What Do You Value?

You know the line from that movie, or song… Put me in coach, I'm ready to play.

As an entrepreneur-ish person, and the CEO of a few different businesses -- including this one, where I've written somewhere north of 100,000 ads over 40-plus years -- I am all about growth.

Not surprisingly, personal development is a huge part of my business growth and development. In fact, one of my businesses, EntreGrow, provides business coaching for entrepreneurs in growth mode who want to accelerate the growth of their business.

Running a business that coaches business owners doesn't mean that coaching is for someone else but not for me. Quite the contrary, I have a few coaches that I respect and learn from that coach me in different areas of my life. While Tony Robbins helps me with my mindset in general, Gary Vaynerchuk has coached me in my business structure and philosophy, and Pamela Hughes helps me in another area altogether: personal wellness.

On one of my recent weekly coaching calls with Pamela, she had me go through a values exercise that hit harder than I expected. It's the kind of thing I'd usually roll my eyes at -- I've sat through enough corporate offsites with values posters on the wall to be skeptical -- but this one actually changed how I think about the calls I make in my agency and my life. Worth sharing.

The Exercise That Kicked My Ass

For much of my childhood and nearly all of my adult life I really didn't think much about my personal wellness. In fact, you could say, I neglected it.

It never occurred to me that if I wasn't physically well, if I wasn't healthy, I couldn't possibly serve all the people I need to serve in my life -- my team, my clients, my family. I alluded to that in my post titled: Succession. The thought of dying and not being there to support any of them is a heavy burden.

In the exercise Pamela ran me through, I was handed a long list of values -- words like ambition, integrity, wealth, connection -- and asked to circle the ones that were true for me, the ones I actually relate to, not the ones that sound good on a LinkedIn bio.

I thought this would be a fairly simple task, but there was a hitch. She asked me to circle those values without personal judgment attached to my decisions. At first, I chuckled -- "of course I can do this without personal judgment," I thought, these are my values after all. But as I started, I found myself doing something rather interesting: I was having an internal debate (you know that voice in your head) over the value and weight of one personal value over another. I found myself trying to determine which were more true for me and which were ones I wanted others to believe about me, or ones I thought my coach would want to hear.

Yes, I found myself holding judgment over my decisions to choose the words that were true for me. What's interesting about this exercise is that there is no right or wrong answer. There are just your answers. It's the thought I put into what those answers meant that was weighing on me -- the value, the weight I gave each individual word, versus just allowing them to be the values I hold true.

As we got further into the exercise I had circled more than the six to ten she had asked me to circle. I wound up circling 15. Then came the judgment (not about WHAT I chose, but about HOW MANY I chose).

She said "I need you to eliminate five, I need you to circle only six to ten values."

Holy crap, Pamela! Why couldn't I just have my fifteen and be happy?

You Can't Value Everything

Because when you "value" everything, you value nothing. I've told copywriters the same thing for decades about headlines that try to say everything and end up saying nothing -- the same principle applies to how you run your own life. Pick what matters most and let the rest go, or nothing gets through.

So here I was picking apart my previous decisions to identify which values had less value. Funny, I thought this was going to be an easy exercise -- it turned out to be more difficult than giving up naming rights to my second son for a camera. True story, I'll share that another time.

So which values did I eliminate and which values did I keep?

I thought achievement and ambition were very similar, but I like to achieve stuff… I have ambition, but which do I have more of?

If you couldn't tell, the noise in my head was relentless from this internal debate.

If I'm ambitious and I'm an achiever, don't those go hand in hand? In the end, achievement lost out to ambition, dreaming to enthusiasm, while reputation and vision both fell off my list.

My final list looked like this

• Ambition
• Acceptance
• Being Liked
• Connection
• Creativity
• Friendships
• Happiness
• Integrity
• Personal Growth
• Wealth

My Final List

Here's the cool thing about this exercise: everyone's list is going to look different because everyone values different things. Guess what, that's OK.

At the risk of making this too "cute," I found this exercise tremendously valuable. It may sound like a soft, fluffy, job interview activity but what it REALLY does is give you clarity into the way you're wired -- into what motivates you and what influences the decisions you make. I see the same clarity problem in agencies all the time: teams that never nailed down what they actually stand for end up nodding along in every client meeting while the work quietly rots instead of pushing back with conviction. Self-awareness, personal or professional, is priceless. It's the same discipline behind a good headline that earns the read instead of trying to please everyone -- you can't stand for everything and expect anyone to remember what you stand for.'

I urge you to take this exercise as a gift, and choose the six to ten values that speak to you, the ones you identify with most.

Try not to judge your decisions as you go through the exercise (which may be difficult). If you're like me, it may take you a few tries before you can be unemotional about the words you choose to circle. Just try to be honest with yourself and remember that the words only hold as much power as you give them. One does not have more value than the others, they simply are your values.