Make your values work for you

Last week, I wrote that passion for your job is a mistake, which attracted a bit of attention, and some of the questions and conversation uncovered confusion about passion vs. values, and what it looks like to be fulfilled in your work even if you aren’t passionate about it.

I’m not an expert, just a traveler on a values-aligning journey myself, so I can’t be authoritative, but I think I can help break this down.

In short, if you want to achieve fulfillment at work, and leave work each day feeling happy, put your values to work for you. By the end of this article you’ll have an idea of how to do that.

To recap, there are two primary reasons not to pursue work that you are passionate about:

  1. Working for passion gives your employer power over you, which ultimately can only hurt you (this was the thesis of my previous post).

  2. When work is doing something that you love, what you love becomes work.

Many content-creators find themselves in the second group, initially putting something out into the world out of excitement and love, and then getting dragged by the “content treadmill” and forced to mechanically pump out content forever or starve. Few make it to the apex where it stops being a grind.

So, if pursuing your passions as a career is off the table, how can you cultivate fulfilling and joyful work? The answer lies in your values.

What are your values?

Your values, interests, and passions may overlap (and likely do), but when I say “values,” I specifically mean things you feel strongly about, which guide your choices and your evaluation of people and events. These things give you satisfaction to uphold, and to see others respect.

If you aren’t sure what your values might be, I strongly recommend that you stop reading right now and take some time to think about it. One great system, which I’ve used, is Brené Brown’s list of values. Here is the simple Google Docs template that I used to figure out my values.

Follow the instructions in that template, and also realize that this can take some time, and that that’s the point. It took me an hour to get down to 10, a couple weeks to get to five, and a few months to get to two.

Activate your values

There are countless research papers and books on what intrinsically motivates and fulfills people at work. Two of my favorites are “Drive,” by Daniel Pink, and “Nine Minutes on Monday” by James Robbins (I’ve linked them both on my library page).

But the missing piece is that sustaining that effort is much easier when the work aligns to your values. The secret is that alignment isn’t just something that is, it’s something that you do.

There are two key ways to activate your values in your daily work:

  1. Center your job or role on the tasks that are best aligned to your values, and/or

  2. Intentionally frame your perspective of the task around your values.

My top two values are curiosity and optimism. I am most aligned with the things I care about when I can bring a “glass half full” perspective, and when my actions are toward a greater understanding of things.

As a coach, I have opportunities to bring both curiosity and optimism into my work all the time (and that’s not a coincidence), but there’s more to running a coaching business than coaching. For example, I have to keep an eye on finances, which I find intrinsically boring. Because bookkeeping isn’t well-aligned to my values, I work to automate as much of that as possible.

Even when the work is necessary, like doing marketing activities for example, you can intentionally shift your perspective. When I can build marketing posts in a way that is curious, like researching and writing this article—which is absolutely marketing (gotcha!)—it activates my value for curiosity and understanding things better.

Sometimes, simply thinking about how the task invokes one of your values can make that task feel more gratifying. This is one of the most overlooked truths of life: the way you feel about everything you will ever experience is just a thought in your mind, and you have the ability to influence that!

As always I’d love to hear from you. What are your values? How do you shape your work and your own perspective to activate them on a daily basis?

Resources

In writing this, I was inspired by three books:

  • “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” by Cal Newport
  • “Drive” by Daniel H. Pink
  • “Nine Minutes on Monday” by James Robbins

You can find links to these books, and more, on my library page.

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