Conscious values

If you’ve followed your fears to your beliefs and described you perfect week, you should have all the material you need to make a list of your unconscious values—the values you live by when you’re not thinking about what values you want to live by.

As you are compiling this list, notice how your beliefs inform your descriptions. If a belief in productivity reigns, does that color almost everything in your perfect week, including the types of interactions you want to have in your relationships? What other patterns do you see?

My list of unconscious values looks like this:

• efficiency

• productivity

• accomplishment

• order

• control

Now imagine the opposite of your perfect week. For me that would include a stressful schedule, a messy house, chaotic children, multiple trips to the same store, paying too much for something I didn’t really need, gaining a couple pounds, and getting behind at work. If any of these things happen (or heaven forbid, all of them), the feelings that come up for me are anxiety, insecurity, fear, overwhelm, and irritation. What feelings come up for you when you think about a week in which everything goes “wrong”?

Whatever your unconscious values are, I’m willing to bet they are designed to keep the negative feelings you fear most at bay. Let me say that again because it’s important. Most likely, your ideal week is merely one filled with coping mechanisms that successfully keep you from feeling negative emotions.

Consider for a moment that your whole life could be an attempt to run away from darkness rather than reach for the light.

Sit with that for a moment. Do you feel compelled to behave the way you do because you’re terrified of what will happen if you don’t? Is the ideal you routinely reach for simply a (rarely achievable) absence of something bad? Is your best-case scenario neutral ground?

This is the tense, closed way of living your life.

When you tightly fold yourself against hard circumstances and feelings, you make yourself small in the process. 

And you close yourself to a whole host of things that bring you joy because you are too busy resisting that which doesn’t.

Now think about the glaring gaps in your perfect week and unconscious values list. What are those things you care about and enjoy (even love) doing but never seem to find the time for? These are what I am calling your conscious values, the ones you have to purposefully choose rather than letting your brain run on its negative default mode.

There are lots of ways to get to these. Here are a few:

• Get still and connect with your inner wisdom/intuition/best self—whatever you want to call it. These positively driven values are already in you, just maybe not on a conscious level. Meditation, walking, and writing are all great ways to access this knowledge.

• Zoom out on your life. If you are a doing-oriented person, you likely spend most of your life in the weeds. Step back. Looking through old photographs helps me do this sometimes, in addition to imagining what I will think of my life 10, 20 years from now, or even on my death bed. What will matter most? What will you regret?

• Think about how you want to show up in tough circumstances. Who do you want to be in chaos, stress, and conflict? If you’re not consumed by controlling and getting, what can you accept, make the best of, and give?

• Remember moments of deep, quiet joy (including those closely linked with hardship). What were you doing at the time?

• Consider the motivation behind your routine tasks. How could you live into a new value by simply finding a new motivation? Doing things because we are scared or anxious about not doing them feels very different than because we love the process.

• Think about the traits you value in other people and what characteristics you in turn want to be known and remembered by. (The writing yourself as a character exercise can be very useful here.)

Be careful on this last point though. While you want to get some distance from your life so that you can take the long view, these values are yours. This is not about conforming to what you think you should do, it’s about uncovering and honoring the things you already want to do. You can’t be everything and this isn’t about being perfect. But you can be conscious and you can start living a life of positive action instead of negative reaction.

And though you are going to feel a lot more negative emotion along the way (which is perfectly fine!), this is your turning point.

It’s the beginning of your unfolding into a life shot through with shining shards of joy.