by Jenny Blake
Although they are not likely to change drastically over the course of your life, values may shift in priority at different stages. Major shake-ups can inspire us to take a hard look at what is most important to us, and where the gaps are between what we say we believe in and how we are actually spending our time, energy, and resources.
You might think that starting with values and vision is too abstract to be helpful, or that they will be hard to pin down. But I caution you not to skip the exercises in this section. Clarifying your values and vision is one of the biggest accelerators you have during a pivot, and the questions are directly within your control to answer.
CREATE YOUR COMPASS
Justin came to me at a time when he knew he wanted to pivot his career, but was unsure about the direction to take. He lacked confidence after what he felt were a few false starts in his early twenties: resigning from Teach for America, then starting and shuttering a health coaching and personal training practice. He found refuge in a real estate job in his family’s business.
But he soon felt stuck in his current situation, and his latent childhood heart problems returned, despite maintaining strong health habits. This may have been an indicator that Justin’s work-related stress was manifesting physically, sending him signals to make a more significant change sooner rather than later.
Our first steps were to explore his values and true goals, not what he felt he should do based on family expectations or obligations. Justin then identified his top values: financial security, physical fitness and health, feeling alive, loving where he lives, and enjoying relationships with like-minded people. These became a lens through which to explore daily activities and more fulfilling next moves.
Next, Justin and I talked about career options and how they aligned with his values, such as whether to restart his health coaching business or to pursue an MBA. It was important not to immediately discount ideas, like teaching or starting a health camp for teens, that contradicted what he thought his family and friends would approve of.
Our early work together was like a game of hotter/colder, the guessing game many of us played as kids. You hide something and as the other person wanders around looking, you guide them by saying only “cold, colder, FREEZING,” or “hot, hotter, ON FIRE!”
Some options felt cold and deflating, particularly when they included the word should, such as staying at his job and living on the East Coast. Other ideas felt hot and exhilarating, such as moving to California to attend business school. Earlier false starts, experiences that Justin once viewed as failures, became clues that Justin and I collected to map his values and plan his pivot.
Your next career move speaks to you in much the same way. It may not be able to communicate in words, but as you explore a range of opportunities, if you are paying attention and taking enough quiet time to reflect, each area you explore will provide its own hotter or colder signal in your body. You might speak with someone and feel “HOT, HOT, HOT!” afterward, a magnetic pull to learn more about what he does or where he lives. Or you might find yourself interviewing for a position and feeling freezing, even though the job looks good on paper. Don’t let these cold indicators discourage you. Instead, use them to refine your values further.
A few months into our coaching work, Justin was accepted into his first-choice business school with a scholarship. He moved to San Diego, formed a new circle of inspiring friends, and lined up career opportunities for the short term that fit his strengths, with a long-term goal of returning to the family business after graduate school. Each of these elements mapped strongly to his core values. Justin said he finally felt like himself again: strong, confident, grounded, proud of his career path, and ready to tackle anything with a renewed sense of vigor and integrity.
Values Mining
These exploration exercises will help you build the foundation of your entire Pivot strategy, guiding decisions throughout the process. They progress from high-level ideas to a refined values list by the end.
In Steps One and Two, aim for quantity, not quality. Don’t censor yourself. For each question, write whatever first comes to mind, then push yourself to ask follow-up questions such as What is important to me about that? and What else?
Step One: Free Write
Answer the following questions:
Describe your ideal day. If money was not an issue, how would you spend your time?
What excites you most?
What are you most proud of?
What is the compliment or acknowledgment you hear most often?
If someone was to interview your family and/or closest friends, what would they say you value most?
Think of a peak time in your life—a time of adventure, joy, or peace. It may be a moment in time, or it may have happened over a long period. Describe it with as many vivid details as possible. What makes this memory so powerful? Take yourself back to that time: What do you see? Hear? Taste? Smell? What are you thinking? How do you feel?
Name three people you admire and list three adjectives for why you chose each person.
What do you want less of in your life?
What challenges are you currently facing?
What are your unanswered questions at the moment?
Are there any areas in your life where you feel out of balance or as if you are missing something?
What do you want more of in your life?
Step Two: Values Clusters
Circle or make a list of all of the key words or phrases that jump out at you from the answers above. After you review the initial list, add additional themes you might have missed that are important to you. Here are some values clusters I see often among clients:
Connection, community, friends, family, intimacy
Creativity, innovation, ideas, writing, expression
Courage, risk taking, challenge
Freedom, independence
Financial security
Gratitude, being present, mindfulness, rest and rejuvenation
Health and wellness routines, sense of balance
Humor, play, recreation
Helping others, making a difference, influence, impact, teaching, service, reach
Learning, growing, exploring, travel, adventure
Step Three: Make a Mind Map
Next, on a sheet of paper, write the word values in the middle of a page, circle it, then draw spokes to each of the values you brainstormed above (see example below). Add tertiary spokes radiating from each value with one- to two-word answers to the following questions:
What is important about each one?
