In my last post, I talked about how my tens-of-thousands of dollars in consumer debt were helping motivate me to commit to a year-long shopping ban, inspired by author Cait Flanders. The debt is my “why.” In addition to knowing your “why,” the author recommends keeping a list of your values on hand to help you make the kinds of decisions you want to make as you commit to the shopping ban. Her words are below:
Throughout the challenge, I would also encourage you to keep a list of your values. Your values should not be your aspirations—confusing the two is just one of the reasons I used to buy things for the ideal version of myself. Instead, your values can be defined as both your principles or standards of behavior, and as your judgment of what is important in life. Whenever you realize what one of your values is, add it to the list. Keep this nearby (perhaps even in your wallet.
By the time you finish your own experiment, my hope is you will be living a lifestyle that aligns with your goals and values—and that your budget aligns with them too. When everything is working together, it’s a lot easier to find inner peace, appreciation, and gratitude for all you have.
- Cait Flanders in The Year of Less (2018), p. 173
Flanders words resonated with me, and not just as it pertained to the shopping ban. Learning one’s own values can mark a deliberate shift in the way they are willing to dedicate their time and energy. I have a long history with determining values, because learning my own for the first time changed the course of my life.
As a freshman at Colorado State University I was invited to attend a new and exciting optional offering for incoming students called Preview Mountain Experience. After attending the mandatory new students orientation, a group of about 100 of us ventured up into the foothills west of Fort Collins in buses. We arrived at Pingree Park, the mountain campus frequented by CSU Forestry Majors, and spent the next three days going through individual and group development exercises. This was the first time I was introduced to the value sort activity, I was 18-years-old.
As the activity unfolded, I was consistently challenged to further and further hone my values, starting with many things I valued at first, narrowing and narrowing until at the end I was only allowed to choose ONE. Holding in my hand the ONE thing I valued most in the world was a moment unlike any I had previously experienced, but what really shaped me was hearing what one value the other members of the group were holding—I could not believe the variety of answers.
One person, out of dozens and dozens of potential values, identified that she valued “punctuality” above all else. Social scripts and rules don’t always intuitively land for me, and this was the first time I had considered in earnest that there wasn’t one “right” set of values, that other people had values different from my own without being “wrong.”
I am 31-years-old now, and I have completed at least one value sort in each of the 13 intervening years, sometimes doing more than one in years of particular turbulence. I value the activity greatly (lol), and once made a video about it, encouraging others to try it because it has given me such firm footing as I take on challenges that sometimes feel too big for me. Every time I do the value sort activity, my most salient values shift around and I am looking at a slightly new framework to guide me.
In response to the author’s prompting, I decided it was time to do a new value sort, especially now that I’ve committed to staying put more in 2024 in pursuit of finding ROOTS here. It will be important to feel particularly grounded in my desires, drives, and motivators when I come upon moments of weakness that will inevitably arise.
What is a value sort?
A value sort is a guided or self-guided activity designed to get you to examine your motives and drives; to help you identify what you value. As Flanders mentions, values are “a person's principles or standards of behavior; one's judgment of what is important in life.”
If you are interested in doing a value sort of your own, I’ve written a companion-blog-post titled Identifying your values: How to do a Value Sort, which walks you through the process step by step. I’d love to hear about your experiences with the activity, and what your core values are in the comments over on that post.
There are many, many possible values, which is why your own list and ranking of values will be unique to you.
I make a habit of keeping my top 10 values (with special emphasis on my top three, or “core” values) in the front of my bullet journal, alongside a personal mission statement that I write. Keeping these important cornerstones of my life where I can easily access them gives me an easy starting point for where to go when a situation overwhelms me. When it comes to making changes in the way we move through the world, or facing decisions that seem to big to take on, knowing our values is one of the best tools available.
Reflecting on my core values:
Core values from my value sort were Love, Inner-Harmony, and Home.
When I completed the value sort, my core values were Love first, Inner-Harmony second, and Home third. I felt a clear sense of resonance with these words, in this order. I knew for certain that they reflected something deeply true about me, right here in this present moment.
Love is my muse, my gift, and my life’s work.
