I believe the more society evolves its understanding of core values, the more personal agency people will realize they have. This is something I work on with my own clients. As a coach, how do you help people understand their core values as individual barometers for finding meaning in their lives? —Brooke M.
It sounds so simple, even corny, but understanding one’s core values can create tremendous meaning in life. Thank you for this question, Brooke, and thank you for your work in the same arena!
As a lover of language, clarifying values is one of the most creative, rewarding parts of coaching for me. It’s an endless source of exploration, too, because our values are always evolving—or at least how we prioritize and express them is.
Of course, coaches have a variety of ways in which they approach it.
In my own practice, I dive into values at the outset, then often circle back, inquiring how they might be changing or currently expressed. To begin, I listen for words or themes that sound like they matter in someone’s stories, and then I’ll posit intuitive hits: Is this the idea? How does that land? What else could it be? My goal isn’t to guess someone’s values correctly or “see all” like a confident VC, but to produce some language to knock around until we get closer to what’s at stake together. It’s a bit like workshopping the self.
The thing about values is they hide in plain sight. When you shift your focus and begin listening for them, you find them embedded everywhere, even, or especially, in stories of our peak moments or angriest complaints. You begin to hear them the way a musician attunes to the layering of instruments in a song, or an artist look at an egg as a pattern of lights and darks, or an analyst spots trends in data that the rest of us cannot see.
I tend to listen for values like a poet, looking a bit indirectly at the essence or self-expression of a life.
I try to crawl underneath narratives that have been assigned to us by culture and society, and here’s why: Sometimes people struggle to differentiate their values from those that they believe they are supposed to hold (because what good person wouldn’t) such as “excellence” or “commitment” or “health.” I’ve found an adherence to prescribed values to be especially true for those who come from “tight” cultures, to borrow a term from the fabulous Michele Gelfand. In tight cultures—whether organizational, cultural, or nation states—there are stronger social norms in which sharing values-in-common is essential to the group’s identity, even survival. The military is one example of this—it’s easy see how “devotion to duty,” “honor,” and “courage” are instilled as shared values when the necessary objective is to think and act as a unit in high-stakes circumstances.
But when safety is not a factor, when we have infinite possibilities for self-expression, I encourage people to break out of the boxy-and-formulaic way they’ve learned to think about values and get creative. For example, one of my core values is “Las Vegas,” the city that is my home, because I like the feelings and attitudes it evokes. My personal Vegas is a mash-mash of high and low culture, imperfections and striving, hospitality and entertainment, glamour, nature, and diversity. Claiming “Vegas” as a value reminds me to stay open-minded, work hard, and have fun. I see it as an equalizer too, in that we all can be a lil wild, and basic, and honest about both.
This is the agency that you spoke about, Brooke.
When we understand what matters to our person, we can learn to generate, or replicate, those inner-states of being with more intention.
As a coach, I encourage people to come up with their own metaphors because I’m not the only one with values at the intersection of this-and-that. The result can be a unique, valuable expression of guidance for the self, not just the “right” words in a proper order.
—Steph