Values: The Roots That Hold You Steady. A Teach, Lead or Leave Episode

Episode Transcript

[00:01:03] Hello, and welcome back to Positively Leading. It is lovely to have you here again. In the last episode, we talked about the first of the three energy sources that we're going to cover in this podcast.

We talked about strengths. And if you missed it, go back and have a listen 'cause it sets up everything we're about to do here. And if you did the homework, and if you actually looked at your week and worked out how much of your time you're spending in your strength zone, you've probably already learned something about why you finish some days absolutely buzzing and the other days flat and on the floor.

Just to remind you where this all sits. A few episodes ago, I introduced you to the career decision-making matrix, the energy versus impact matrix from my book, Teach, Lead or Leave. And this maps out where you are right now based on your energy and your impact. [00:02:03] And the big question underneath the whole matrix is this one: Why does some work light you up while others empty you out?

Why can two teachers do exactly the same job and one of them thrives while the other one is counting down to the holidays? The answer comes down to three energy sources. Your strengths are what you're wired to do and what you love doing. Your values are what matters most to you and what really needs to be honored on a day-to-day basis.

And your working style, which is how you naturally prefer to operate. There's a fourth source, which is your purpose or your why, and we will talk about that in another episode. So last time, strengths. Today, values. Next time, working styles. So let's dive in. I wanna start the way I started the strengths episode, by clearing up some [00:03:03] things that trip people up.

Because when I say the word values, most people picture words painted on the wall in the front office. Respect, excellence, integrity. You know what they are. Lovely words, and most people I ask can rattle off a few, or if I say, "What do you value?" "Oh, I value learning, and I value making a difference, and I value public education."

And all of those things are lovely, but it's not quite what I'm talking about. So here's the distinction. Those words are often aspirational. They're the person that you would like to be, or the person you're supposed to be, or they belong to the school or the organization of somebody else. Real values, personal values are different.

They are the things when somebody treads on them, you feel it in your body and your brain registers it. They're not what you [00:04:03] wish mattered to you, they're actually what does non-negotiably and on a visceral level. Let me give you an example from my own life. For years, I thought I should value things like prudence and doing things properly and organizing and being across every detail.

They sound like values that a principal should have, and in fact, my mother told me that they were good values to work hard and be studious and pay attention to details, but they are just not me. I did a lot of work on this, and I know that my two real values, the ones that show up every day, are freedom and flexibility.

I have an inbuilt need to do things creatively, to do things in a way that I want to do them, to have some freedom and flexibility over my time and the kind of work that I do. When I have the freedom to be creative, and when I have the autonomy over how I [00:05:03] spend my day, when I get to try things my way, I am the best version of myself.

It feels really selfish. But I now know that that is called self-direction. And the day I stopped pretending that I was prudent, color-coded, spreadsheet-orientated kind of woman was a really good day. I often say I don't like the rules. I like to have some basic structure that I work within, but after that, I need the flexibility to be creative and to be innovative.

Now let me tell you what it feels like when a value gets trodden on, because this is the bit that I really want you to start noticing. I want you to picture yourself in a meeting. Someone with more authority than you announces a change, a new priority, a new approach, a new way of doing all the things.

[00:06:03] And Around the table, people are nodding and they appear to be agreeing, and on paper it seems reasonable. There's nothing specific that you could stand up and object to, but something in your body has gone tight. There might be heat in your chest or heaviness in your gut that you can't quite explain, because on the surface, there's nothing particularly wrong.

And you go home and you're grumpy with the people that you love, and you don't quite know why. You're awake at three o'clock in the morning, turning over and over and thinking, "Well, maybe I'm just tired. Maybe I'm overthinking this. Maybe I'm the one being difficult here. Maybe I'm the problem." But something here is not sitting right with me I wanna offer you a completely different reading of that moment.

