(How to) Do Good Well by (Finding &) Focusing on What Matters Most
“A value is a way of being or believing that we hold most important. Living into our values means that we do more than profess our values, we practice them. (Brené Brown, Dare to Lead)
I’m so glad you’re here
Thanks to everyone who read about (how to avoid) greenwashing & goodwashing last month. My aim was to start with something super actionable (which is how I hope that information landed for you) and then, this month, shift to look at what matters most by asking ourselves some of the “whys” behind our goals and how we spend our time do (so we can all be more values-aligned & purpose-driven people and leaders). I’m so glad you’re here, reading along! If values aren’t your cup of tea, next month we’ll be talking about time, energy, attention, productivity, and joy, and in April I’m thinking we’ll talk about Impact Business Models.
Finding & Focusing on What Matters Most
Before diving in, I’d like to share that it has been super challenging for me to keep this post concise. Examining “what matters most” was the foundation for my dissertation—titled, “What Does it Mean to Be a Success: The Future Goals & Values of American Youth” (i.e. millennials who, at the time, were facing high school to emerging adulthood)—which I started researching 25 years ago and finally completed in 2003, earning my Ph.D. …two decades ago! In short, I’ve been thinking (and teaching and writing) about these issues for most of my life.
My fascination with how people come to figure out for themselves “what matters most” is rooted in three of my own experiences that remain quite salient for me, decades later.
I grew up as a child of the eighties. I was 7 years old in 1984 when Madonna’s Material Girl music video was released on MTV and became an anthem for the decade. The messages I received from the media said that men were supposed to be dominant, aggressive, active, and providers, while women were supposed to be attractive, nurturing, passive, and emotional, and that what mattered most was fitting in, fame, fortune, fashion, and having a lot of nice stuff (like Guess jeans and a Sony Walkman). Yet the people I admired most didn’t seem to buy-in to that facade or care much about impressing others. Somehow they were “cool” *and* they were bright, brave, kind, caring, and charismatic people who made everyone feel seen and welcome in their presence—like my third grade teacher, Ms. Long (Dr. Nancy Corbett, now), and my after-school sign language teacher & drama program leader, Sybil (Dr. Sybil St. Claire, now). Through their examples, I learned the value of educating and empowering others—but most importantly, I learned how powerful it was to be seen and accepted for who we are rather than how we appear.
In the eighties I was also the only kid in my kindergarten class whose parents were divorced *and* the only kid in my school (or city, or the world, for all I knew) whose Dad was gay. There were no “out” public figures at the time, so I lived in what is now known as a “family closet.” When we’d go shopping at the mall or out for dinner, my Dad would sometimes see someone he knew and lean down to whisper in my ear, “they’re family,” I’d look up at him and smile, and he’d squeeze my hand. I remember feeling special in those moments, like my Dad was part of a special club and, by extension as his daughter, I belonged as well. Here in the south, it was not safe for my Dad to be out, though he had a partner and small community of gay friends—many of whom we lost when the HIV/AIDS epidemic hit in the late 80s, when I was in middle & high school. Seeing the way they came together to carry each other taught me that friends are the family we create for ourselves. I quickly realized the messages we receive from society (i.e. stereotypes, labels, assumptions) are not always correct, as my father was the kindest, most thoughtful and generous, most gentle and loving person I knew, yet he faced oppression and discrimination for who he was and how he loved. I became my Dad’s biggest ally and advocate. At an early age I knew I wanted to do something to help people understand how their assumptions might be wrong, and to speak up for those who are marginalized; as I grew older, the list of people experiencing discrimination became longer. The experience of being my Dad’s daughter taught me so many things — I learned and I hope the way I live my life reflects his values of open-mindedness, inclusion, justice, devotion, and lovingkindness.
