Live your values

I’m off on holiday for the rest of this week, so things will go a bit quiet, but it fits perfectly with a leadership conference I went to at the weekend.

The primary focus of the day was on identifying the values you want to be living by, and orientating your decisions and the division of your time accordingly.

Some of my values were: Solitude, Creativity, Community and Learning.  The holiday I already had planned involves: an art course, visiting art exhibitions and museums (alone), going (alone) to Greenwich, somewhere I’ve not really explored or discovered yet, and taking some time to sit quietly and read/think.

Now I’m thinking that for the community part I might invite a friend who works in the evenings to meet me for lunch one day.

Being aware of the different values each activity feeds will enable me to get more out of them, for example, instead of just going to the museum exhibition, wandering round, and wandering out again, I will approach it with the mindset of wanting to learn something new.

Plus, at the end of the week, I will have the satisfaction of knowing that although I relaxed and had fun and hopefully came away refreshed, it wasn’t purely hedonistic, but was part of the process of building myself into the person God is making me.

This carries across into leadership, too.  If your team doesn’t know its corporate values, all the work its members do can just feel like activity – a box-ticking exercise.  Helping them to know and understand the values you’re working by can be key in building a stronger, more effective team.

What values are you living by?  How does your life reflect them? (eg, if one of your values is creating order and beauty, then doing the laundry stops being a mindless chore and becomes an expression of your values!)

Is there anything you could or should do to re-prioritise your activities in light of your values? 

See you next week!

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