That reaction you can't argue your way out of is almost always a value. [00:07:03] Something that you hold at your core that has just been stepped on, and your body knew it before your mind did. So if you have a real value of equity and someone in that meeting said that we were going to do something that felt inequitous to you, maybe really subtly, maybe they just grouped a group of students and called them a particular name or made a little bit of a judgment about them, not rude, just something that got your heckles up .

Then that is the feeling that is not gonna go away for you, 'cause if equity is so important to you, you are gonna feel that inside before you can articulate what it is that is going on. I lived this as a principal. I could manage crisis all day long, as I said to you in my previous episode, because I'd built that skill pretty early.[00:08:03]

Put me in a situation where I had no freedom, where every decision was dictated from above and I had no room to move, I would feel really close to panic. For a long time, I thought this was stress. So literally someone would send me an email and say, "Jenny, you didn't submit your XYZ form. Could you put it in by close of business today?"

And I would literally feel sick. In the beginning, I went straight back to the, "I should have been more organized. I should have done this better. I should have followed the advice and, been more disciplined." But it was more than that. There were a lot of shoulds, and you... as I always say, you should never should on yourself.

And yes, I should have got that piece of paper done, and yes, there were lots of reasons why I potentially was wrong, but that visceral [00:09:03] feeling that somebody was watching over me was not a discipline problem, it was a values problem. If freedom is my value, then in that kind of situation where someone is expecting something of me immediately that feels like compliance, I arc up.

Here's why I think values matter the most, and it's the whole heart of this episode. Your values are the things in you that don't move. If you read the research around values, they're gonna talk about values as your roots. They are the part of the tree that sucks up nutrients. They are the part of the core of you that keeps you strong and grounded.

And so if this is the part of you that doesn't move and that makes you grounded, I want you to think about how much shifts in a school in a real short amount of time. The [00:10:03] restructures, the reforms, the changes to duty rosters, the changes to curriculum, the fourth new principal in five years, the initiative that gets dropped out of a helicopter one term and quietly forgotten about the next.

When everything around you keeps changing and you... Look, it's normal. You can start to feel like there's nothing solid to stand on and you lose your footing. Your values are the footing. They are the bedrock underneath the shifting sands. Four principals and three restructures later, the thing that you actually care about are still exactly where you left them.

And once you can see them clearly again, you've got something to stand on. This might seem a little bit esoteric, but you can look at that next thing, that central office or the helicopter drops on you, and ask a very grounding question: Does this serve what I value or does it serve the [00:11:03] noise? There's a lovely piece of research here, and I'll keep it short because I promised you more story than theory.

A researcher named Shalom Schwartz spent decades studying values across cultures at the University of Western Australia, and one of the most useful things he found is that our values aren't a random pile. They sit in relationship with one another. Some of them cluster together and pull in the same direction, and some of them sit on opposite sides and genuinely pull against each other, which means, and I love this, if you've ever felt truly torn between two things that mattered to you, this is not weakness or indecisiveness.

It is just two of your own values pulling in opposite directions. That's not a flaw. That's being a whole person, and being able to recognize and identify that [00:12:03] is so important. So how do you actually find your values? If you're new here, you'll learn quickly that I'm a great one for a journal, so this would be a good time to push pause and pull out your journal.

Or if you're driving, make a mental note to come back to this, but you can still push pause while you're driving. Or just listen carefully. The fastest way is not to sit and think about noble words that describe your values. It's to notice your reactions, and your strongest reactions is where the data actually is.

So here's question one. What has made you disproportionately angry lately? Not the small daily irritations or photocopier jamming again. But the big, hot, [00:13:03] why do I care about this so much kind of reaction to things. So what has made you disproportionately angry?

Maybe the decision that made you fuming in the car park an hour later And you're still turning that reaction over and over, and underneath it, you will almost always find a value that has been stomped on. So I had a client who was genuinely an easygoing bloke who shocked himself with how angry he got when a colleague wrote off a group of students.

"Oh, they'll never be any good. I don't know why you bother with those kids. You know, then, you know, look at their families. They're never going anywhere." And he got really angry. This really easygoing bloke got furious and, and had a few sharp [00:14:03] words with his colleague.

