Live Your Values Everyday

You kind of touched on this earlier when you talked about a prior experience when you were younger and the values of a company that didn’t align with yours, but I’m going to kind of do a deeper dig on that. What would you say are your top three values, and how do you assess alignment between your values and your actions?

Sure. Fairness is number one. Are we treating people according to their needs and how you would want to be treated? Compassion. Are you giving people the benefit of the doubt? I have a really young son. He’s a year and a half old, and he is maybe just starting to learn that the world does not completely revolve around him.
But, you know, as adults, we forget that too. You know, we are just one person in somebody else’s interactions in a day. So, compassion, knowing that the world does not revolve around you. Know that the person you are engaging with has a whole bunch of other things going on.
Know that the way you talk to someone and leave them at the end of the workday feeling, the impact you have on them, that is baggage that they will take home to them, to their family. And how do you keep that in mind? I’m not saying treat everybody with kid gloves, but be compassionate.
And then impact. I love the Mary Oliver poem where at the end she says, “Tell me what it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life,” but are you making something of this one wild and precious life that you have? So fairness, compassion, and impact?
And I would say if you need to assess—I’ll push your question—if you need to assess alignment between your values and your actions, that means that they’re not actually your values, means that they’re your aspirational values.
Maybe you wish that they were your values and the things you really cared about, but I actually think if they’re really your values, you’re living them every day, they come pretty naturally to you. Some things will test your values.
We’ll be placed in a situation, there’ll be a really difficult compromise to make or tradeoff to make. But I believe that if something is truly your value, you get that feeling in the pit of your stomach, you know it’s pressing up against your values, and that’s your opportunity to act against your values.