From 1987-2002, I participated in a program for local youth (first as a middle & high school student, then as a staff member throughout college & grad school) run by Rebecca Brown, a serial social entrepreneur who became my mentor and role model, and whose influence shaped my education and career goals. Through her weekly lessons (called “Focuses”) based on the lyrics of popular music—including U2, Elton John, Dave Matthews Band, Indigo Girls, REM, James Taylor, and Pink Floyd—I learned the importance of perspective, risking love and connection, being of service to others, and spending time in nature. I learned that questions are more important than their answers, that we’re all more alike than we are different, and I learned about the brevity of life.
“The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.” (Morrie Schwartz in Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom)
So many “peak experiences” in my life are associated with my time in this program. 15 years as a student of Rebecca’s Focuses led to my fascination with questions around what matters most and impacted much of my own values and goals. Those lessons run deep, as do the friendships formed in those years (Rebecca’s program is why I know and love a number of you reading this!). I wish everyone had a formative experience like the one I had in my youth where we were encouraged to live into our questions and to find and focus on what matters most.
During the same time I was involved in Rebecca’s program, I also learned of the work of a famous early 20th century psychologist and philosopher named Erik Erikson. He said that in order for human beings to feel a sense of well-being (he sometimes called this “wholeness” or “psycho-social integration”) in our lives, we need four things:
Belonging (e.g. spending time with friends & family, engaging in activities you enjoy)
Identity (e.g. roles you play, hats you wear, your vocation)
Purpose (e.g. doing things to be of help to others, creating/making things, accomplishing tasks)
Meaning (e.g. gaining a greater sense of awareness & understanding, connecting with a sense of something greater than yourself, leaving a legacy)
I think about Erikson’s theory often—especially when I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed or over-committed (which is common, as saying no and setting boundaries can be difficult for so many of us). One of the ways I decide what matters most is to ask myself, “Does this (whatever is asking for my time, energy, and attention) offer me belonging, identity, a sense of purpose, and/or meaning?”
Another way of framing “What matters most” is to consider our core values
The full text of Brené Brown’s quote up at the top of today’s post reads, “A value is a way of being or believing that we hold most important. Living into our values means that we do more than profess our values, we practice them. We walk our talk - we are clear about what we believe and hold important, and we take care that our intentions, words, thoughts, and behaviors align with those beliefs.”
According to Dr. Barb Markway and Celia Ampel in Psychology Today, values are: “…the principles that give our lives meaning and allow us to persevere through adversity.”
Values are how you experience meaning in life.
Values guide you when you must make hard decisions.
Values are made visible in your life through your actions.
A person’s values may change over time but are typically very stable for long periods of time in their life. Your values come from within. No one should tell you or decide for you what your values are. In my role as an educator, I’ve had the opportunity to encourage college students to consider their values since I began teaching in 1999. I’d love to share three of my favorite exercises designed to help folks find clarity around what matters most.
3 Exercises to help get clarity around our values
1. Blank is what Matters from Echoing Green
Imagine the image above as a name plate. You’d write your name on the straight line and your response to the question “what matters most?” on the dotted line. If your response to the question, “what matters most” does not immediately come to mind, perhaps consider prompts like:
Then consider how you filled in the “blank” above and reflect: Why is it meaningful for you? Where/how does it manifest in your life?
(I originally learned a version of this exercise from Echoing Green’s Work on Purpose program, in 2010. It’s since been archived, though it’s mentioned here and detailed in Work on Purpose by Lara Galinsky.)
2. How Values Light the Way & Living in to our Values
Dr. Brené Brown is among my favorite thought leaders. I had the honor of studying with her and her team at BBEARG in 2019 to become a Certified Dare to Lead™ Facilitator and I recertified in summer 2020 with a focus on justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging. She offers an outstanding exercise called “Living Into Our Values” which she explains in a 2022 episode of her podcast. Her Living Into Our Values worksheet offers an extensive list of values to consider and prompts to help us figure out which values matter most and how they manifest in our lives.
(If you’re new to Brené Brown’s work, this website offers a great summary of what she says about values. In Dare to Lead she offers an additional exercise to help business & organization leaders to operationalize their values—we’ll be talking more about that in a future post).
