Why Values Are Critical To Writing Your Compelling Story
ADVANCE CONFIDENTLY!
“Your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny.” ~Mahatma Gandhi
VALUES DRIVE BEHAVIOR
This article was adapted from a process we developed to help emerging entrepreneurs and new small business owners identify their values. It was written to help take a closer look at the Values selection process. Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs have one thing in common with their larger corporate counterparts and that’s the need for Values.
As I worked with my TEAM to build out the structure of our new process to help entrepreneurs and small business owners capitalize on what makes them unique to their market and to help position themselves as the only logical choice for their potential customers, we realized the need to identify our own set of values that will drive our decision-making process as we begin to take on new clients.
At CreateYourQUEST™ we believe YOU are the Hero of Your own Story!
Our process was developed with YOU in mind. Our goal is to help you turn (Your Everyday Story) into (Your Empowering Story).
In the spirit of The Hero’s Journey, we are committed to helping you not only write your story, but also create an exciting and empowering QUEST to guide you in the direction of everything you hope to accomplish as you continue to move forward towards the achievement of your goals and dreams.
What do YOU offer the World?
At CreateYourQUEST™ we believe YOU will be happiest living a life of integrity in which your actions are aligned with YOUR personal values and beliefs. In other words, YOUR “True North.”
The reason many of us struggle with knowing what we genuinely want is because we don’t really know what direction to go. If we use our true north to guide us, in other words if we use our values to guide us, it makes the decision-making process much easier. Some of us struggle with simple day-to-day decisions but when we take the time to consider our core values, these things often become crystal clear.
Our core values will be the needle point of our compass. They will be like the north star in the sky guiding your journey. Your values will be like a torch in the night to help guide you down your pathway toward living your meaningful life and bringing purpose to your quest so you can live your life filled with passion and purpose.
Your values will help you avoid all the “shiny objects” you are bound to discover while on your quest. Values will shield you from the potential outside influences attempting to distract you from reaching your prize, from reaching that elusive prize we’re all searching for, success. Values will help you identify what success means without sacrificing the things most important to you. Values give you the energy and clarity to say both yes and no. Your success will be guided by your ability to say no to things like social media, social influence, and the social environment that would try to keep us from being true to ourselves.
If you are interested in gaining clarity around the importance of values, then read on. If not, then this article is probably not for you, and I will save you the time and trouble of reading any further.
The activity outlined below is designed to help you discover your own unique list of values and beliefs that will help to orient you on your journey. If you’ve ever wondered what a life would be like if you were living in harmony, this is the life you will experience when you become clear about your values. That’s why we think it’s so important that you take the time to properly do this exercise because it means everything!
Your core values will help you build the foundation of whatever it is you hope to bring into the world while on your quest. Whatever you build, if it sits on a strong foundation, it will stand the test of time.
Success can only ever be identified individually and absolutely must be defined by the individual seeking success. Otherwise, there will be no way for you to measure whether you’ve achieved what you set out to accomplish. If you try to skip over this step what you will find is yourself chasing empty accomplishments. You will find yourself stuck on the hamster wheel of life chasing your tail. We cannot impress upon you strongly enough, the importance of completing this exercise.
When we don’t know and understand our values, we could easily make the mistake of violating something incredibly important to us, simply because we weren’t aware. The result of doing something like this is usually fraught with feelings of shame and guilt and not even knowing why… It’s because somewhere along the way you violated what was important to you and there’s no way to reconcile the actions you took when they are not aligned with your values, when they’re not aligned with your true north.
One of the things that makes CreateYourQUEST™ a unique organization is the partnerships we’re creating with individuals who’ve proven themselves to be value added resources to both individuals and large organizations.
The following list of core values comes partly from my own research and partly from my dear friend and Executive Coach, Michael O’Brien from Peloton Coaching. He has been helping companies and the executives of those companies create better tomorrow’s by teaching them to clearly identify their values TODAY!
CORE VALUES
Note: This is not an exhaustive list but will definitely get you started with the selection process!
Authenticity, acceptance, accountability, advancement, adaptability, adventure, affection, appreciation, abundance, assertiveness, awareness, beauty, balance, being, bravery, connection, creativity, change, caring, career, confidence communication, contribution, consistency, commonality, compassion, cooperation, clarity, charisma, contentment, courage, change, credibility, decisiveness, determination, dignity, discipline, diversity, energy, enthusiasm, excitement, excellence, empathy, entertainment, ethics, encouragement, effectiveness, enjoyment, entrepreneurialism, facilitation, fame, family, fearlessness, forgiveness, finances, fitness, focus, friendship, fun-loving, finesse, fun, growth, generosity, goodness, gratitude, grace, health, harmony, happiness, home, humor, honesty, hope, imagination, independence, integrity, invention, intelligence, involvement, innovation, justice, joy, kindness, knowledge, love, laughter, leadership, learning, loyalty, management, maturity, motivation, openness, order, optimism, originality, peace, prosperity, patience, professionalism, pride, power, personal development, purpose, quiet, quality, respect, religion, relationships, reciprocity, responsibility, risk, strength, self-respect, self-confidence, speed, spiritualism, strategy, success, security, time, teamwork, truth, tolerance, trust, transparency, vitality, vision, willingness, wellness, wealth, work, wittiness, wisdom, wonder, youthfulness, zeal…
Based on the guidance of my Executive Coach, Michael O’Brien, who you can find at michaelobrienshift.com — I suggest you pick 5 values as your core values. This doesn’t mean you can’t or won’t have other values that are extremely important to you. It simply means being bold enough to select 5 for right now. As we change and grow some of our core values will change with us. As we embrace life-altering challenges and opportunities, our core values might shift as we gain new insights and information.
