It is worth taking time to sit and reflect on your core personal values. Come up with 3-5 values and write them down. Keep them in a place you can frequently access – on your phone, in your wallet, in your planner, on a sticky note in your car. To get you started, here is a list of values from the amazing Brene Brown. This is not comprehensive, but can get you started and really thinking.
What do you really value? How would you like to live in order to reflect those values? Living according to our values can affect and improve how we:
Show up for ourselves
Show up in our closest relationships
Perform at work
Spend and manage our time
Spend and manage our money
Approach household care
Act at family and social gatherings
Invest in hobbies
Develop our spiritual practices
This not only affects the large goals and results in our lives, but really transforms our day-to-day experiences. On the worst of days, keeping our values at the front of mind can really add meaning, purpose, and push.
In “The Happiness Trap” by Russ Harris, defining and living by one’s values is a core step in decreasing one’s suffering and increasing one’s purpose and meaning. He defines success as living by your values. In 2015, the World Health Organization asked Dr. Harris to write a program for refugee camps to help people cope with the enormous stress of daily life. In 2020 the results were published in the Lancet showing “the refugees experienced significant improvements in their psychological health, including major reductions in depression and PTSD. A big part of the program was the sense of personal empowerment among the participants, through connecting with their values.” Dr. Harris goes on to say “We can live our values right here and now, in a thousand different ways, even when our goals are impossible. The more preoccupied we are with what is out of our control, the more miserable and disempowered we become. But our values connect us with what is in our control: the ability to act like the sort of person we want to be.”
I didn’t know I was doing it at the time, but I used a values tactic in residency to get me through really tough days. Residency is a minefield of tough moments. It requires the trainee - the least skilled and knowledgeable physician – to be the first responder. It is a pressure cooker of learning the encyclopedic medical knowledge, the technical skills to examine and operate, the communication skills to manage all corners of human behavior, and the emotional reserve to handle difficult diagnoses and outcomes. The resident is often the target of blame by the patient, the front desk, the lab, and the attending physician. Through all of this, it is impossible to not have dark days. The thing I started asking myself at the end of a frustrating day was: “was the patient taken care of?” If yes, I would let the rest roll off. It didn’t matter if I had to re-order the labs a few times, if patients were angry they had to wait, or if the attending physician thought I should have read more the night before when I was on call actively caring for patients. If my core value (providing excellent care for each of my patients) was fulfilled that day, I could find clarity through the mud. I still ask myself this twelve years out of training. Was the patient taken care of? Did they receive excellent care? When I remind myself of this, the other annoyances that crop up in my day bother me less.
If you identify your core values, and live each day with intention according to them, you can better withstand the guaranteed daily storms of life.
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