Hello everybody, happy New Year, happy 2023, and welcome to this episode of The Meaningful [bleep] Show with your host, Vincent Lussenburg. Today I am excited to talk to you about values. We're talking about values because I believe them to be an essential ingredient in your decision-making machine, and upgrading or getting insight into your values upgrades the quality of your decisions quite a bit.

What I want to do is help you make decisions that are better aligned with who you are and who you want to be. Many things go into making quality decisions, and your values are more important than you may think. Let's take a look at a couple of definitions of value. First of all, a person's principles or standards of behavior, one's judgment of what is important in life — and this is from the Oxford Dictionary, synonym that they list as principles. Second one, from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: something such as a principle or quality intrinsically valuable or desirable.

Cool. So we immediately see that these statements refer to an individual or a group — they are subjective. The related words, synonyms, like principle and meaning, are also highly subjective terms. There is not a common set of principles we all agree to. Of course, within our society there are some that we by and large agree to, like, you know, not murdering, for example — things like that.

When we're talking about values, what are examples, so that we can get a feeling of what we're talking about here? So I have a list — these are by no means specifically important values, just have a handful here. Going through them: adventure, beauty, community, consciousness or awareness, equality, faith, gratitude, honesty, independence, joy, knowledge or learning or understanding, kindness or generosity, love, romance or intimacy, modesty slash humility, order, passion slash enthusiasm, respect, safety, security, teamwork or collaboration, uniqueness, variety or newness or novelty, and wisdom.

So a number of these values I've listed synonyms for, like, for example, variety, newness, and novelty — you might relate more with one of these words than the other, and this is actually where values work gets quite interesting, because we have this word that usually we don't really use that often in day-to-day life, that we're suddenly using to point to something that is really important about our life. So it is very important to dive into not only what, for example, uniqueness is according to the Oxford Dictionary, but also what it means to you. But we get ahead of our skis — some of these values come from a values card from livecompasscards.com, some of them from actualize.org, and from mindtools.com.

All right, so values — they're omnipresent on self-help and social media, like the word authenticity, or presence, mindfulness, love, kindness, self-care. So we see these words a lot, and so we kind of already know that it is important, and maybe you follow Tony Robbins or the Dalai Lama or Eckhart Tolle, and in their work they refer to value and beliefs and many of the other things that influence your decision-making, right. Maybe in your religious tradition — you're a priest, or a rabbi — this refers to it as well. So you might say, like, "I already know this," because you get bombarded with it every day. But that makes it even more important to zoom in, because in order to get ahead and actually make this useful, you have to do quite an amount of mental effort, and, well, we're all lazy, and we don't really want to engage that brain process to really go down into that. Maybe we want to, as we're listening to a podcast, spend like a couple of seconds thinking about it, but our brain already knows if we want to do this right, it's going to be like a bunch of work to actually hash this out.

How do values impact your day-to-day life? What does value exactly mean? Why are values so important — why more important than the ten thousand other things competing for your attention? So these are some of the questions that we want to answer in the next section. I already mentioned that we're really focused on making higher quality decisions, and my statement was: values are one of the important ingredients that drives that decision-making process. So the more that we can draw out from the unconscious space into the conscious space, the better.

If you look at this machine, this decision-making machine, you can compare it to an iceberg. So what happens consciously in our decision-making machine, we can refer to as the tip of the iceberg — it's visible. So things are conscious: intentions, like goals, desires, and methods that we follow — we know about that, that's on the forefront. But the rest of the iceberg, the part that is underwater, is a lot larger, and a lot of the decisions are unconsciously controlled by things such as values, but also worldview, beliefs, conditioning, thinking styles, prejudice, and bias. So, in short, unconscious programming — there's a bunch of interesting stuff there. Right now we're talking about values; for future episodes we might want to dive into some of these other concepts. I do believe that beliefs and conditioning are also very, very interesting, but values, in my opinion, they can be mapped, they can be drawn out into the conscious realm, they can be influenced, changed, and it can be immensely important for personal growth and happiness, because these decisions are not just arbitrary — they affect your happiness.

If you are interested in dissecting this further, I would recommend reading the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, or reading papers on decision-making. I also like the worksheet that UC Davis has, called Values-Based Decision Making, and I'll leave a link to that in the show notes.

