Once upon a time, I worked for a large US-based corporate company, and a great deal of time was spent on ‘strategy’. What this usually meant was that someone had an idea for a new product or a particular way of cutting costs or some other notion they thought would be helpful which would involve a lot of work to implement and take a long time, so was ‘strategic’.
Along the way, I learned that none of this is strategy. True strategy is about the choices you make to do one thing or another, and the reasons why. You can choose to make a product cheap, you can choose to make one with lots of leading features – but crucially you probably can’t do both and be successful.
In everyday life, too, we are often presented with similar choices that are frequently in conflict. This can be every day things like “Do I leave work on time and enjoy a longer evening with my family, or stay at work an hour or two extra to get this project task completed? ” or can be a big decision like “Do I leave work in a job I hate and study for three years so I can do one I think will make me much happier?”.
So how do we choose? According Steven Hayes PhD, the developer of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), the answer lies in our values:
“…you can keep walking towards that beacon in the distance. That process, that journey, is called life. And if you’re moving towards the things that you value, life is more vital, flowing; it’s more empowering.”
Whenever we make choices and act in accord with our own personal set of values (for example, “Being a loving mother”, “Telling the truth”, “Acting with integrity”) we are much more likely to be happy with the outcome, even if things don’t turn out as we might hope. Values-based action is always open to us, and is the thing that fundamentally makes us who we are. It is the act of choosing what we do that makes us “us”.
When Viktor Frankl was in a Nazi concentration camp in the Second World War, he realized that although his choices were severely limited, and the wrong one could bring instant execution, he nevertheless still had freedom to act in ways that were aligned with the kind of man he chose to be. The small act of giving up part of a daily food ration or a kind word to another prisoner were things he chose to do to live life in a values-based way, and contributed to his emergence from his truly awful experiences with his fundamental self intact.
Our personal values provide a sort of “blueprint” for an ideal life – perhaps not in terms of outcome but crucially in how we act, both everyday and when faced with those “moment of truth” choices that present themselves just a few times in our lives. They give the direction to our Life Strategy, and if we allow them to guide our actions will mean we can lead a more authentic life, less conflicted and with a clearer understanding of where we want to be,
Of course, we are often not completely clear what our personal values are, and it can take some self-reflection to come to a better understanding of the things we hold most dear, and how they relate to each other. A useful place to start is by making a list of the things that matter to us, and there are several example lists of commonly shared values available as a starting point – for example this Values Questionnaire from Author Russ Harris’ book “The Happiness Trap”. This particular approach also invites you to compare the importance of your values with the degree to which your life is taking you towards them, which can help identify where your life is taking you away from the things that matter to you.
A Life Strategy is always a direction, not a particular outcome. It may take a long time to achieve a result you want, but if you are headed in the right direction, you are much more likely to achieve your goals. Using your values to guide you like a compass can be an important part of making your life a success on your own terms.
