by Lisa Kentgen
Core Values Are at the Heart of An Intentional Life
“What are your underlying beliefs about a well-lived life?” “What qualities would you be most proud to model for others?” “At the end of the day, how do you most want to be remembered?” “If money didn’t matter, would you hold the same personal values?” How you answer these questions speak to your core values.
Core values are timeless, unlike your goals, which can change over time. Core values reflect how you fundamentally see yourself, or would like to see yourself. Having clarity on your personal core values enables you to experience yourself as authentic. But it’s not enough to know what your core values are. To live intentionally, they need to be central to your life’s mission.
Core values are influenced by your upbringing and your culture. But as you increasingly listen to your own internal voice, your core values become more personal and unique. You place your own individual stamp on them. If you asked your immediate family to list their personal core values, there would be diversity. And if there was overlap, and each person then defined what the value meant to them, there would be further variation.
Much is spoken about core values in corporate culture. Too often, talk about core values sounds more like a branding exercise. Yet the relatively rare, truly innovative, and visionary companies make core values central to everything they do. It is their fundamental reason for existing other than making money. Making money does not take precedence over the company’s core values. They work hard and consistently to align their vision and goals with the company’s core values. They hire employees who share these values. Alignment of core values with all aspects of company culture is absolutely central to what makes great companies visionary. We would benefit from more language and dialogue about how to make individual lives visionary.
An important question for living intentionally is: “Are my core values reflected in all I do—in my thoughts, choices, and actions?” For many of us, there is a discrepancy between our idea of our values and our ability to manifest them in our daily lives. More than any external condition we will face, this discrepancy between core values and their embodiment in our lives interferes with the ability to experience life as purposeful.
Become a visionary in your own life. What are your personal core values and how do they align with your raison d’être? Can you clearly identify how you practice your values in your life, particularly in those areas you define as mattering most to you? Where is there conflict between your core values and your goals? When there is misattunement between your values and your day-to-day life, can you bring them back into balance? When you reflect on these questions, and can answer them in the affirmative, you will experience your life as purposeful.
The following is a list of possible core values: accountability, assertiveness, autonomy, balance, belonging, boldness, broad-mindedness, candidness, capable, care, challenge, civility, commitment, community, compassion, competence, connectivity, conscientiousness, consistency, contemplation, cooperation, courage, creativity, credibility, curiosity, decisiveness, dedication, deliberateness, devotion, diversity, empowerment, enthusiasm, entrepreneurship, equality, equanimity, excellence, fairness, faith, fearlessness, focus, forgiveness, freedom, generosity, genuineness, gratitude, industriousness, innovation, health, helpfulness, honesty, humility, humor, inclusiveness, innovation, integrity, intelligence, joyfulness, justice, kindness, loyalty, mindfulness, modesty, nurture, open-mindedness, openness, originality, ownership, passion, patience, peace, persistence, positivity, presence, reliability, respect, responsibility, safety, self-discipline, sensitivity, service, simplicity, sincerity, solidarity, support, sympathy, tenderness, tolerance, tranquility, truth, understanding, uniqueness, warmth, wellness, wisdom.
Which personal core values do you naturally orient toward? They may be ones you strongly identify with or ones you aspire to. They may be qualities you admired in people when you were young. Looking at this list, you might think, “So many of these are my values. How can I know which ones are core?” Ask yourself directly, “If no one judged me, if I was valued for who I was, what qualities would I most want to embody?” If unsure, which ones most resonate for you, which ones naturally speak to you? You have time to test them out, modify, or change them as you develop practices around them.
Defining your core values for yourself is important because without clarity on your personal definition of them, your values can constrain you rather than guide you. For example, say loyalty is a core value of yours. Loyalty to what or to whom? What if loyalty to someone or something is at odds with something else that you deeply value? In this case, understanding the parameters of loyalty, as defined by you, promotes authenticity rather than hinders it.
Don’t relate to your core values as an abstract idea. Be specific. It is difficult to have a deeply personal relationship to your values before they are tested in some way. It is by defining values in the particulars of your life that they can be tested out. The more clearly and concretely you embody your core values in everything you do, the better you can mold your choices and actions to be in sync with them.
Exercise: How to Embody Your Values
Look through the list of values on p. 28 or create your own without looking at the list. Write down up to ten that you feel are your personal core values. Then, of these, choose two or three that will become the focus of your awareness. Each value gets its own sheet of paper.
Write down a definition for each. Do this without looking at a dictionary.