Where we start is knowing your values. So the question is: do you know your values? Do you know what is unconsciously put in your head, and what is unconsciously putting a finger on your decision-making, so to speak — and what could be the danger of living by values that have been instilled upon you, such as by your experiences growing up, your childhood, values society, the you live in, your work, your church, co-workers, neighborhood, and maybe some misguided ideas of what it means to be a good person, or a good man, or a good woman.

The risk of not doing this work — mapping out your values — is ultimately delay and emotional distress. An emotional distress that's over getting into unwanted situations, and, after realizing that you're in an unwanted situation, the stress over wasting so much time on them. If you're lucky, this long way around, you can still complete it during this lifetime, but maybe it'll take a few lifetimes or more, as a manner of speaking. So we don't want to take the long route here.

Let's take a look at a couple of examples of this unconscious road. Let's start with family. Common value — you may have been raised to value family a lot, but in your adult life it may have started to cramp your style. This is not right, this is not wrong — you might still respect your family, but you may outgrow their comfort zone, or, for that matter, they might outgrow yours. It would be painful to keep engaging with family as a core value, putting a lot of time and effort into it for years and years, and to finally decide, when you just emotionally break down after a trip home gone awry or something like that, that family isn't really for you. There's a little bit of the fallacy of "you invest in something, you keep investing in it," right — it's a bias, like, I think, sunk cost, or something like that — "in for a penny, in for a pound," things like that.

So it's painful to steer away from that. In relation to the example I was talking about, the less painful variant than waiting for an emotional breakdown is to consciously reflect on your life and values and see the trend of family getting less important, and get into it what its natural outcome would be, before you get to the state that you're completely emotionally exhausted.

Another example is safety. You may discover that later in life, taking risks is much more meaningful to you than going by the relative safety of staying on the well-trodden path. That doesn't make it right, doesn't make it wrong — it might be something that was instilled in you by maybe your parents, that grew up in very different surroundings than you did. It's all possible. But we can also go to the polar opposite, such as variety — maybe as an early adult, instead of being focused on safety, you're really into getting exposed to many different stimuli. A lot of us do this when we're in our early 20s — we might travel to different countries, meet different people, go to different parties, sleep with different partners, move a lot. You get a taste of life, you get a picture. At one point you may discover, though, that another value might be getting more important to you. You kind of know that there is variety, but you might be more drawn to maybe family, because you've started your own family. It might also be wisdom, or order, or something like that.

So my cautionary tale here is: don't just act on the values that were instilled in you — be aware of them and reflect on them. There is another danger, though, and that is much more insidious, and those are kind of the autopilot values. It's values that you don't necessarily disagree with — it's not that you get to a state where there's emotional distress, it's not working with you — but it's more like you still do it because you get recognition, you get some kind of reward for it from your community, and maybe it's not really a value of yours. It might be an innate strength that you have — maybe it's really easy for you to be compassionate, comes to you naturally — but it might not be a value of yours anymore. You might not want to be compassionate to people and help them at this stage of the game. You might want to do more self-expression, for example — live for you.

Let's see. Then there's the values that you pursue until "good enough," right — those are the values that often are kind of negatively motivated, more about that later. So you're a six out of ten, a B-minus, and then you're just like, okay, this is fine. Maybe it's some value that comes with the church you go to, or passed down from your parents. An example could be honesty — that's something that's communicated to you as being important, and you might be okay with just being good enough. Honestly, you go for that six out of ten, and then you feel more honest than your neighbor, or you look at society and you're just like, okay, I'm honest enough. Kindness is another good example, so you might compare yourself to neighbors, friends, spouses, parents, siblings, priests, boss, and that's sort of the level that you want to take a value to, right.

Remember that these are values contrary to the other ones, in that generally you do agree with them. So I have an interesting quote from Benjamin Hardy — he wrote books like Be Your Future Self Now or Willpower Doesn't Work — and he says something along the lines of: the greatest threat to reaching your biggest goal is not the obstacles that you encounter on the way that prevent you from getting there, but actually achieving a lesser version of your goal and then quitting. So it's kind of a mouthful, so I'll go through it again: the greatest threat to reaching your biggest goal is not the obstacles thrown in your path, but achieving your goal with a lesser version and then quitting. Right — maybe not until you have a six out of ten, maybe it's an eight out of ten, and then you're done. It lays the emphasis differently from the more commonly known "perfect is the enemy of good," from Voltaire, French writer, historian, philosopher.