How is each value most fully expressed in your life?
This exercise will help clarify how your values manifest in your life. For example, from a value of freedom, you might draw spokes to phrases such as financial security, flexible schedule, ability to travel, and work autonomy. From a value of helping others, you might have teaching, mentoring, sharing experiences, volunteering, and a few groups or organizations that matter to you.
Here is an example of one of my values mind maps:
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Step Four: Rank Your List
On your mind map, circle the one word or phrase that best represents each value. Write five to ten of these values on their own Post-it Note, stick the notes on a wall or the back of your front door, then rank them in order of importance. If you had to make a choice where two were in conflict, which would you select? In real life we hardly have to make such delineated rankings of our values, but the exercise will help you clarify the ones that matter most.
Group similar themes and eliminate values that are not absolutely critical to your health and happiness, creating a short list that is easy to remember. Reflect over the course of one week, as daily experiences may provide additional clarity.
Step
Five: Narrow Down and Rename
Review your mind map and the Post-it ranking exercise to home in on your top five values. These are your oxygen, your must-haves, the elements that are crucial to your well-being. Feel free to get creative with the names; pick labels that make sense to you and that best capture each value’s essence. Here are two of my more creatively named values, still relevant, that I shared in Life After College:
CLEAN-BURNING FIRE—Contribute positive, passionate energy to the world. Bring optimism, good cheer, and a smile to a room or a conversation whenever I can. Be conscious of my impact on others.
RIDE THE WILD TIGER—Live big! Take risks. Do things that make me uncomfortable, that challenge what I think is possible. There is no saddle, there are no reins. Enjoy and adjust to the crazy ups, downs, and surprises that life throws my way.
Step Six: Create a Visual Reminder
Put ’em where you can see ’em! You might want to write your values list on a small piece of paper to keep in your wallet, make a wallpaper image for your computer or phone, keep a Post-it Note by your desk, or design a more creative visual representation, like a Pinterest board, that you can add to over time. You may refer to this visual reminder often throughout the Pivot process, then at some point the values will become ingrained and you will be able to recall them easily.
Think of this as your own personalized decision scorecard. When you bump up against a particularly tricky dilemma, revisit the list and rank how each option (or even how your life in general) meets each value on a scale of 1 to 5.
IDENTIFY YOUR HAPPINESS FORMULA
One morning I was sitting at my desk, bleary eyed after returning from a week of travel. All of a sudden, I had an out-of-body experience as I watched myself angrily slam my fists on my desk in exasperation because my wireless mouse got disconnected for the umpteenth time. It was a cartoon moment: every item—books, papers, speakers—jumped two inches in the air and scattered back down.
Yikes. Red flag, much?
I am not normally an impatient person, but that morning my fuse was short, if not completely blown. I couldn’t fix my mood with mental gymnastics or ignore it—clearly that had not been working.
Then it occurred to me: it had been five days since my last bout of vigorous exercise. My eyes darted from my clock, to my to-do list, to my e-mail inbox. I didn’t exactly feel like I had the time for a short run, but I certainly did not have the time for hair-trigger frustration and a sour mood the rest of the day either. Everything on my list could wait the twenty minutes it would take to get some endorphins flowing. I laced up my running shoes and headed out the door. Sure enough, after a run and a cup of coffee, my mood and productivity bounced back.
One of the keys to being agile in life is knowing how to quickly find your way back to equilibrium. It is difficult, if not impossible, to pivot from a place of anxiety or unhappiness. Your ability to proceed with the next Pivot stages will be severely hampered if you are weighed down by people, habits, an environment, or activities that drain you.
Your happiness formula is the unique mix of environmental factors and activities that are most likely to invigorate you and reset your energy batteries when they are running low. As you plan your pivot, think of your happiness formula on a micro level—day-to-day routines and five- to twenty-minute habits—and on a macro level of bigger choices like where to live and work.
What micro and macro elements are most important to build into your life? Your happiness formula might contain a mix and match of the following:
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Define Your Happiness Formula
Translate your values from abstract concepts into real-life practices by filling in your own chart. What daily activities and morning routines are critical to your happiness formula? What macro lifestyle factors are most important? For both categories, note what you are doing well and what you may be missing.