Under each definition, write down at least one example from your personal experience in relation to how you implemented this core value. If you want to go deeper, below each example of how the core value manifests in your life, also write a time when the core value was challenged in some way.
Finally, for each core value, reflect upon one way you could manifest it in relation to what matters most to you. Return to the earlier exercise on what matters most and imagine one concrete way to infuse your value into what you identified as mattering most. For example, if you said in the first exercise “my career” and a core value is “courage,” then what is one way you can bring courage to your career? It is important to focus on real, doable steps, no matter how small. If you want to go even deeper with this exercise, focus on one core value for at least one month. Place your awareness on this core value, reflect upon ways to cultivate it. Then create a clear, simple plan and implement it.
Align Your Core Values with What Matters Most
The question of what matters often comes up when we experience conflict, or when a crisis happens in life and the rug is pulled out from under us. Crisis and loss are important times to reaffirm core values. At the same time, self-imposed crises can sometimes be avoided if we develop skills to shape our decisions and actions to align with our core values from the get-go.
In the introduction, you met Brian, who came to therapy during a personal crisis in which he felt a lack of deeper purpose. Fueling this crisis was a lack of alignment between one of his core values (creativity) with what mattered most to him (his wife and daughter). His experience of himself as creative played out almost exclusively at work. At home, he cultivated other important values, like safety and love. Brian felt sadness when he recognized that he did not bring his creativity to his home life, the cost of which was a diminished experience of vitality. This recognition was new and important.
Brian incorporated intentional practices to help him infuse the spirit of creativity into his family time. Understanding that this was his central challenge, he could bring his generative problem-solving self to the fore. He relaxed his identity as “dad the provider” and showed more sides of himself to his daughter, feeling freer to be silly and playful at home. Brian now understood that being a provider did not have to fall into the narrow confines of his current lifestyle. Even as he continued to have financial abundance, the focus shifted to more meaningful ways to be present to his loved one
s. This shift was an important modeling for his daughter. Brian took pressure off himself—recognizing that he had had high expectations regarding how to be the manager for all of his family’s needs—and that this role wasn’t fun or enlivening. He could now get helpful distance from assumptions he had unconsciously adopted as his life unfolded, assumptions that had undermined his ability to take the risks necessary to align his choices and actions with his personal core values.
Brian recognized for the first time how vital it was to understand his personal core values and to allow them to shape all of his decisions and actions. Now he was consciously living in greater alignment with his core values in the areas that mattered most to him. This transformation was central to his reclaiming ownership of his life and regaining a sense of purpose.
Chapter 2
How to Access What
You Need for Well-Being
But what is happiness except the simple harmony
between man and the life he leads?
Albert Camus
If you are reading this book, it is likely that you already have the basic ingredients for well-being: having enough, physically and emotionally; being aware of your basic dignity and worth; living within your means in order to have resources to put toward what matters most; and having supportive and loving relationships. If you have these, you have everything you need.
Well-being is not something that you are lucky to have or unlucky not to have. It is not the result of a set of fortunate external circumstances, though these might exist. Nor is well-being necessarily diminished by hardships though these, too, may exist. It is instead an internal state that is available to you independent of any external circumstance. The sooner you accept that well-being is possible for you, the sooner you can cultivate and access it.
Some people have natural tendencies that enable them to more readily experience well-being. They naturally think more positively, appreciate their bodies and take care of its needs, create time for leisure and play, have creative outlets, perceive abundance and opportunity rather than roadblocks, orchestrate circumstances that feel purposeful, and engage in rewarding personal relationships and work. Other people are more likely to perceive their world, make choices, and act in ways that interfere with their well-being and perpetuate struggle. Most of us, though, have tendencies which promote well-being as well as those which interfere with it.
Although you may have the basic necessities for well-being, you might not experience this as a reality. What is enough is a moving target for some people, leading to a constant search for more. Some people link their sense of worth to external validation, which makes the experience of authenticity tenuous at best. Others might love and be loved, but not be able to bring the best of themselves to their relationships. Some people are so hungry for what they do not have that they can’t appreciate what is here for them right now. When we are blocking access to states of well-being, this becomes the focus of intentional practices.
Mood is Mixed Up With Well-Being
Moods are often mixed up with the sense of well-being. When this happens, feelings and moods get labeled as good or bad. This leads to problems when certain experiences are avoided because they are associated with negative moods. When this happens, we become cut off from important aspects of our experience.