But why would you quit at that B-minus, if this is core to who you are? And you need to be able to realize that, to see that there is more growth for you to go into, and actually there might be much more value coming to you as a person to go and sort of level through that entire value set, like exploring it fully, than focusing on other values. Right — although you might already be better than your peers, right, it's not about your peers, it's about things that make you happy.

For the gamers among you, I like to compare it to putting points in your skill tree. So it is better to do it yourself than having someone do it for you — although there is something to be said for it if you just start in life, or in a game, you follow guides, and there's nothing wrong with it. But the moment that you let all these decisions be made by your parents, priests, teachers, religious person, your boss, your political party, your Myers-Briggs, or your [bleep] astrology sign — you're limiting yourself, right, you're not exploring that deeply enough. It's your skill tree, damn it. And another thing that I often see is that taking control of your own skill tree can be a lot harder than trying to coerce other people into putting points into the same path.

So let's see, with this analogy — early on in the game you followed a guide, and at that point you read that guide and being a Healing Druid — a little World of Warcraft alumni shining through — but that Healing Druid was where it's at, that was the best class, and you might then influence other people that are going in a slightly different direction to be like, "oh no, that's wrong, you shouldn't do that." For a game it's like, who actually cares, that's true. But when you think about this more from a perspective of actual life, then it becomes more important, and examples of that would be trying to proselytize to other people on the value of, whatever it could be, like kindness or something like that. You're not focused on doing your own work, you're telling other people how they're not kind enough or honest enough or something like that — you're not staying in your lane. That's also a waste of time, because ultimately you can't control their skill tree — they're in charge of that. Let them be their own person, and focus on staying in your lane instead, and leveling out what you can.

So when I'm talking about the value of values, I'm really talking about you taking your power and helping it define who you are, who you want to be, and where you put your skill points into. And that doesn't mean you set it and forget it — it's an iterative process.

So just to see what we did so far — we talked about knowing, the importance of knowing your values. Before that we went through what values are, examples of values, and things like that. We get now to the part where I've explained that it is important to know your values — both the ones that might not be values for you (in fact, the unconscious value that's not really your value anymore), but also the autopilot values that you might not be able to — that you might not put all the energy into that you should be putting into it, because that will be the best for your happiness, although your society might tell you to do something else.

And the question, of course, is: how do I get to know my values? So really the pragmatic, practical part of this episode, in a way — and that's going to require work, right. So there's a school of thought that values are not picked, right, that value exercises you do are meant to determine your values, not set them. And I have to admit there is some mind [bleep] going on here, because that's a cool thought as a point, right, and I think it's a wonderful place to start, to be like, "I want to discover my values," because when you do that, you get to surface some of your unconscious values and look at them — do they feel right, and also, am I putting enough effort into my autopilot values, or am I comparing myself to my peers.

There are many different ways to get to your list of values. Since I have a finite amount of time today, I'm going to walk through a couple of examples that have worked very well for me. Like, to start with, the value cards — LiveCompassCards — that I have here, they're just simple playing-style cards with values on there. So you can go to livecompasscards.com and order, or Amazon or something like that, pick any — I know mental health professionals actually use these, and it is helpful because they're physical, right, and that means that you can throw them all on the table, you can sort through them and stuff — there's something to be said for that, right. There's online resources as well — MindTools has an online process that allows you to go through the same thing, and there's a sorting process through that. So there are many different ways to do that, right, to get from a stack of like a hundred different values, either online or with cards, and to go to your top five, top three, top one, right, your core value.

Generally what you do is you take all these different values, and you want to look at the individual values — I just have a couple of them in my hand now — but generally you go through, and you start with having an initial discard/keep pile, right. So generally what tends to happen is you hang on to a lot of values, and it's kind of hard to sort of disqualify a value, so that you get down to a shorter list that actually is a little bit more actionable to you. There's many different strategies for that, which you will find on the online resources as well.

