When it’s important to you, you have to dig in.
Last week in one of our social media feeds there was an article calling people forward to do their own research – the real kind of research where you read white papers created by knowledgeable people, gather information from various perspectives and based on data and facts, form your opinion. What we took from it was if something feels important to you, you’ve got to dig in – do the work to understand what it is all about.
This is why we included the chapter, Claiming Your Values, in our upcoming book, Humanity Works Better. Claiming values helps you become conscious of what drives your behavior and articulate what is important to you and why. It means knowing what is important to you.
So many of us have been preconditioned – we are unconscious about what really matters to us and why. Claiming your values is a practice of questioning your internal narrative. To challenge yourself. To notice where resistance is coming in and ask yourself, “what’s important about that?” Is a core value of yours being rubbed against – or is it an old, outdated belief that is limiting you, holding you back from expressing yourself as the good human you want to be?
This is hard, courageous work. Knowing your values creates intentionality. It allows you to stand in choice about how you are being and what you spend your time and energy doing. It creates clarity in your life. It might seem easier to point fingers, pick up on the narrative of others, and not think for yourself. But it isn’t. That behavior just keeps you stuck.
We saw the courage of claiming your values show up in the Olympics as Simone Biles pulled out of competition. On the world stage she took a stand for a personal value that was more important to her than the external narrative she had been letting drive her actions. We saw similar courage recently from Naomi Osaka. Behaviors are values in action, and they matter to people. Only you can change yourself, and when you change, others around you begin to change.
Michael Jackson’s hit Man in the Mirror is echoing in our ears:
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you want to make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself, and then make a change.
Here is what we know: you get to claim your values, not someone else. You have the responsibility to unpack what is true and not, even if you don’t like what you are learning. Only you can do the hard, soul-searching work to understand and claim what is important to you. As always, it comes back to YOU.
Why? Because the only thing you can control, is you.
Humanity works because of you!