Positive emotions are an important predictor of well-being. But what is more important than the amount or frequency of positive emotions, is that you take care to place awareness on that which is affirming. If you more naturally notice what is wrong or negative, placing awareness on your tendency to gravitate toward negativity is the first step to opening up to a fuller range of experience.
You can’t be your most authentic self unless you open up to all of your experience: positive, negative, and in-between. Negative mood states don’t prevent you from experiencing well-being. On the contrary, it is important to allow room for painful emotions whenever they arise. When you push away difficult emotions and experiences, you are inadvertently intensifying your pain because you are compartmentalizing it. When this happens, you limit your capacity to move through the experience and reach the other side of it. It’s natural to want to cultivate positive states such as joy, contentment, and excitement. But don’t chase these states in lieu of being present to all experience.
In the future, when you look back on your life, you will not think about it in terms of a predominance of mood states. What will endure in your memory won’t be the number of positive feelings or pleasurable experiences you have had. Rather, what will likely stay with you are poignant moments: the time you met your best friend or partner, had a creative breakthrough, chose to leave a career to be more fulfilled, moved to a new home, took a life-altering trip, said goodbye to your child leaving for college, revealed yourself in new ways to a friend, gathered up your courage and said “yes” to something or someone in spite of fear, entered a new relationship, or courageously took a risk and redefined an existing relationship. The moments that leave an indelible print are those that occur when you allow yourself to be vulnerable and take risks in the service of living in alignment with your core values.
Exercise: Cultivating Well-Being
Create a list of things or activities that give you a sense of well-being. Keep this list in plain sight. Include only things that enrich your life rather than things you should do because they are good for you. (This is because shoulds are often experienced as deprivation.) For example, instead of “smoke less weed” you might instead include other ways that you relax, such as “listen to a relaxation podcast before turning out the lights.”
Make the list as specific as possible. So instead of “spending time with friends,” use more concrete examples. “Dancing salsa with Olivia,” “Having a spa weekend with my closest friends,” “Golfing with Charlie,” or “Hiking at Harriman State Park for the day with my dog.” Or, instead of “getting physically fit” can you list five particular things, such as “that special kind of muscle ache when I pushed myself to the limits at the gym” or “the clarity I feel when cutting down on sugar,” or “getting up from sitting every thirty minutes to do ten burpees.”
Include on this list a variety of things that take anywhere from two minutes to an entire day. For this exercise, it is especially helpful to include a good amount of possibilities that take no more than five minutes. Activities don’t all need to be actions. They can, for example, be setting aside time to reflect upon the good things in your life, or “Telling myself something that is right about me.”
Now, every single day, incorporate one of these activities. This is why the short exercises are so important. They make it possible to follow through with this beautiful intentional practice regardless of how busy you are. As powerful as the particular things you do to develop well-being, the consistency of the practice—making it second nature—has mighty benefits.
What is Deep Happiness?
Happiness has been defined in countless ways over centuries. While there are common threads to most modern definitions, research has shown few clear relationships between particular life circumstances and the subjective experience of happiness. This is important because often we strive to change our external circumstances, with the notion that when we do we will be happier. This belief sometimes leads to making decisions and taking action that can actually make us less happy.
Deep happiness, as defined here, requires that you know how to cultivate well-being, but it is not synonymous with it. Unlike well-being, which with practice you can come to have much of the time, deep happiness is episodic—experienced in moments. While these moments are not continuous, they become deeply entrenched in your cellular memory. They stay with you and give meaning to your life. The state of deep happiness is akin to a feeling of profound connection—connection to yourself, to others, to everything.
There is converging scientific evidence that bringing the quality of greater presence to all of your activities leads to a grea
ter sense of happiness. One study from Harvard, with over 2,000 college students participating, found that while the students’ minds wandered much of the time, being more attune to what was happening in the present moment made them happier. And thinking of the past or the future, even if their thoughts were on pleasant things, made them less content. A major takeaway from the study is that it is natural for our minds to wander, a lot. And, also, wandering minds don’t serve our happiness.
Looking to the Whats for Happiness
Even as more and more people understand the importance of being present, and engage with various mindfulness practices, we can continue to have unarticulated deep-seated beliefs that what makes us happy is something external to ourselves. Even though we may know on some level that happiness comes from within, our efforts and energy are often directed toward finding and obtaining things outside ourselves that we believe will make us happy.
Too much emphasis is put on the what when seeking happiness: e.g., the content of our work, external recognition of our efforts, our success or the success of our partner, the best school for our children, the composition of our family, our material resources. We look to the what to fulfill us. While the what is, of course, important, the way we look for it—and at it—is often backwards.