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Finding Footing in Core Values
Being clear gives me something to stand on.
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 groundlessness. Brene reminds us that we may lose sight of our values in times of challenge, struggle, fear. When we lose sight, our experience of the haters and critic’s voices seem much louder. She says, “We forget our values. Or, frequently, we don’t even know what they are or how to name them. If we do not have clarity of values, if we don’t have anywhere else to look or focus, if we don’t have the light up above to remind you why you’re here, the cynics and the critics can bring us to our knees.” (p185).
As I wrestled with the challenges of the global pandemic and witnessed pain in communities, I lost focus, and as a result, the voices of those who yelled the loudest seemed to dominate. Brene gives a simple exercise to help us begin examining our values and giving us language for them. Providing us, as Brene says, “a North Star in times of darkness.”
Working through the exercise (which I highly recommend) forced me to examine and question what…