Examples are always good to demonstrate a viewpoint so let’s examine the idea of wellness. Let’s get extreme to drive home the point. If you had a heart attack, or developed a life-threatening disease, wellness might easily become a new core value for you if it wasn’t previously one of your five.
One of the most impactful ways to discover your core values is to focus on what’s important to you. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to ask empowering questions. Here are some empowering questions to help you get started with the process of focusing on what’s most meaningful to you now that you’ve been given a whole bunch of ideas about which values might be most important.
· How would you define this value?
· Which actions, activities, and behaviors reflect this value?
· How are you in alignment with this value?
· Where does this value show up in your daily life?
· Why is this value important to you?
· What is it about this value that inspires you?
· Who would you be without this value?
Feel free to create some of your own empowering questions to stimulate the discovery process! Answers are good. Questions are empowering!
The gap between where we are and where we want to be can often be closed by having a better understanding of our values. With a better understanding of our values, we will be in a better position to say yes to everything that’s important to us and no to everything else that’s a distraction. When what we do is aligned with what we say, we can then be congruent in our behavior about what’s most important to us.
If you remember from earlier, we learned that values drive behavior. Let’s move now from concept to construct with some core examples. We will share with you the five core values significant to us and why we chose them to demonstrate the importance of this exercise.
CORE VALUE EXAMPLES
One of the core values of our TEAM at CreateYourQUEST™ is Freedom. A second value important to each of us is Authenticity. Another core value is Courage. The 4th core value critical to the success of our organization is Encouragement. And finally, we turn one FACE into many FACES by adding the “S” of Self-Respect.
When you put these five values together what you get is FACES. We refer to this as our ability to show our FACES to our clients and customers. There are a whole host of other values especially important to all of us at CreateYourQUEST™ but we decided on “FACES” because we wanted something first that was easy to remember, and that more importantly, reflected the true essence of what we see as our collective core values.
As an emerging leader in this field, we felt it important to do the hard work of identifying our core values “Up Front” so that whenever we face a decision as it relates to the company and our future direction, we can come back to our values to help us make a clear choice about what we want to do, where we want to go, and how we want to get there.
We made a pact early on that we would never sacrifice our values in relation to our opportunities. What we collectively decided was that if an opportunity didn’t align with our values, then we would just politely say thank you for the opportunity, but it doesn’t fit with what we’re currently trying to do with the organization right now.
We took it one step further and decided that if we were honoring our values, we would help whoever was asking us to work with them by providing them a referral for an organization we felt could better help them with what they were trying to accomplish.
Let’s take the time to dive a little bit deeper into the five core values of our company as an example, so you have a clear idea of what might be important to you and a frame of reference as you choose your core values for yourself and your organization, or your family, moving forward.
FREEDOM
“When Writing the story of your life don’t let anyone else hold the pen.” ~Harley-Davidson
For us, the importance of this value is best expressed by this quote we use as a guiding principle for decision making. We believe everyone has the ability to write their own story and create their own ending.
The reason we believe freedom is so important is because it leads to an abundance of expression, creativity, and original thought. From this abundance, we experience increased productivity, a sense of fulfillment, an enhanced purpose, a state of well-being, and an overall higher quality of life. We understand freedom as a value that should never be taken for granted. We understand the fragility of freedom.
We hope to communicate the importance of this value. All too often, those who live in freedom tend to ignore just how fragile it is and take it for granted. We hope to reinforce the importance of freedom. We must be free to think, to create, to crowdsource, to collaborate, to build, to come together, to accomplish what none of us could ever hope to achieve alone.
AUTHENTICITY
“Authenticity allows us to engage with each other in powerful dreams that make the impossible possible. We are called on to persevere despite failure and pursue a purpose beyond the paycheck. This is at the core of innovation.” ~Henna Inam
Authenticity is all about being true to ourselves. Being true to ourselves is all about having the courage to define our own version of what it is to be successful. Success absolutely, positively, must be identified individually because what’s success to one person, might be failure to another. Success is discovering the delicate balance between drive, achievement, and self-reflection. The prize, if we’re diligent enough to pursue it, is equanimity which is just another way of saying, mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation.
Authenticity helps us build deeper connection with others. The way we build authenticity is by being willing to let our guard down. Once we are willing to show and share our shortcomings, warts, and all, we give ourselves and others permission to be true to what we really believe. Authenticity is almost a “bearing of our soul” and when we do it without concern for what others might think of us or about us, we in turn create the best opportunity to be true to ourselves, our values, and what’s uniquely important to us, not those around us, but to US!
