Critically-Valuable
Achieving balance in life is important. But this doesn’t mean simply living with the status quo. On the contrary, balance is important to create generative change which can significantly change your life. Part of this involves balancing down-to-earth Critical Thinking so that you can actually achieve things, with your unique passions – your values.
I was having a conversation the other day, and the person mentioned that they never did goal setting because it didn’t work, despite them having previously hired a coach to help them. After a brief chat it became obvious what they and their coach had missed out. Sure, they had set some decent outcomes… but they didn’t consider their values.
If you’re not intrinsically motivated towards an outcome, then you’ll either fail to achieve the outcome, or be disappointed when you get there, and intrinsic motivation reflects your values. I do a deep dive into the different types of values – including recognising the ones that cause you to fail – in my course Resilience, How To Be Mentally Tough.
This is why with my coaching clients, unless they are very clear and congruent with their values, I always begin with a values elicitation exercise to dig past superficial likes and dislikes, and introjected or extrinsic values, to uncover a person’s genuine passions. It’s from those genuine passions – their deep intrinsic values – that we’ll do any goal or outcome-oriented coaching.
A good example of how important values are in coaching was a chap I coached several years ago. He was a very intelligent and driven person With a Ph.D. in microbiology but was nonetheless deeply unhappy with his career trajectory. We wrote down his conscious values hierarchy and I then set to work coaching. By the end of the session his list had literally flipped upside down. He stared at it, contemplating, and eventually said, “Yeah, that explains a lot! Now I realise where I’ve been going so wrong”. The goals we set after this exercise were completely transformational for him.
So the next time you want to make a significant change in your life, make sure you find the balance between Critical Thinking so that you can ground the change in reality on the one hand, and your passions on the other. And if you want help, just drop me a line.