How to think about your values and let go of the junk
Values have recently taken my interest and have seemed to become more prominent in articles I’ve been reading and podcasts I’ve been listening to. Funny how that happens isn’t it?
So I wanted to share where my current thinking is on values in the hope that it brings some different perspectives and awareness to something I think is important to consider more carefully.
What are values?
Values serve as a life compass.
They help to drive our beliefs, our behaviour, our actions and our habits.
When it comes to difficult decisions, tricky trade-offs and knowing when to compromise - values are the guiding force to do what’s right for ourselves.
Knowing and activating yourself based on your values is going to steer you in a positive direction where you’ll feel more fulfilled and happy over time.
Aligning with your values keeps you healthy - emotionally, physically and spiritually.
Values help you stay in your lane; know who you are. They help you navigate the tricky feelings of comparison and come back to yourself with a heartfelt appreciation.
I’m sure you’ve been in a situation you can recall where something didn’t feel quite right to you; you were asked at work to do something that didn’t feel aligned; your friend’s idea of fun didn’t feel much like fun to you; or you didn’t like the way someone behaved.
All of these instances can be clues to bring awareness to values, even if we aren’t fully aware of them yet.
Our Values as Our Problems
Recently I read Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (not a fan of the title but I did enjoy the book).
Mark dives deeply into values, including an examination of the metrics we use to measure ourselves against them, illustrating his points with some interesting stories.
For example, we value success and the metric is the amount of money earnt or position obtained. Alternatively, we value the progress of a romantic relationship and the unconscious metric we’ve adopted is how long it takes for someone to get engaged.
I found this interesting because I had always seen values as a way to guide positive decisions and hadn’t formulated this values-metrics concept in my head before reading this.
In this way, Mark continues and identifies our values as the source of our problems - where the source of unhappiness lurks in a dodgy value we are holding onto - possibly more consciously or unconsciously.
Johann Hari’s work echoes a similar sentiment...
Travelling the world speaking to various experts about the global mental health epidemic, Johann provides food for thought. He points the finger at the notion of ‘junk values’ - things that society, culture and trends have programmed us to value. These things may seem harmless to value in the moment e.g. purchasing a handbag to celebrate a promotion, however over time, the acting out of these values makes us unhappy where it draws away from the less meaningful.
“..junk values don’t meet our underlying psychological needs — to have meaning and connection in our lives. Extrinsic values are KFC for the soul. Yet our culture constantly pushes us to live extrinsically.” Johann Hari
This is powerful to consider because yes, we can do a personal values list and decide that honesty, integrity and all the virtuous ones are who we want to embody, yet when it comes to acting out our lives, the ‘junk values’ easily take over.
Someone may verbally deny that money, success, looking good, material things, the social media ‘likes’ etc. don’t mean anything to them, but it’s likely the case they do. After all, we are human and we want to fit in with the tribe and feel belonging. So all of these potential junk values are coming at us in some form or another. I feel we’re all navigating this in our own way.
Even if we don’t want to consciously admit these are our values, subconsciously they are seeping in from either past programming or current social and media influences.
So the question I’ve been asking is how do we uncover these so that we can weed out the unhelpful values and beliefs as a way to improve and manage our own mental health?
Values and culture
One thing seems for sure, who we follow on social media, what we read, what we watch - all of these things are strongly influencing our values over time.
And so the answer to my question, for now, is to become ever more conscious and questioning of the inputs that I’m consuming and my recognition of those with different values to me.
Where does this person or organisation embody values I align with and where do we have some differences?
Can I consume and learn from them whilst appreciating and being aware of those differences?
Are there elements of values here that I would like to embrace?
Getting intentional about understanding your values
Values change and evolve. To think that you maintain the same values throughout your whole life is possibly a mistake. How we journey through events, lessons and other people will shape our values in life.
I believe examining our lived experiences, being truly self-aware and honest about our feelings will help us to understand and live true to them. Owning up to the junk when we see it and taking action to change will equally help.
So here’s the case to be more value adoption conscious. What do you think?