Values Based Decisions for Career Change

Baby boomers valued hard work and they valued loyalty and commitment. The new generation, millennials, value a sense of freedom, a sense of autonomy, and a sense of purpose.

What Career-Based Values Do You Have?

Hello! I don’t know why I do this all the time, I feel like it’s magical. Doesn’t that feel magical? My name is Christopher Lawrence. I’m with ChangeMyLifeCoaching.ca. I am a life and career coach. I wanted to ask you guys, and you can post below, what values you have that are important about your career. In other words, what career-based values do you have?

Baby Boomers Valued Hard Work

So some of them are really obvious and I think actually if I was to stereotype and that’s what this is, it’s a stereotype which means that it is not 100% true or factual, if we look at the generations, baby boomers valued hard work and they valued loyalty and commitment. The new generation, so millennials, value a sense of freedom, a sense of autonomy, and a sense of purpose and I’m stereotyping, so we can go left or right, older people can value those things and younger people can value those things, and in fact, they do, but why does that matter for career, right? And actually, it’s a little bit deeper than those things. Those things are values but actually, it’s even more than that.

When We Understand our Values, We Can Start to Make Values-Based Decisions

What I do with my clients is I take them through a process where we uncover all of their values, at least their core values, everything around money, life, fitness, health, mental, emotional, spiritual if that applies to them, relationships and career, we look at everything. Why? Well because when we understand our values, then we can start making values-based decisions. Have you ever struggled with a decision that you need to make in your career? If so, values-based decisions actually make that decision come to a lot easier. Why? Because when we understand our values and we make values-based decisions, the decision becomes really clear to us. It’s like, this is what I value so for this decision I’m about to make, how does that fit? Which values will get the most expressed? And sometimes we have values that are in conflict with each other. That’s okay. It’s not ideal but it does happen. And sometimes we choose to, in our lives or our career, we choose one thing over another and therefore we end up compromising our values, so look at Jean Valjean, he had to steal a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. Tough choice, especially at that time, the period that that was written for. What would you do? Would you steal the loaf of bread just to feed your starving family or would you obey the law and let your family starve? And of course, there are more options now but at the time this character didn’t feel like he had that so when we choose one over the other, we can feel a sense of shame or guilt. I’m going to choose to steal the bread to feed my family but I feel crappy that I stole. Or I’m not going to choose to steal the bread to feed my family and therefore I feel honourable because I didn’t steal the bread but now my family is starving so I still feel guilty.

So What Do You Do?

So what do you do? Well, the idea is when you have values in conflict and you’re trying to make a career-based decision, you turn it into a values-based decision and you say to yourself, how could I honour both of these values at the same time? It doesn’t always work, but it’s worth a try and sometimes that’s where innovation in our own thinking comes in. It’s like, huh, maybe I could do the following things and make that work. I had a client who did this actually, who really wanted to work in yoga as a yoga instructor but she wasn’t going to make enough money to sustain the lifestyle that she also valued she worked at an engineering firm and so what could she do to live both? Well, she was already teaching yoga at night but it was getting kind of tiring so here’s what she did. She went to her wellness committee and she said, can I teach lunch and learns and I’d like to teach yoga, here’s a room that we can do it in and they said yeah, sure, why don’t you teach a couple of lunch and learns, so over a couple of years actually it became such a great initiative that her employers put it on her performance indicators and so it became part of her performance development plan. Or personal development plan for the company to teach yoga at lunch as part of their wellness committee so I thought that was kind of cool and very innovative and that’s what it means in her case to make a values-based decision and honour values that might be in conflict. Hopefully, that’s helpful for you. Christopher Lawrence, ChangeMyLifeCoaching.ca life and career coach. Tell me about your values below. Thanks, bye!

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