You can even write this out as an actual formula, like my friend Bill Connolly did when I shared this approach with him. His equation is: (Creating) + (Friends and Family) + (Traveling) − (Being Scared) = Happiness.
YOUR BODY IS YOUR BUSINESS
When you are coasting in a comfort zone, you can afford to get a bit lazy. You can overspend, overeat, overdrink, or skip your workout for a few days and you will still have some flex in your system to absorb it. There is more margin for error. But when you are in the middle of a pivot, you need every cell in your body to be high functioning. You will already be on overdrive during this time, asking and answering life’s biggest questions.
Willpower is a limited resource. While grappling with important decisions, you have less mental bandwidth available for other things. You will already be prone to feeling more sensitive, so health swerves that did not affect you much in the past will have a greater impact now.
In times of stress, our bodies are often among the first things we neglect, if not actively abuse. But your body is your most valuable asset during a pivot. With so much change, it is important to actively recruit all your natural feel-good chemicals—serotonin, oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphins—while minimizing spikes in cortisol, the stress hormone.
This is a time to guard against numbing out with food, alcohol, drugs, TV, video games, social media, or a smorgasbord of all of the above. Numbing out is an impulse many of us have when life gets more intense than we can bear, but there are significant benefits to breaking these habits, even when it seems toughest to do.
Do not just take my word for it—test things for yourself. Pay close attention to what elevates your mood, performance, creativity, and physical and emotional resilience, and what kills them. The second glass of wine might seem completely harmless—and maybe it has been throughout your adult life—until it becomes a slippery slope to the third, and you wake up the next morning feeling foggy headed or downbeat on a day you need to grapple with complex pivot questions.
You be the judge. If something works, it stays. If it detracts from your optimal mood and performance, it’s gotta go, no matter how tough the habit is to break. Kick the crutch. Once you have made it through the belly of the pivot beast, you can reintroduce these indulgences, but you may feel so good without them that you no longer want to.
If you find yourself discombobulated at any stage of your pivot, you will benefit from returning to the health fundamentals of nutrition, sleep, and exercise. Strip your life down to the most productive and healthy habits so that you have a clean system from which to operate. If you are hitting a wall, troubleshoot your physical foundation first to find mental clarity. Go for a walk or run, eat healthier for a week (or month), meditate for ten minutes, take a nap, or go outside. Peace of mind is the dividend we collect from paying for the day with supportive habits.
REDUCE DECISION FATIGUE
Your existing routines are likely to get shaken up through the Pivot process, so it is imperative to reestablish anchors in your day. Without habits and routines to systematize your well-being, decision fatigue will set in.
In a Harvard Business Review article, Roger Martin wrote that many companies today have stopped making widgets and are instead producing decisions; we have become “decision factories.” Our working hours are spent coming up with ideas and strategies, talking about them in meetings, building consensus, and implementing them to achieve results. And just as willpower is proven to be a finite resource, so, too, are our cognitive abilities for complex thinking.
Decision fatigue, also referred to as ego depletion, refers to the dwindling effectiveness of our decision-making abilities throughout the day without proper recharging. In a New York Times article, journalist John Tierney summarized the consequences: “Virtually no one has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide. Big decisions, small decisions, they all add up . . . ego depletion manifests itself not as one feeling but rather as a propensity to experience everything more inte
nsely.”
When you are in the middle of a pivot, big decisions regularly weigh on your mind: Should I stay at my job or quit? Should I fold my business or keep at it? Should I move to a new city, or just take an extended trip? It is no wonder that with these questions gobbling up the lion’s share of our mental bandwidth, we become exhausted sorting through smaller daily questions like what to eat, what to wear, or when to exercise.
There is a reason Steve Jobs wore a black turtleneck and jeans every day—it saved him the mental energy of having to make at least one decision. Similarly, I default to making my mom’s chili soup recipe (provided in the Pivot toolkit online) for the majority of my meals when I am deep in the zone on my business. It is one less thing for me to think about. For exercise, I schedule my yoga and Pilates classes on their own calendar as non-negotiables. It saves me the trouble of debating if or when I am going to work out every day, or inefficiently planning and replanning the anchors in my schedule each week.
If decision fatigue is an ailment of the overtaxed mind, then what is the cure?
One of the most powerful allies you have for making clearheaded choices throughout your pivot is one that is readily accessible to you at any moment: getting quiet enough to connect with the part of you that already has the answers.
MEDITATE TO ACTIVATE YOUR BEST INSTINCTS
Despite the many articles and books touting the benefits of meditation—Improved sleep! Health! Gratitude! Focus! Productivity!—for the longest time I could not get into it. I got bored, restless, and I never “had the time.” Meditation, schmeditation.