, Risk-taking, Meaning, Equality, Balance. Updated 2020 values: Care, Growth, Freedom, Courage, Purpose, Justice, Belonging, Flair

I’m really pleased that there’s been a shift in my values, but not too radical a shift. I’d worry if what I value hadn’t changed at all in three years, and I’d also worry if there was zero continuity. Three out of the seven have stayed constant (Care, Growth, Freedom), three are iterations of the 2017 values (Courage, Purpose, Justice) and there are two new additions (Belonging and Flair). Eight values is too many. I’ll revisit them in 2021 and see which have stuck and which I might retire.

If you know me well, I hope that these values align with your perception of me. If they don’t align, please keep quiet and allow me to remain blissfully self-ignorant…

Care (replaces “balance” and “caring”)

Related values: generosity, service, tenderness.

I’ve read too many articles that describe how our lives are pummelled by systemic forces like patriarchy, white supremacy and ableism, only to end with a platitudinous call for us to individually achieve “balance”. Enough. Balance is not achievable for me, I won’t hold myself to it any longer.

I can always carve out space for Care, though. Things may be eternally unbalanced, but I can care for myself, I can ask for care when I need it, I can care for others, I can work to bring about a society of care. Care is a grain-of-sand-word that contains a world of radicalism, as Johanna Hevda writes:

We take care, we give care, and it can be contagious, it can spread. It shows us that the limit of the world is always a place to be exploded, pushed against, transformed. Meet me there, at the end, where there is give and take, and let’s follow each other into the beginning.

Growth

Related values: challenge, rigour, decisiveness

I dithered with Growth. I was tempted to choose “challenge” instead, a space I’ve stepped much more into over the past 18 months through coaching senior leadership teams. “Emily challenges us with love” is the most common flavour of feedback I get from clients. But then I realised that the reason I challenge is because I believe every person and every group can grow. So, Growth stays, but it’s a word that has evolved a great deal for me in the past three years.

Back in 2017, Growth was an inwardly focused value for me. I was thinking a lot about my individual journey at the time: being chronically ill, re-negotiating relationships, going freelance, building new skills in organisational design. Now, it’s a relational word: I recognise that I grow in relationship with others. And I now know that some of the greatest joys I’ve experienced have been the times I’ve supported others to grow. It’s one of the reasons I trained as a coach this year.

Freedom

Related values: wildness

Freedom is my core, guiding value. If I need to make a decision, I ask myself: “does this make me feel free?”. For me, it’s a “feeling”, not a “thinking”, value. It feels like:

Sauntering down Buenos Aires’ wide neo-classical avenues, morning cigarette in hand, on my way to Spanish class

Spending hours with a good friend, cocooned in connection, not looking at my phone once

Whooping into the blustery wind on a coastal walk

Letting go of other people’s expectations

Presence, vitality, a really deep breath

Courage (replaces “risk-taking”)

Related values: leadership, intuition, vision, truth-seeking, faith, hope

“Risk-taking”, my 2017 value, feels a little tone-deaf to me now. It reads like someone who isn’t aware of the privileges they have that allow them to take risks (I’m sure that was true of me in 2017). I think I was really trying to convey Courage. The etymology of Courage is “heart” (from the Latin “cor”): warm, feeling, expressive, intuitive, embodied. I hope it encourages me to sense the right path and follow it, even in the face of fear and opposition.

Purpose (replaces “meaning”)

Related values: legacy

As an explainer to my 2017 value of “meaning”, I’d written “doing work that positively impacts society” and “generating shared value”. Bit dull, no? Back in 2017, it was enough for me to be guided by finding “meaning” in my work, a general sense of “doing good”. But I need more than meaning. I need purpose. Three years on, I know that my purpose is to make life better for people with chronic illnesses. I have the lived experience (five years of illness), knowledge and skills (design, coaching, facilitation). It’s what excites me and it’s where I belong. I expect I’ll do all sorts of things to fulfil this purpose. For the moment, I support clients to build more equitable workplaces, I talk about my experiences and share the voices of others, and I support friends and peers with chronic illnesses in small, everyday ways.

Justice (replaces “equality”)

In 2017, I thought that working with governments and charities meant that I was living by the value of “equality”. I hadn’t properly interrogated the systems those institutions perpetuate. I hadn’t thought enough about my own power and privileges as a designer (I wish I had read George Aye’s post much earlier!). I hadn’t grasped that “equality” is twinned with “meritocracy”: treating everyone the same, ignoring the systems of oppression that mean people have very different lived experiences.

Justice is a far more ambitious thing to strive towards. For me, it’s a “stretch” value that I included to keep challenging myself. At the moment, this value shows up in the way I choose to ask awkward questions of my clients and among my networks, and remove myself when I think that I will unfairly take up opportunity or space. I am also building my advocacy for people with chronic illnesses, and hope there is more to come on this in 2021. However, I cannot claim to truly live by Justice, not by a long stretch. Re-reading the Design Justice Network’s Design Principles, I see that my practice is far from meeting this standard. I have work to do.