Living By Your Values, Not Just Naming Them

I Thought I Knew My Values

I believed I knew my values. My calendar, my bank account and my decisions told a different story.

Two years ago, my knee needed surgery, which meant at least six weeks off work, and I knew exactly how I'd spend them: worrying, not recovering. For the first time, I chose differently. I resigned, knowing other people would hold the pen on the story behind my decision. I left anyway.

That decision wasn't easy to explain to myself, let alone to anyone else. People don't spend decades building a career and then casually swan out the front door. Those careers reward staying, especially after you've put so much into them. Leaving felt like giving up, or admitting I'd been wasting my life. I couldn't control what others decided this meant about me.

At first, my body didn't catch up with the decision. Working across multiple time zones meant there was always something waiting first thing. I still woke at five and reached for my phone, expecting the email that needed answering before I even left the house. There wasn't one. I took the dogs out and realised halfway round the walk that I was walking as if I was trying to catch a train. It hadn't registered it was OK to slow down.

It was only weeks in, with the job gone and nothing to fill the hours except training to get my knee ready for surgery, that I could see what my decisions had been saying all along. My family got what was left after the work was done. My health wasn't second to the job. It was bottom of the pile. Family and health hadn't stopped mattering to me. In fact, the only reason I hadn't left earlier was because I was working hard to provide for my family. But values don't cancel each other out. Freedom competes with security. Ambition competes with family. Health competes with income, especially when income is what makes everyone else's life work too. What had changed wasn't what I valued. It was what won when two things I valued came into conflict, and for years the job won by default.

What Leaving Made Visible

For years, I judged the same three things about myself: wanting variety instead of committing to one lane, needing time alone when my working life demanded constant availability, and getting frustrated whenever I was boxed into the same thing for too long.

Human Design, which I'd first come across in 2019 and mostly ignored for five years, finally gave me language for what I'd been overriding. It didn't tell me anything I hadn't already experienced. It helped me understand why I had spent so long putting my own needs behind whatever was in front of me.

There was always work to do, and I was good at responding to it. I had also been lucky enough to find a role in Consultant Relations where variety was built into the job. No two days, firms or investment requirements were the same, so I wasn't constrained by the need for variety until I moved to a pure sales only role. My need for space and autonomy was different. That had to wait until working from home became possible through lockdown. When the call came to return to the office, it threatened the one thing I had come to love without realising how much I needed it.

There was something else I'd missed. Money can keep you in a career long after you're interested in the work itself, but it can't manufacture interest. I'd had periods when I was fascinated by what I was doing, particularly sustainable investing. I enjoyed learning about it and cared about the subject. But over time, as the commercial side dominated, what I had found so interesting became much harder to enjoy.

Two Years Later: Living By Your Values

Before I left, I'd have dismissed some of the things I do now as unrealistic. My calendar is just as full as before, but it no longer belongs entirely to work. I walk the dogs for ninety minutes without worrying I'm going to be judged for being late or dishevelled when I get back. I can plan a workout in the middle of the day, or have a bath in the afternoon. Even on holiday, I'm no longer mentally at work, running through what I've missed or forgotten to do. My kids joke they've got a new mum.

When frustration visits now, I recognise it as my sign that I've started drifting towards a life I don't want. I catch it sooner and can do something about it.

Once I'd seen that in myself, I started noticing it in other people. People who can tell you exactly what they value, but whose decisions keep telling a different story. That is the work I do now.

So are you living by your values, or only naming them? Take a look at rosinabarnett.com.