So what you often see, and what I think is very important, is when you look at these values, that you look as well at where your motivation comes from to choose that. So, some of them — safety is actually a good example — that might be a fear-based value, related to the fact that it's not like you love being safe — maybe you do, but in this situation it's more like you're scared of what will happen if you don't have safety in your top values. You might be afraid that your house is going to get burglarized, or physical harm will come to you, or things like that, or your children, right. So that's actually another very important aspect of looking at your values — the moment that you look at these fear-based versus intrinsic values that you're positively drawn to, it's generally a ratio. And the fact that something is negatively motivated is not bad, right — depending on my situation, my history, or whatever, that's safety — although it's based on fear, it might make a lot of sense. Maybe I'm in Ukraine right now — might be very important to have that as a top value right now. Maybe not in five years or ten years, but right now, even though it is negatively motivated.

So if you acquire one of these decks, they will come with an instruction card, and they will guide you through the entire process — get you down to a top 15, then 10, and 7, then 5 — and you can sort of stop at that point. Like, I think that it is nice to have a list of different values to work at, but it's also very good to see, okay, what's my one core value, like if you boil down me, what does it really come to. I find that really interesting — the moment that you've decided that, you'll see that your decisions change.

Another resource is mindtools.com — I'll have the full link in the show notes. It's less of a finite list, because, of course, this is driven by a publisher that said, okay, well, these are the values that are important, and my understanding of the English language, of understanding what safety is about — because safety, of course, can be a bunch of different things, and, you know, what I have — like, hope here — like, what is it exactly that it means. So you're primed by having a list that makes your life easier, but it also limits you in a way. MindTools does a really nice job of priming the pump in a different way, and it takes you down different mental exercises to tease out the values that are already present in you, by looking at your past. To refer back to Thinking, Fast and Slow, I think this is an excellent way to increase the effectiveness of your values choices, because priming the pump in this way does increase the quality of your decisions quite a bit.

So I'll walk through the process — this is verbatim what's on the website, so I'm not taking credit for it, I'm just reading what the steps are, and I do refer you to mindtools.com, which, you know, is the source. Step one: identify the times that you were happiest in both your career and your personal life — this will ensure some balance in your answers. What were you doing? Were you with other people? If so, who? What other factors contributed to your happiness? So, focus on happiness, focus on activities, people around you, and other factors that might influence that happiness.

Step two is identifying the times that you were most proud — same thing, career and personal life. Why were you proud? Were there other people to share your pride? Are there any other factors that contributed to your feelings of pride? So you can already see that there is a difference between happiness and pride, right — generally these emotions are generated in different types of moments, right. Proud is generally after a big achievement — maybe you got your doctoral degree, or won a race, or something along those lines, right — where happiness can be more just about surroundings that you are in. Maybe you had a real happy youth, you were a happy kid, and that was just because you remember going down the slide like ten thousand times, or riding your bike, or something like that, which is less related to a big achievement — you did, you were just flowing with life.

Step three: identify the times when you were most fulfilled and satisfied, and the same questions — what need or desire was fulfilled, how and why did the experience give your life meaning, and what other factors contributed to your feelings of fulfillment. Again, after happiness and pride, fulfillment — or satisfied — is a subtly different beast again, right. So fulfillment generally comes not really after an achievement — it's not just a situation you find yourself in — but what I at least associate it with is a little bit more of a slow burn, where pride is really like, a thing happened, I won a race, that was a big thing, right, where fulfilled and satisfied is more about what you were doing, and it's getting you into a positive direction in your life. Happiness feels more like context — more, fulfilled and satisfied, you're flowing with the universe, which can apply to happiness as well, but I think fulfillment implies a little bit more direction, right — it's more, like I said, a slow burn rather than just a burst.

Determine your top values — this is step four. Based on your experiences of happiness, pride, and fulfillment, why is each experience truly important and memorable? Use the following list of personal common values to get you started — so that's the list that you find there, and they encourage you to aim for about ten top values. So that is a wonderful process to go through as well. Like I said, I think that priming the pump and really going into those three different directions is a really good way to start as well. If I look at these cards, I feel like fulfillment, happiness, and the third thing are more done later in the process, as you think about, okay, how are these things exactly motivated, where this other method starts with it all the way in the beginning. Your mileage may vary — you might like the one thing versus the other thing — but you have different options, and that's the cool thing.