He thought he had a temper problem. He thought he had an emotional intelligence problem. It's not a problem. What he had was a deeply v-held value that every child should be seen and respected and valued, and someone had just trampled on that value. If he did Schwartz's model, he may have found that he had a value of benevolence Or, or a value around inclusion or a value about equality.

But whatever the actual word is or the value attributed to it, his colleague had stomped on that, and he had a disproportionately angry response to it If we're journaling, come back to me because here is question two, and it's the other [00:15:03] side of the same coin. When have you felt most like yourself at work?

Most at ease, most fulfilled? Like, yes, this is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing What was actually going on at that moment? Because that feeling is a value being honored, and it's just as much a clue as the anger.

And you might think about, a team that you were in. What was it that the team allowed? What permission did being in that group give you? What value were you allowed to express or that was never stomped on in that particular group of, of people?

Question three is if everything in your [00:16:03] school changed tomorrow, the leadership, the policies, the priorities, what is the one thing that you would still refuse to compromise on?

What is the one hill that you would be prepared to die on?

So getting to your values is a sorting process, and it's one of the things that I would encourage you to do is to perhaps write a whole list of words, find a list of values. Check out Brené Brown's work because she has a list of values. And circle the ones that make most sense to you, and keep paring it down until you get to the three or four that really sit well with you.

But let's make this practical, like the way that we did with strengths in the previous episode, and let's connect it back [00:17:03] to the career decision-making matrix, the energy versus impact matrix. So what we're doing here is trying to work out what quadrant you're sitting in, so that you can choose the best strategies to feel happy and satisfied in your career.

So you could be high energy, high impact; high energy, low impact; low energy, low impact; low energy, high impact. And the energy is given to us by our strengths, our values, and our styles, and when we are working in alignment with our strengths and our values, we get energy. So just bringing it back to the matrix.

I'm gonna bring you back to Sarah, who we've met before. She was sitting in the overwhelmed quadrant. High impact, really great teacher, but she was running on empty. When we looked at her [00:18:03]strengths, part of the problem was that she was spending her days on data and compliance instead of the creative, relational, people-focused work that she was wired for.

But there was a second layer, and this is her values. Sarah holds fairness as a core value, and she's been asked to run an assessment approach where she could see that this was really gonna disadvantage a particular group of kids. And so she pushed back on it, and her leadership team thought she was pushing back in terms of workload.

They thought that she was complaining that the workload of this assessment task was too high. But no, it was the fact that she was being asked to do something where her fundamental value of fairness was being compromised literally every single time she ran that assessment, and it was quietly poisoning her energy, no matter how competent she was.[00:19:03]

Then there was a leader I worked with, a deputy in a school that had restructured three times in four years. This school was in absolute chaos.

She was a highly competent, highly organized, really great educator who was working incredible hours trying to get this ship back on course. But she wasn't burnt out from the hours she was putting in. She was burnt out from being disoriented. She said to me, "I don't know what we stand for anymore. I don't...

I, I, I just don't know what this school is at its core anymore." And then she and I stopped talking about the school and started talking about her values. And a few things had surfaced that had been true through every single restructure. [00:20:03] She really valued building people's capacity and doing things properly rather than quickly.

She was one of those people that was very considered, very thoughtful, very methodical, and this level of speed was really disorientating her. And the moment she could see that this was the part of the problem that was throwing her off course, she was able to do something about it, and she could get back on her feet.

And she could name it. Did it fix it? No. But she was able to put some language to the fact that it wasn't the changes themselves that she didn't like. It wasn't the new leadership team that she didn't like. It was the fact that they were going too fast and without adequate thought. Do you see how this works?

Your values [00:21:03] don't just tell you who you are on a good day. They diagnose why you might be stuck in a particular role or career quadrant in the career decision-making matrix. So Sarah was, Very competent. She was making high impact, but she was exhausted because every single day her value of methodicalness and tenacity and prudence were going out the window.

