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You have a prestigious career that enables you to make a comfortable living. You work hard and make the most of your spare time, spending time with your family and friends, maybe volunteering at a charity and pursuing a hobby or two. Anyone looking in from the outside could tell that you’re one lucky duck.
So how come you’ve been feeling so dissatisfied lately? What’s with this nagging feeling that there must be more to life? As if that’s not enough, you also feel guilty about feeling dissatisfied. After all, you tell yourself, you’ve got more than most people—your health, your job, your family and friends. Shouldn’t you just be happy with that?
That’s how I came to my life coach several years ago. I couldn’t complain. I worked for a top firm and was well respected by my practice group. I had terrific friends, bought a beautiful home, and took fun vacations. I counted my blessings. And, yet, I felt as if I was missing something. Something major.
I discovered what that was within the first few meetings with my coach. I was living a life that was defined as “successful” by everyone…but me. I wasn’t living a life based on my own values; I was living a life based on everyone else’s values.
Values Matter
Values are who we are. When we honor our values, there is a sense that all is right with the world. When we don’t honor our values, there is dissonance. If we are really out of touch with our values, the discord that results can be so jarring that it can become unhealthy.
Many of us don’t consciously choose the values we live by. We absorb what we learned from our families of origin, our life experiences, our friends and loved ones, our environments. If everyone around you defines success as the proverbial corner office, a big house, prep schools and fancy vacations for your kids, it’s easy to see how you might come to define success in your life by those same criteria.
The problem with this approach is that it leaves you feeling the way you are now—dissatisfied, a little cheated, a little disillusioned.
When I discovered my own personal values and made a deliberate choice to live a life based on those values, I found that satisfaction I was longing for. My clients tell me that when they identify their own values and make a conscious effort to live by them on a daily basis, they feel as if they are now really living their lives, rather than just existing. What a rush!
Warning: This process is simple but not easy. It’s simple to figure out what your values are. However, living them—especially if they are in direct opposition to what the rest of the world considers important—isn’t easy.
Is the challenge of honoring your values worth it? For me, absolutely. It’s transformed my life. I would venture to say it has done the same for my clients as well.
Start Defining What’s Important To You
The process my coach used was pretty straightforward. First, we identified what my values were. Second, I assessed how much—or in my case, how little—I was living by them. Third, I made changes so that my life began to better reflect my values.
I’ll talk about my own experiences with this process in this first article. For a different perspective, we’ll take a look at another lawyer’s experience in the second article. In the third article, we’ll give you the tools to identify your own personal values so you can begin the transformative journey yourself.
Make A List Of Your Values
Values. We use the word so casually today that it doesn’t appear to have much meaning. When I ask you what your values are, I’m asking what’s important to you. What matters so much to you that if you don’t have it, you’re not really living, just existing?
When I started working with my coach, I thought she was just going to give me a list of values—such as, love, justice, financial independence—and I’d just select mine and off we’d go. But she explained that picking from a list made it too easy to select values that I think I should have, rather than the values that I actually have.
Instead she asked me a series of questions to tease out my values, ranging from, “What makes you angry?” to “What gives you peace?” to “Describe your peak experiences.” I provided her with stories as illustrative examples for each question. From those stories we crafted a word or phrase that captured my individual, personalized values. Then I had the hard task of identifying which of those values I absolutely could not live without. (We’ll explore this process more in the third article of the series so that you can determine your own set of values.)
Here’s the list my coach and I came up with. By the way, I must admit I feel a bit vulnerable putting my list out there. It’s pretty personal. But I want you to understand just how different your values might look from society’s values. So here goes. My values are:
• Authenticity
• Autonomy
• Voracious learning
• Silliness
• Having a big, open heart
• Trusting God
I was delighted and quite surprised by what my coach and I discovered. This list didn’t look anything like anyone’s typical list of values. But, boy, did it sound just like me! I also realized that what’s important to me now has been important to me all of my life. I also felt as if my life had drastically contracted. As a child, I joyfully stoked the fires on a daily basis; as an adult, my values only smoldered in little bits and sparks.
