How Getting Clear on Your Values Can Guide Your Life

Back Story

I’m going to start this with a bit of backstory. Because, well… I had a breakdown at the start of 2021, that plunged me into a dark place for, well over a year. In the previous 9 months since the start of covid, my life had gone from absolutely amazing to a total train wreck. And I didn’t understand why.

For the next 18 months I would be stuck, ruminating on what had happened, trying to find a perspective that formed a cohesive and functional narrative for me to learn from and put myself back together. And what eventually clicked was when I started to look into my values.

In the first week of lockdown my work contract got pulled. The events industry I worked in was completely shut down. I only qualified for the minimum of furlough pay. My plans for buying a flat in the next few months went out the window. I was living out of a room in a house share, 100 miles from my girlfriend. A bunch of stuff. And I got depressed.

With everything else falling apart, I focused my attention on my relationship – trying to support and make my girlfriend happy, not add the burden of my depression to her plate. My self-esteem had quickly plummeted, and I was clinging onto her as the only constant in my life.

So when I finally managed to tell her I was struggling and she responded that she thought we were too different and wanted different things, it floored me and I felt so much shame for trying so hard to please her.

Now I can really understand how rejection could easily make a man bitter and resentful. At that time I blamed my girlfriend for not being more supportive, I blamed my dad for not being a better role model, I blamed the world for covid and all the lockdowns.

I was so disgusted in myself, and the crazy thing about shame and self-loathing, all these negative emotions, is that they can be so overwhelming that we can’t consciously bear to look at them within ourselves. They get pushed into our shadow, and we project them out onto the people around us.

My relationship with my dad at that time became so strained, because I was basically punishing him for traits that I couldn’t accept in myself.

So, as I said, I had about 18 months of constant rumination and thought cycles, trying to make sense of how my life had disintegrated in less than a year. It was relentless and I tried everything to work through it. Progress was painfully slow.

Finally, I signed up for a 10-day silent meditation retreat, after a friend suggested it was a place to confront and grapple with your thoughts. That thing was 9 days of torture to be honest, it was brutal, and I really thought I’d made things worse – those thoughts just bombarding me 24-hours a day.

But eventually, on the 9th day, everything seemed to slot into place, and I found a cohesive narrative, and so many realisations about the ways I had not been showing up fully in my life, and insight into the way I saw relationships.

Internal vs. External Values

What I realised was, when I lost my job at the start of Covid, my self esteem started to crash because I had unconsciously attached my self-worth to what I believed I brought to the table, materially. Having a great, well-paying job, being able to travel and have unique experiences.

Our modern culture has largely attached to this way of thinking but, actually, we’ve got it backwards. See, material success is an easy indicator of someone who has a functional way of interacting with the world – they are able to shape the world around them, somewhat to their will, and create what they want.

It’s a shortcut to identifying someone who has the potential capacity to be a provider. But we’ve become so focused on the external, material evidence rather than understanding that our underlying, internal values are actually the bit that’s truly important.

So many men are out there, working themselves into the ground, because they believe that what they can materially provide for their family is the key. If many of these men were to lose their job, they, like me during Covid, would be at serious risk of depression because the evidence of their effort has been taken away.

But when we shift our perspective to see that there can be an underlying, internal value – that we would do whatever it takes to provide for those around us – we find that this is where our real worth lies. We can always strive to uphold these internal values no matter what external situations the world throws at us.

We can always do the best we can to look after our loved ones in any situation. That value is just as relevant whether we’re making millions of pounds or if we don’t even have a job right now. And ironically, it’s also what will drive us to create external value in the world.

During covid, I was doing everything I believed to be right, but still my belief in where my self worth laid was focused externally on what I could now no longer provide materially, rather than appreciating the part of me that was trying hard to do what was best for the people around me. I got depressed, and clingy, because I was focused on the wrong things.

You see, externally, nothing necessarily has to change. We can still work hard, chase money and success. The only difference here is understanding what the intrinsic driving force behind our actions is.

So many of us have been trapped believing that material wealth is the end goal. But the ability to create what you want in the world, and the underlying knowledge of why you are doing what you do, is where true meaning and purpose, and value will be found.