3. Focusing on What Matters Most: the Times Left Exercise
A few weeks ago I heard an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Hidden Brain, interviewing Dr. Cassie Mogilner Holmes, a professor of social psychology at UCLA, sharing the highlights of her 2022 book, Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most. She’s a proponent of time-tracking and writing our eulogies to help clarify what matters most. She also shared a technique called “the times left exercise” (starting at minute 41:18 if using the 53:00 long web version, the mobile version is 54:30 so please adjust accordingly) that I’d not previously heard of, and it landed as super impactful for me. It’s a good reminder of how we often take for granted (and under-value) the things we have (as the song by the 80’s hair band, Cinderella, says, you “don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”). Here’s how it works:
Reflect on an experience that brings you joy.
Count how many times you’ve had that experience in your life so far.
Count how many more times you will likely have that experience in the future.
The example Dr. Mogilner Holmes shared was about an MBA student who really enjoyed dinners with her parents. She counted how many times she’d had dinner with her parents and came up with approximately 6800 so far, then she calculated approximately how many dinners they’d share in the future (now that they no longer live in the same city, etc.) and came up with approximately 575 dinners left—which means only 8% more dinners together remain.
If you’re interested but don’t have time to read her book or listen to the entire 53 minute episode of Hidden Brain, perhaps tune in starting around 40:10 min (if using the 53:00 long web version, the mobile version is 54:30 so please adjust accordingly) to hear her talk about how writing one’s eulogy and practicing the times left exercise helps us get clarity on our values. I think you’ll find it time well spent.
Another way to conceive of “times left” is to visualize the amount of time we have remaining in our lives. Seeing my life in weeks helped me gain perspective on how precious our time together here is. Tim Urban wrote about what he calls “Depressing Math” and created a number of infographics in a 2014 blog post; he also wrote about it in this 2022 NY Times article.
If you’d like to create your own visual representation of time left, I encourage you to do so. An interactive online version is here, a printable version is here, and a poster version is available from the original artist. Next month we’ll talk more about the precious & limited nature of our time (and energy and attention) here together.
Examples of B Corporations leading the way as values-focused businesses
As mentioned at the start of this post, one of my favorite quotes is from Anna Lappe, who said, "Every time you spend money, you're casting a vote for the kind of world you want."
Certified B Corporations exemplify what it means to be values-based and purpose-driven businesses. Focusing on what matters most is their north star and guides their practices and policies. Some examples of Certified B Corporations with strong statements about their values include:
Patagonia: Our Core Values
Ben & Jerry’s: Our Progressive Values
Greyston Bakery: Our Core Values are baked into our cultural DNA
King Arthur Baking: Vision & Values
Burton Snowboards: Our Values: we work like we ride
Areti Bank: Our Principles (a prospective B Corp— Areti calls them “principles,” I consider them values)
Atmos Bank: Our Core Values
Questions help shift our perspective to focus on what matters most
Questions are powerful tools to help us discover what matters most. Rebecca Brown called these sorts of questions “perspective jolts” (or p-jolts for short). Khe Hy, founder of RadReads, calls them 10k questions. He says good questions “are a compass for life.”
Here are some examples from Khe:
Some of my favorite perspective shifting questions include:
What are some of your favorite perspective shifting questions? I’d love to hear.
Resources for more info:
For more about why it’s important to start with what matters most, see Simon Sinek’s 2009 TED Talk.
For more on creating a compass for what matters most: a few weeks ago I heard Dacher Keltner being interviewed by Krista Tippett on OnBeing. Dacher Keltner is the founder of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley and he was featured in one of my favorite films ever, “I am.” Dacher & Krista shared this gem: “Awe gives us a compass for what matters.” They also mention that music and spirituality can bring us together and make us feel connected. You can listen to that quick one-minute snip here. Keltner is also interviewed talking about the power of awe on Hidden Brain, and also on To the Best of Our Knowledge which is just as awesome ;) and in this interview on NPR’s On Point, he focuses on the health benefits of experiencing awe.
For more lists of values (and how our values drive our actions and how we can learn values-based communication), I’m a big fan of this Nonviolent Communication (NVC) resource: NVC list of human values/needs.
