What I learned today #2: Surfacing Your Core Values
Building an inner scorecard to help align you external with your internal self
A lot of us go by in life wandering, not knowing how to make our next career choice, and/or unsatisfied by work or what we are doing. Life is hard, our work and day to day are demanding. Our relationships in our lives are challenging. There are a lot of times where we just can’t seem to catch a break.
What I learned today is how to align what you are doing and how you are doing it with your core values and you can too.
In my pursuit of learning, there are a few great podcasts that I listen to on a regular basis that help me grow my understanding of the world and how to work towards being my best self. In the working world side one of them is Lenny’s Podcast (you should all subscribe, it’s fantastic!) where Lenny Rachitsky, a former founder and Product Manager at AirBnB, has on some of the top tech and growth minds out there.
A few weeks ago he had on Ada Chen Rekhi, COO and cofounder of Notejoy and an executive coach, and she among other great things taught about finding your inner scorecard (core values) and has a free exercise on how you can find and surface yours.
What are inner core values and why are they important?
Life is is never black and white and it is not binary in the general sense, but there are tools you can use and build that allow a person in smaller chunks to use certain frames to help with the overwhelming world and this is one of them.
Inner core values are the things that are the most meaningful to you, these are not external validations like a promotion or a raise. If these values are fulfilled, you will be satisfied and living your best life. It allows you to move the external validation away and focus your decisions and how you move through the day towards meeting your inner values.
For me, life was getting to a place where it was running me and I was overwhelmed.
So here is my inner scorecard:
Learning every day of my life.
Create a positive impact on the world with work that is making a difference.
Don’t take yourself too seriously, live with playfulness.
Collaboration is how we get to better solutions and answers.
Resilience in the face of challenging times.
Ada brings two questions that allow you to use this scorecard every day:
How well are you living your values?
How well does your decision align with your values?
Here were my answers:
One of the things I truly love about software development and engineering is that you learn something every day, so I made a shift -
I am reading or listening to a podcast for an hour every day and coding/building for at least an hour a day. I had been off with my most important value and that needed to change.
I was at a wonderful company that was making a difference in helping student’s achieve their goals, so that was a check.
The stress of life had gotten pretty heavy and I was super overwhelmed. My playful side had taken a back seat, so I made a shift -
I love watching really silly comedy that incorporates quick thinking and dad jokes so I started to watch some Game Changers (College Humor) and YeahMad on Youtube to help bring the wonderful silliness back into my life.
At work, where I was spending the most time, there were parts of my day that I worked and pushed my team towards some really great collaboration, but there were some larger parts of my job where that just didn’t exist.
This lead to a really good inflection point of how/if this core belief really fit the organization where I was.
Lastly, life is hard no matter where you are or what you do. Resilience in the face of that, the ability to face it or bounce back is something that I need in order to find my own fulfillment. I was finding that I was not as resilient as I wanted to be, so I made a change.
I started doing yoga, running or biking every day and working to fulfill my other four core values so that I am able to get emotional energy back to be more resilient. I also started talking to a therapist and working on building tools to allow for that resilience to build up.
Now, things are not perfect, but I am more aligned to what I need and things are on the right track.
What I Learned
Finding and surfacing your core values so that you can build an inner scorecard to live your best life.
Please take the time to do this exercise if you haven’t already, the mindfulness that it brings will help you get to where you need to be starting from inside and working outwards. To learn a little more on finding your inner scorecard, check out Ada’s original post here.
Also, please check out Lenny’s Pod and Ada’s site, you’ll love what you find.
Happy Friday and have a great weekend!