Good value(s)
#4 17/02/24 (Yes, I'm already behind...)
Dear B,
A couple of years ago I hired a coach.
I was frustrated.
I had strong opinions.
I couldn’t articulate them very well when it mattered.
My brief was simple.
Walk away from difficult conversations having said what I needed to say.
The way I wanted to say it.
Not three hours later, replaying it in my head on the tube home.
My first question: is this therapy?
I’ve tried therapy.
Never found the right person.
Always felt performative.
Expensive. Regressive.
My coach described her approach as forward-focused.
Using your strengths to clear obstacles.
Not excavating the past to explain why you’re a tw*t. (Not sic.)
That, I could work with.
She asked about my personal values.
I drew a blank.
No idea.
She sent me a deck of cards.
Each one had a value and a short description.
I picked the ones that resonated, then narrowed it down.
Five, then three.
Creativity. Rational thinking. Authenticity.
To me creativity isn’t just arty creativity.
It’s also commercial. Strategic.
Putting things together that haven’t been put together before.
The kind that makes money or solves the thing people aren’t willing to admit is broken.
For me, rational thinking is using logic, facts, evidence to make objective decisions.
Having opinions you can defend.
Being willing to change them when the evidence changes.
Knowing when to stop and recalibrate.
Authenticity is the simplest, but from over a decade in business, clearly one of the hardest…
It is doing what you say.
Owning what you do.
Voicing an unpopular truth without a hidden agenda.
Strong opinions can alienate people.
I’ve got this wrong plenty of times.
Too forceful.
Not enough evidence.
Wrong room.
My coach helped me use my values to frame the frustration instead.
Get the words out without burning the building down.
When I wanted to say, “you’re a f*cking idiot,”
I’d say, “can you help me understand what you’ve just said?”
It plays to their ego.
Signals they know more than you.
Gets them to dig deeper, reframe, explain.
Sometimes they change your mind.
Sometimes they watch their own argument collapse in real time, which is fun.
Felt ridiculous at first.
“One of my values is creativity.”
What a w*nker.
But it became second nature.
I built a bank of questions.
The kind that make people open up or discover, quite publicly, that they haven’t thought it through properly.
I’m still building it.
Clear values also made the big decisions easier.
I could see when a situation, a job, a personality just didn’t align.
And when they didn’t, I could trade off consciously.
Security and salary against dull, uncreative work.
Less money and higher risk for more fulfilling, purposeful work.
I’d made the call. I could live with it.
Make the trade off and owned it.
The one thing you can’t trade is authenticity.
Honesty. Trust.
Don’t let people chip away at those.
And don’t chip away at them yourself.
It never ends well.
Self-reflection, kind self-critique and self-awareness are super valuable and rewarding tools to have in your toolkit.
Using a coach to get there is one fo the best things I’ve done.
Great value…
Understand your values.
Be proud of them.
Use them to solve for and frame the tough stuff.
Love,
Dad