Aligning Your Actions With Your Values [Life]

Sometimes the life-lessons we learn take their time making an impression on us. Sometimes, they overtake us with force, not unlike the recent winter squalls. This month, the universe conspired to send me my own personal winter squall.

On a day when I was very proud of myself for tackling lots of small to-do’s that had been waiting for my attention, I called my cell phone company. They had been charging me for a service I had explicitly requested not to have. The call turned into a three hour ordeal with long stretches of being on hold and multiple supervisors during which I found myself angry, frustrated and in tears. Ultimately, I resolved my issue AND I had wasted three hours of precious work time, in addition to working myself into such a frenzy that no further constructive work was possible.

The next day I learned that our neighbor and friend had been diagnosed with breast cancer, was scheduled for surgery and needed blood for expected transfusions. I was a match, so I cleared my calendar, drove to the city and made a designated blood donation at the hospital. Door to door, I was away from my office for three hours. I came home with a full heart and somehow at peace and continued to do several more hours of work.

You can tell where this is headed, right? Well you are smarter than I am because it took me a little while to make sense of the difference between the three hours with the phone company and the three hours at the hospital. It all comes down to honoring my values. In the phone company interaction my values were being stepped on-big time: respect, honesty, service. (And to be honest, I was complicit in disregarding these values.) Donating blood for my friend, on the other hand, was me honoring my values fully. So the life lesson for me (okay so I have had to re-learn this one several times in my almost 5 decades) is:

I am most alive, at peace, and productive when I let my actions be guided by that which I truly value. To be crystal clear: when my actions honor my values, my entire experience of my life shifts.

In coaching, I uncover the client’s values, and really look at how well they are being honored, how they can be used to make more resonant choices, and how they can help the client approach difficult situations.

Speaking of difficult situations, if you also have people in your life who are experiencing serious heartbreak—be it illness or loss—visit Aurora Winter’s website. She is a woman with heartbreak of her own who is a wonderful resource for others. I leave you with three tips she offers when talking to a person in your life who is in crisis:

*Acknowledge the pain, sorrow, suffering, …
*Listen without fixing or resisting
*Give hope by reminding the person of his/her inner strength, and the support of the people around them