Innovation is the lifeblood of almost any organization. The only way we will ever be able to completely tap into everyone’s ability to be innovative is when everyone is given permission to be their authentic self. Richard Branson was quoted as saying that “innovation happens when people are given the freedom to ask questions and the resources and power to find the answers.”
COURAGE
“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” ~Maya Angelou
The word consistently is often overlooked in the quote above, and we want to make sure that doesn’t happen here. Courage gives us the ability to put aside our fear of failure and to take the first steps. Courage helps us to overcome our fear of rejection. Courage allows us to attempt things that we have not tried before despite our fear of judgment or looking foolish.
It has been said that confidence is important and indeed it is, but without courage, confidence does not exist. We believe courage is more important than confidence because we know that confidence comes from being courageous. Before we will ever be confident, we must first be courageous.
We need confidence to do something that we’ve never done before. And to do something that we’ve never done before will require courage. We need courage to begin something. When we’re attempting something, we’ve never done before, we will experience a feeling of uncertainty.
Courage gives us the ability to move along the continuum from unsure to unstoppable. We believe courage is the secret sauce that allows us to act despite our fears. Confidence is an outcome. It’s a natural result, or the benefit. It’s becoming familiar with our fear and working through the process. Confidence is a one day at a time game, it builds day by day every time we courageously embrace our fear.
Courage allows us to consistently practice all the virtues and values that are important to us because without courage we won’t be able to consistently honor the rest of our values. At some point in time the challenge will be too intense, or the effort required, too much, and without courage, we will give in.
“You can’t be consistently kind, or fair, or humane, or generous, not without courage, because if you don’t have it, sooner or later you’ll stop and say the threat is too much, the difficulty is to too high, the challenge is too great!” ~Maya Angelou
ENCOURAGEMENT
“Hidden within each of us is everything we need to achieve anything we can imagine.” ~Bobby Kountz
One of the greatest lessons on the power of encouragement comes from the story of the letters written by Ralph Waldo Emerson to a young and aspiring writer by the name of Walt Whitman. Had it not been for the encouragement of Emerson, there is an exceptionally good chance that Whitman may have never followed his passion to become the great poet he is known to be.
At CreateYourQUEST™ we are in the encouragement business!
We should never underestimate the value of an encouraging word. One small act of encouragement could be enough to change the entire trajectory of another person’s life. When we offer encouragement, we’re literally speaking courage into another human being. We are empowering them with our words. Encouragement can make all the difference.
Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny… ~C.S. Lewis
SELF-RESPECT
“Respect yourself enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves you, grows you, or makes you happy.” ~Robert Tew
The importance of self-respect cannot be overstated! Having a healthy level of self-respect is what enables us to create the confidence to set clear boundaries for ourselves and others. Malcolm X once said, “If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.” Self-respect means knowing what you stand for and what your values are. It means being aware of both your strengths and weaknesses.
Self-respect is being courageous enough to say no when you need to, and bold enough to say yes when you’re afraid to. It’s saying yes without having all the answers ahead of time. Self-respect allows us to stay to true to our values while still pushing the envelope to take informed risks. Self-respect is developed after experiencing setbacks and failures. It’s a byproduct of resilience. It comes as a result of embracing self-discovery.
Self-respect is knowing who you are, what you believe, and what you are willing to work for and sacrifice for. It’s also knowing what you are not willing to compromise on and then having the courage to stand your ground.
We hope you found some merit in this article that was adapted from the Values Identification Process we take our clients through when they commit to working with us. It’s how we turn our clients into VIP’s!
If you believe we might be able to help you better tell your story to your potential audience and customers, then reach out to us.
You know our values now so it should be an easy decision to at least reach out if you know you need some help telling your empowering story!
We are creating an interest list for our inaugural CreateYourQUEST™ interactive, immersive, appreciative inquiry experience. To learn more, send an email with UNSTOPPABLE in the subject line to unsure2UNSTOPPABLE@gmail.com today!
Advance Confidently is the title of my next book, you will have to wait to celebrate its release as I celebrate my 60th birthday. I have concluded the world doesn’t need another self-help book from me right now, so I am listening to my muse and will write a sci fi personal growth story of self-discovery instead. Hmmm? Almost sounds like a QUEST, right? I believe you will be INSPIRED with the story that chose me to write it! I never saw it coming but now that it’s here, I can’t wait to share it with all of YOU! I know it will be worth the wait because that’s my commitment to you, my readers. Thanks in advance for your trust and patience!
In the meantime, I released a special audio short story on Twitter to commemorate my Independence Day and my 31st year of sobriety. You can watch/listen to the story here ( https://youtu.be/9zP4kk5OTlo ). You can find me on Twitter @bobby_kountz
Keep Pedaling, Keep Going, Keep Growing!
Advance Confidently!
If you enjoyed and found value in this article, please share it.
In Gratitude,
Bobby Kountz, Author, Speaker, Sobriety Scholar, Inspirationalist!
PS. You can find out more about me here. You can find my book on Amazon.
