Are you living your values?

As a follow on from the exercise in my post about Framing your Values we will look at the narrative around the values that you have set.

What goes through your mind when you think about how you think you live by your values? How do you show your values off in the world? How do your family, friends and colleagues know what values you have?- for example I have thoughtfulness as one of my values and I know I live by this value because of the gestures and actions I do to those around me. I also know that friends and family realise this.

Taking time to write down these 'narratives' helps you align yourself with your values in 'real' time i.e. sitting and thinking about your daily/weekly/monthly routine and how these values show up in your life.

Once you have those values and narratives written down a great exercise to see how you are ‘living’ your values right now is to -

🌱 Take the graphic ‘wheel if life’ - attached; 🌱 Write your values in each quadrant; 🌱 Rate how you are now living your life on a range of 1 to 10 (1 being this value is barely in my life to 10 I live this value every day in every way).

Now, let’s see if you can increase those lower ratings to get closer to 10!

When completed ask yourself - 1. What is challenging for me out of these values? 2. What is getting in the way of me having high ratings for all values? 3. What option in life am I choosing instead of these values? 4. When I look at these lower ratings what small thing can I do today to increase this rating?

This work will help bring awareness to your values and how you live your life with them.

Without doing this work it's difficult to set boundaries that 'mean' something to you. An example of this would be when I get upset that my partner asks me last minute what I want for my birthday! As thoughtfulness is a value of mine and I have my narrative about how it shows up in my life I can set my boundary. For

example, I reply to my partners request by saying 'please do not ask me this again, if you have not thought about this gift then that is your problem and do not expect me to help you or feel sorry for you. You know how important these acts of thoughtfulness are to me. Being thoughtful and not asking me what I want especially last minute would show to me that you care.'

I am speaking clearly and in plain language. Yes, this is an ongoing problem because it does affect me when he does this. What is the consequence you may ask? That is down to me. Every action or inaction has a consequence and as such I manage these. I'll post next about these consequences and why they mean as much as boundaries.

Take care.

Dawn