Shame is a Bind

One other thing I want to mention here, and I use this as a warning of why getting grounded in our own internal values is so important. I’ve spoken before about shame being a bind in our psyche – like a Chinese finger trap, that won’t release until it can relax.

In that breakup I got hit with so much shame and, at the time, it felt like I was being punished for doing what I had believed to be the right thing. Now, many of us are carrying around very similar wounds from childhood, and you can learn more about this in my video on releasing buried shame, which I’ll link to below.

But the thing is, even though I’ve largely been able to straighten this out and understand the layers underneath, I still get hit with residual shame in moments when I’m trying to show up as loving and supportive. My subconscious associates those behaviours with heartbreak, and it takes deliberate effort to sit with those emotions, and remind myself that what I’m doing is in alignment with my values. Releasing shame is a process, and it takes a lot of compassion and acceptance to reset your nervous system.

So many men are shamed for being nice and can easily be sold the story that they need to be a bad boy to keep a woman. There’s so much terrible, distorted advice out there, so much of it pedalled by people who are clearly acting from their own shame wounds from experiences like mine – I wasn’t actually that far away from that place. The projections of blame I experienced in those first few months could so easily have been a slippery slope.

Most men I speak to who relate to this are genuinely kind. It makes me happy to do anything I can for my partner, and that’s how it should be. Being nice is not the issue, the problem for these men is not being able to effectively communicate and ask for their own needs too. Because many of us were not taught how, or grew up in environments where we didn’t feel able to, or we’ve been shamed for feeling negative emotions.

You absolutely should be prioritising your relationship and doing everything you can to support and celebrate your partner. As the potential mother of your future offspring, she should 100% be your top priority.

But that commitment also includes making sure you’re showing up as the best version of yourself – making yourself as strong and capable as possible so that you can provide and protect, being aware of what you need and being able to speak up about what you believe to be in the best interest of your relationship, even when it’s in disagreement. Standing up for what you believe to be for the greater good of your family.

And this is where I think many of us feel lost, because we don’t know what we actually want from our relationship, or even our lives. If you don’t know where you’re going, how can you know if you’re making a good decision in any situation?

Living our Values

This is the real power of getting super clear on our values, figuring out what we want from our life, what we stand for… is that it removes the burden of having to make decisions in each moment. Our values make those choices for us – is this situation in alignment or not?

Our values lead the way, and stop us chasing after the next shiny thing that crosses our path. I’m not saying it’s easy, and temptation will always be there. But striving to be true to our values, even when it’s hard, can only move us towards the life of our dreams. If we refuse to entertain any situation, or behaviour or action that is not in alignment with what we want, how can we receive anything else?

If you want to be fit you need to value working out consistently and eating healthily. If you want to be rich, you need to value paying attention to your finances, investing and working hard. If you want a conscious relationship you need to value vulnerable and real communication.

It sounds so simple, but how often do we stop and think about what it would actually take to live the life we really want? And how aware are we of our current habits and behaviours that are not in alignment with our ambition?

We’re already living out our values, whether we’re aware of them or not. The challenge is to consciously choose to focus on ones that are internal, that can’t be shaken by external events, and that will still move us closer to our goals.

It’s the difference between wanting to be the biggest guy in the gym, or working out to beat our former self. One of those has a limit, and can always be taken away by someone else; one of those you can refine forever.

I have a practice that I use to check in on how well I’m showing up in relation to my values. I’ve distilled them into a list of seven statements that encapsulate how I want to show up in the world. Every morning I meditate on these for just 50 seconds each, and I use that time to imagine what it would look like if I was showing up as the best version of myself.

I also replay recent scenarios, to look for alternative perspectives of how I could have done better. So simple and quick. But in the year I’ve been practicing this I’ve gone from being completely lost and untethered, with no direction, to being laser-focused on who I want to be and what I want from my life. I still fuck up, countless times every day, but now I have a tool to dissect and learn from those mistakes.

I truly believe that getting crystal clear on our values and what we stand for, is some of the most important work we can do to help us live an amazing life. We need to commit to a path as best we can, and grieve and let go of the possibilities we leave behind.

When our values are internal, and based on the kind of person we wish to be, this still gives us the freedom to pursue any and all external experiences that feel in alignment, and we can still change tack whenever something even more meaningful comes along.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your perspective and if there’s anything else you’d like me to talk about then let me know in the comments too.