While values & virtues aren’t the same thing (“Values are the aspirational practices by which you hope to live your life,” per Angela Duckworth, and virtues are how we practice and demonstrate character), virtues are lived values; they are values in action. Virtues are things we do on a regular basis. Values are ideals or goals that tend to be more aspirational. When focusing on values, I’m also a fan of the Virtues Compass by the team at Heroic.
When speaking of virtues (i.e. values in action), I love love love this advice from Maya Angelou: “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can’t be consistently fair or kind or generous or forgiving any of those without courage.” Bonus: listen to this 2-minute audio clip of Maya Angelou sharing this advice on OnBeing just weeks before she passed in 2014.
Thank you for reading along. Feel free to reach out if you have questions, comments, and/or concerns; I’m happy to do my best to be of help. And if this wasn’t your cup of tea, I hope you’ll offer me the grace of sticking around for a few more posts before you decide whether or not to remain subscribed. I’d love to hear what resonated with you (so I can do more of that in future posts), or you can simply tap the heart below with your quick vote of encouragement, as a nudge for me to keep the posts coming.
If you’ve not already done so, you can subscribe to this newsletter by entering your email address here (you can also enter a friend’s email if you’d like to sign them up): https://dogoodwell.substack.com/subscribe
With gratitude & excitement,
:)
Kristin
p.s. #1: If you’d like to learn more about what I mean by “creating strategic impact,” give me a shout and I’ll gladly share with you a quick Guide to Planning Your Impact Strategy that I’m cooking up.
p.s. #2: As mentioned, each post ends with a pair of gifs (sometimes they take a few moments to load, thanks for your patience), one that shows me falling, followed by a gif of me flying. Learning to fly on my mat (first by falling countless times) has helped me navigate falling, failing, and challenging situations off of my mat— practicing courage, kindness, gratitude, hope, grace, and joy with myself and others.
In this month’s share, I’m attempting a pike press handstand which is, for me, the most challenging of the floaty/flying things I’m able to do. Of the various ways I’ve learned to invert and balance on my hands (since doing my first press handstand in 2018 at the age of 41– after tens of thousands of attempts) this remains the most difficult for me. It requires hamstring flexibility (which I lack) – and it’s really hard to make it look easy. I want for it to appear effortless– yet, it’s… not.
I find so many lessons in this practice– and I imagine I’m not alone in this. I wonder where in your life you’d like for things to appear easy & effortless, as if you “have it all together,” and why it is we even have those expectations of ourselves? As Brené Brown reminds us, we’re all doing the best we can– that’s good enough (even if, especially if, it’s not pretty or graceful).
Speaking of which, on Saturday, March 4, from 11:30-12pm ET at Searchlight Yoga (via Zoom only) I will offer a Free Pop-Up Mini-Workshops on Finding Flight: The Fundamentals of Overcoming Fear, knowing how to Fall Safely, and having Fun Learning to Float & Fly. If you’re interested, register here for free to receive the Zoom link.
p.s. #3: For folks in the greater Gainesville, FL area: On Saturday, March 25, my friends Eze Sanchez & Leif Stringer from Gainesville Nonviolent Communication will offer a full-day, in-person workshop on Nonviolent Communication (aka NVC), “Get the Most Out of Every Word: an In-Person Communication Workshop!” For more information or to register, see https://gnvc.love/get-the-most.
p.s. #4: Shout out to my dear longtime friend, editor extraordinaire, and beloved grammar queen, Amy Haines. Amy has edited *everything* important I’ve ever written since I was in grad school– my dissertation manuscript, a little book I was commissioned to write, the eulogy I gave at my Dad’s Memorial Service, and countless other speeches, scripts, papers, posts, and versions of my bio…. Even the Airbnb listing for my Dad’s home has her fingerprints on it. If anything above reads as even a bit wonky– those are changes I snuck in following Amy’s final review 🙈. If you’re in need of editing help, contact Amy for her amazingness.