You will ultimately come to this initial list — so I don't expect you to have that initial list ready now here on this podcast, but once you do, remember that you're not done — this talk is really about motivating that it's really important to put the effort in, and it's not a one-and-done. There's multiple passes to this process. It's very important, for example, to create your own definition of a value — again, I've got hope here, but what does hope mean, what does hope mean for me? Now, values, I think it's very important to ground them in the now — like, if I do this exercise now, and a quarter from now, this hope might mean something completely different for me. So it's important to write down not just the definition of what hope means, but what it means to you. All right, maybe you want to substitute it with another synonym that works better for you, of course, as well.

So you definitely want to write about that — you want to write a paragraph, and not when you get to your final five values, right — because at one point, if, initially, as you go through this list, you cut it down from like a hundred to twenty-five or something like that, it's fine to just do it with broad brush strokes. But once you get to like 15 or 20 or something like that, that's the moment to put a little bit more effort in, and to make sure that you're making the right choices, because maybe one of these values does not surface, because you're like, okay, well, hope doesn't really mean that much to you, without really going through the exercise of being like, what would my hope mean for me, like if hope would be a value for me, if I would embody that, what would that mean, how would my life look differently.

What I also think is very important, and that a lot of these methods miss, is to rate how you embody each value — so rating it, for example, one to ten, and paint a picture of how your life would look if you would embody this value perfectly. And that, of course, means perfectly for you. If travel is a value, you could say, hey, ten out of ten is when I'm traveling around the world all the time, I don't work, I don't do nothing, I don't have family, I don't have relationships — but that might not be a reality for you. You might not right now have a spouse and kids, and your cash might be tight, so what's a ten out of ten for you now? Maybe it's just planning one trip a quarter, and you alternate between driving somewhere and camping, and then flying and hotels, or something like that. But what would it mean to you now?

And this is partially so that if you do this more often — and I recommend doing it like once a quarter or something like that — your answers aren't just the same, right, that it's also like, now I feel a ten out of ten would be this, and I feel right now that I'm a seven out of ten, or something like that, seeing circumstances. Sometimes you're a ten out of ten for a value, and you might not even be satisfied with that. So it's a little bit of a tricky process.

I already mentioned that you should think about if your values come from a positive or negative mindset — if they come out of fear, as in, "I'm afraid my parents will be upset if I don't honor faith as a value," or "I'm afraid I will become dependent on my partner if I don't prioritize independence," something like that — these would be negatively, or fear-based. You could even have courage as a value that's actually fear-motivated, as in afraid of what would happen if I weren't courageous. Reminds me of a woman I did a multi-day course with, who was a stereotypically strong female of a specific ethnic group — she was afraid that her life would become undone if her courage would wane, if she didn't step up to the plate, because she felt that that was necessary to allow her son to develop healthily, right. So that can be super important as a value, maybe it's 90% negatively motivated, because you don't want to deal with what happens if you don't do that — that's your choice, that's fine, but it's very, very useful to have clarity on that, right. Often it's not 100% the other way, or 100% the other way — it's like a balance, 70/30, 60/40, or something like that. It's useful to annotate your values list with that, and maybe re-prioritize based on that — but you don't have to.

As we're starting to round up, there's one word of warning that I want to add, and that's backlash from your environment. It's always important — I want to say, be conservative, or careful, because of your environment and how it responds to this. Every time you change your behaviors, especially if it's a large change that you are considering, your environment will respond by trying to get you back into your status quo. So expect that — there are probably not a lot of people in your life that truly accept you, or maybe they are, and then I would be super happy for you. But plan ahead, think of what people's own agendas are, and what they would want you to be. I'm not telling you to not live your most core values, far from it, but be aware of that backlash — and not just from your environment, by the way, from yourself as well, right — you are your environment as well, right. It's called an ego backlash — it's whenever you do some serious work, there tends to be a dip afterwards, trying to pull you back, because it's painful, and change is hard, and things like that.

So I've taken you through a fast and furious tour through why values are important, how you discover yours, different methods. I haven't really gone in depth into: once you have these values, how does your life change, and what is different. I've mentioned that your decision-making will improve, so right now I would suggest that the next time you make a big decision — such as the brand of cottage cheese to get, joking — you make that a value-based decision. You can use the UC Davis worksheet that I've linked in the show notes, or just eyeball it, but really focus on your values as you look at making this decision.

All right, that's it for today. Through working on this material, I've discovered new resources for myself that I will use next time I do this exercise for myself, to augment that list. So I'm excited about learning that with you guys, together. Until next time. Until then, peace out.