I don’t like interrupting people…
I was having coffee with my friend (a successful biz owner) and she’s talking about “values.” I cut in…
“When you first came up with your business values, how did you get to them?”
I asked because I notice a lot of small biz owners tend to “grab onto” lofty values that seem admirable, but aren’t necessarily theirs.
I’ve done this before myself.
I told her that I felt in her case, the values were a true, deep representation of her and her people as well – and that it exudes out of what they do.
It’s really powerful.
She explained that they spent a lot of time on this as individuals, and as an entire team, and there was a lot of introspection work…
A lot of times when people “pick” values, they grab something:
Freedom
Integrity
Education
Connection
And for sure, these might be great values, the question is why did they pick those in particular?
In a hyperconnected culture, our personal stories are often forgotten. There’s so much communication – tweets, posts, emails, comments and shares, that the cultural narrative often gets confused with our own narrative.
So, when we try to identify our values – and build a business that’s aligned, we often end up grabbing onto these aspirational cultural values.
It isn’t wrong, it’s just not necessarily true at a personal level if these values haven’t been lived “through” that individual.
If this happens, you’ll end up creating an inconsistent story with your biz.
You’ll also get a little tired, because you don’t feel like upholding the particular value you’ve chosen, and you haven’t seen another really cool value set that’s unique to you.
The alternative then, is to really look back over our life, and let the life that we’ve lived up until this point tell us what our values are! We can see what is important to us based on how we’ve acted, and how we’ve shown up.
