Finding Footing in Core Values

Anthony Beckman
4 min readJun 23, 2021

Being clear gives me something to stand on.

Photo by Mathias P.R. Reding on Unsplash

Sometimes it feels like there is no ground beneath my feet. Floating or falling feel the same when life happens. When confronted with inevitable challenges, I call forth what I value to help me navigate to a solution, providing the necessary ground to root my next action.

Events will call upon us to define who we are and what we stand for. Life demands that we choose how we will express our core values. The spring and early summer of 2020 was such a time in my life. I experienced a sudden and overwhelming sense of groundlessness when the pandemic changed everything about how we lived. The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic threw our daily routines into question, giving us little solid ground to stand on. Then, following the murder of George Floyd, I came face to face with a lack of social awareness and realized just how many of my long-held “assumptions” about race were rooted in ignorance and white supremacy.

This double whammy left me searching for solid, reliable truths. Was there anything firm I could stand upon?

While not in the least where I expected it, I began to find some footing in Brene Brown’s excellent book on leadership, Dare to Lead. Two sections of the book are related to identifying personal values, providing me stability in this time of…

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Anthony Beckman

Dad, husband, thinker, writer, exerciser. “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” — Dumbledore