I want to be upfront with you about something. Um, in the same way that I showed you that strengths have a shadow side Just knowing your strengths or just knowing your values does not mean that you get to live in perfect alignment every day. You can't. You work inside a system, and some days you'll just have to do things that pull against what you care about.

That's real life. Just yesterday, [00:22:03] I found myself in a public space with somebody making misogynist remarks, and that really tugged at my values. But I was in a public place, and I had absolutely no control over that situation. So in those situations, I just had to swallow it, and I remember similar things in my workplace.

One-off examples, one-off interactions where I just chose peace over, over misalignment with my values. That's real life. We don't get our own way all the time. The goal isn't a magical job where every value is honored every minute. The goal is to know what your values are so that you can make a conscious choice to live in alignment with them more often. The one that just popped into my head [00:23:03] is, that most of us value, a clean environment, pollution-free, recycling, climate change under control.

We would all say we value that. There are some people for whom that is a value so deep inside them that they choose to live a particular life. For many of us, it is just something that we value and that we might value that in our lives, but in the staff room, we see somebody using a whole lot of single-use plastic and putting it in the wr-wrong bin.

While that steps on our value, there's often not a lot we can do about that. And so instead of, moving to a cabin in the hills and living off-grid, we have to sometimes choose, the path of least resistance. But when [00:24:03] you do bend, you know you're doing it knowingly with your eyes open.

And so s-instead of slowly grinding yourself down and wondering why you're so tired, noticing that the way that things are being done perhaps is out of alignment with your values. And I'm gonna be vaguely controversial here. There's a lot of teachers exhausted at the moment because the way that they think and believe as a value that children should develop and teachers should work is out of alignment with what the system is insisting of us.

So it is genuinely not my job to give you homework, but I'm gonna do it anyway, 'cause I want you to do some deep thinking about this. This week, I want you to become a detective about your own reactions. If your body does something like the tight chest or that flash of [00:25:03] irritation or that cynicism, the big exhale of relief when something goes right maybe, or a big smile when there's a micro moment of joy, I want you to catch it.

So a big reaction to something relatively small, and I want you to jot down just one, just one word. Just one. What mattered to you in that moment? Don't analyze it. Don't try and make it neat and write lovely full sentences about it. Just collect the words, and by the end of the week you'll have a little pile of them, and I promise you they won't be random.

They'll be pointing at something, and they'll be pointing at you And then I want you to look at your typical week and how much of your time honors those things, and how much pulls against it. If you're sitting in the overwhelm or the disengaged quadrant, I'd put money on the fact that [00:26:03] values misalignment is a bigger part of your story than you realized.

In the next episode, we're gonna talk about the third energy source, which is your working style, because even when you're in your strengths and living your values, if you're working in a way that fits your natural style, you'll feel great, and if it fights your natural style, you'll feel friction. Here's what I know for sure.

You can't lead anyone else steadily if you don't know you yourself and what it is that grounds you, what you're standing on. Your values are not soft and fluffy. They are the most practical thing you own. They steady you when the ground moves. They're the tell when something is wrong, and they're the anchor when you have to make a hard call.

Now, I gave you three questions today to help you notice your values, but I deliberately didn't give you the full process, uh, the way that you actually find your values, sort them out, and [00:27:03] narrow them down. I mentioned Brené Brown in Dare to Lead, and she has a long list that she encourages you to whittle down to just two.

 I mention in my book The Values Navigator, but I have created an entire online program for you to go really deep into your styles, your strengths, your purpose, and it is the self-leadership profile. So if something stirred inside of you today and you're ready to do the real work, come and find it. I will put the link in the show notes.

And all of this, and more, lives inside my book, Teach, Lead or Leave, if you'd like to go even deeper still. So thank you so much for being here, and thank you for doing the honest, reflective work. It matters more than you know. I'm Jenny Cole, and I'll see you in the next episode.