In February 2021 I had been feeling like I was struggling to know myself. Between the extreme stress and exhaustion of the twins' first year or so of life, my faith transition of the last decade, frustrations and issues in our marriage, and the anxiety that had overtaken me, I just felt like the Me that I used to know was long gone, and the Me that I was existing as was unknown. I looked back on Past Me with some longing, as She was pretty fun and delightful in a lot of ways. But I felt like Present Me had some maturity and maybe some useful insights and lessons learned from the challenging experiences of four plus decades. Present Me felt pretty fractured and incomplete, though. I followed the sister of a friend on Instagram who is a therapist and she was offering a several hour online workshop that would be featuring a value card sorting. I had heard of the idea before, and even printed out the papers, but never gotten around to cutting them up into cards or doing anything more with them. I felt like this could be a useful exercise for me, so I signed up and paid the fee. It turned out to be more insightful and valuable than I had anticipated, and has served me well in the past year plus since then.
The general idea is that you have a bunch of cards with different values listed on them. You first do a preliminary sort to see which ones resonate with you. You aren't rejecting the others and saying they don't matter, but just seeing which ones you find really strike you as being particularly motivating or important. Then you do it again, and I think maybe one more time. At the end when we had about 10 or so cards left, we looked to see how they could be grouped in a way that made sense to us.
Here's my first pass, just pulling out the ones that resonated with me more than others.
Then I got down to these.
I felt like they kind of sorted themselves like this.
And this was my final grouping. I feel like the final paring down is not a perfect representation of my values, but I did like the simplicity of it and felt like it was an adequate enough capturing. The way I looked at it was that my Values could be grouped into three categories, which I thought of as My Purpose, My Joy, and My Way of Being. So under Purpose was Growth, with Intimacy and Mindfulness being the core components of that. This did have a bit of a time component as well, as I felt like those two areas were the most in need of attention at that time in my life. My Joy consisted of Fun, with Adventure, Family, and Openness being the key components of that. It is funny to review this now, because I hadn't remembered that I'd put Openness under Fun, though I did remember that it was a core value of mine. I'll talk more about this later, but Openness this past year has felt a lot more like an area of Growth (which has lead to some Fun) than something just set up to be Fun. My Way of Being was Loved, which I think includes being loving as well, even though I simplified it down to that one single card. It was more how I aspired to FEEL at the time.
I've talked to a few people about the value I gained doing this, and I think the number one thing is that it gave me some metrics to use when evaluating opportunities and also my own behavior. Most of us have inherited values either from our families of origin or from a religious institution and we don't really question them. Most of the time those values are pretty good ones, so that works out okay. The problem is if we reject or abandon some of those values but don't define what our own values are. Then we are often left in the situation of still measuring ourselves against our old values and coming up short because we aren't living them in a way that satisfies our critical mind, but it's human nature to judge and make these sorts of distinctions. Once we make the effort to define our own values, we can measure ourselves against them and it feels pretty damn great to see your own growth and your own integrity in living according to values you defined. I know it has made quite a difference for me, and helped me make choices that have pressured me to grow.
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