I felt a bit dismayed as well. How could I match up what was important to me with the values my profession considered important? I could only see ways to explore my values in my free time. And that definitely wasn’t going to work since my career took up a large chunk of my time every day. How was I ever going to be able to honor these values in any significant way?
Ask The Hard Questions: How Fully Am I Honoring My Values?
Next, my coach asked me to score myself on how much I was honoring each of my values on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 10 (fully). No surprise, the numbers were pretty dismal. I was shocked, though, to discover that I wasn’t living my values very much in my spare time, either.
Let me show you how I scored on a few of my values at the office:
Authenticity:
I was putting on a show at work—trying to be “Little Miss Perfect Associate.” If people at work didn’t want to talk about anything besides work, we talked case law and projects. If they wanted me to be excited about missing out on a three-day weekend to meet a court deadline, I put on my eager beaver face as they piled on the assignments. If they wanted me to pretend that I knew what I was doing, even when I didn’t have a clue, I obliged. My score: 2
Autonomy:
Law firms talk a lot about how autonomous you can be, but this is true only up to a point. Let’s say I was asked to draft a motion for summary judgment only to have a senior associate or partner tear it apart. There I was at my desk, struggling to give them exactly what they wanted. Autonomy? I don’t think so. My score: 4
Silliness:
Don’t even think about it. My score: 0
Bring Your Values To Work
I’m a fan of making drastic changes all at once. Usually I start with a massive spurt of energy at the beginning, lots of ideas and excitement, and end up with a headache, a feeling of being overwhelmed, and paralysis. My coach talked me down from those precarious heights and suggested a program of baby steps.
I decided to tackle what I perceived to be my highest priority value first: Authenticity.
I’d recently changed firms and had been reassured by my new colleagues that it was a place where you could be yourself. Still, I played “Little Miss Perfect Associate” for the first three months. I didn’t want to make changes at the risk of losing my new job. After that self-defined three-month “probation period” though, I decided to be brave and dip my toe in the water of being authentic Monica.
One of the aspects of being authentic for me is to allow my real mood to show at work. So I tried it out. On days when I was in a good mood, I was playful, compassionate, and open. On days when I was in a rotten mood, I griped to a select few and kept my door closed to the rest of the world. After a few months, I noticed something. I still had my job. I was still liked and respected. Still getting good work. Hey, maybe this being authentic thing would be OK.
Over a period of about six months, I tested the waters by sharing another aspect of my personality with the firm. Even if my behavior wasn’t greeted with applause, I stood my ground. I consciously made an effort to stop acting like a robot associate until one day I realized all of me was showing up at work.
Maybe authenticity isn’t a value for you. But for me it’s as important as breathing. In fact, being able to bring myself to work allowed me to be able to breathe at work. Pretty cool!
Aim For Abiding Satisfaction
I know this process sounds like hard work; maybe you’re also concerned that it could uncover some stuff you’d rather just keep buried in the sand. Wouldn’t it be easier just to sign up for that all-inclusive vacation to St. Lucia or go get a massage or, heck, make a pitcher of margaritas? Sure it would. And you might get some satisfaction out of that—but it’s short-lived. Deep, abiding satisfaction with life requires some effort. It also requires some courage. What you discover may not align with what everyone else wants for you.
Whether you’re a first-year attorney or you’re a seasoned practitioner with an empty nest, life is too precious to spend it making everyone else around you happy and denying yourself the opportunity to live your life in a way that expresses who you are. If you’re honoring your values, you are a happier, healthier person and that benefits your family and your community so much more than if you trudge through life bearing the burden of everyone else’s expectations.
Don’t just take my word for it. How has making a conscious effort to live by their own values impacted other lawyers’ lives? We’ll take a look at that question in the next article.
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NOTES
1. Parker, Monica. Getting Hit By A Bus Isn’t The Answer: A Road Map For Finding Meaningful Work Outside Of The Law. Sourcebooks/Sphinx Legal, 2008.