I’ve recently been through a revolution regarding Love: I realized that everything I’d ever “known” about Love was based on something else entirely. Born into a family rife with addiction, I’d been raised into the “family disease of alcoholism,” trained literally since birth to “love” in a way that overextends, depletes, surrenders and enables.
When I was asked to define romantic love, I used to say, “it is the desire for oneness. It is the feeling of wanting to move your separate lives toward a joint one.” Learning that this definition much more closely resembles “codependency” than “love” sent me on a sacred mission to learn more about Love, and to discover the effects of addiction on adult children so that I might begin to heal some of the ways these two concepts had become entwined for me.
I wrote a long personal essay on the subject last year titled New understandings about Love, and have continued to explore explicitly in myself and my relationships what it means to have and maintain a distinct self. Loving, for me, is a process of unlearning. It is the slow and methodical unwinding of all I have ever known, done with hands shaking, fueled only by a hope that something more substantial will come and take it’s place. Love has become about faith. It means everything to me, and now more than ever, my life is oriented toward Loving, and Loving well.
Also interesting to me is that compared to my value sort last year, Love has soared in importance. In May of 2023 Love as ranked fourth in my value sort, losing out to Creativity, Inner-Harmony, and Courage.
Inner-Harmony is the foundation for all of my work: creative, spiritual, bold, and reckless.
Inner-Harmony has been, and remains, a central tenant to my way of being. It is, much like Love, something I currently must strive toward, rather than something that settles down easily inside me. I have noticed that the values that swim to the surface during a value sort are the most salient struggles that I face in that moment. When I was younger and reckoning with my identities as a queer and trans person, Authenticity was regularly my number one value. Since claiming and owning those parts of myself, Authenticity has not broken my top ten. It lives somewhere else now, as a fact of my person, rather than a guideline I am endeavoring to live by.
What Inner-Harmony means to me, specifically, is the sense that I am honoring the boundaries of my self, and checking in with my body when I am unsure. It is a practice in cultivating interoception, noticing when something feels off in my body, and being willing to change course when my gut is talking to me. It encapsulates other important values of mine, like Peace and Optimism, and also represents things that are true about me, rather than inherent to Inner-Harmony itself, like Boldness, Honesty, Loyalty and Authenticity.
Inner-Harmony means that I am committed to making decisions that are about ME. This might seem obvious or even unimportant or selfish depending on your vantage point. When you’ve been brought up to believe that you are only valuable to others if you are willing to take your dying breath on behalf of their convenience, it is been a true paradigm shift to carve out a sense of care, attentiveness, and attunement to things that you yourself want and need. Inner-Harmony is the cue that I am paying attention to the right things.
Inner-Harmony remained in the same position as it held in my value sort last year, coming in strong in second place.
Home is as much a place as a feeling, a groundedness I’ve long devalued.
As I shared in my blog post about Minimalism, the loss of my childhood home to foreclosure when I moved away for college shook me deeply. At the time I couldn’t even see it for what it was; out of a survival instinct, I convinced myself that I alone was independent from the need for home. “Home is wherever I am,” I would sometimes say, or, “I do not need a home other than the one I carry with me in my mind.” I convinced myself I could move constantly, run any time I felt called to settle, and access my best self from wherever I happened to be.
This caught up with me, rather violently, when I was stuck in another country from my family and friends during the lockdown portion of the global pandemic. I was homesick for every home I’d ever known, and especially for the home I had lost that held my family together once upon a time. I spent National Poetry Writing Month sitting with these feelings, grief especially noteworthy among them, and wrote the chapbook Home & other poems from these reflections.
These reflections in part inspired me to choose ROOTS as one of my guiding principles for this year. My exploration of Home as a concept is ready to tip over into an embodied experience of building home as a place. It’s a huge part of the work I am doing right now, and it doesn’t surprise me that it lands in my top three values.
Home is a newer value, and last year it wasn’t a part of my value sort activity, and I didn’t think to add it, let alone for it to rank in my top ten.
Even as these values are overarching and touch many parts of my life, I can also see how they each lend themselves to sharpening my resolve for the shopping ban.
As I clear up space in my mind, my home, and my life, it is Love that I am endeavoring to make more room for
As I examine my shopping and accumulation habits and engage with how consumerism affects me, I notice how it lands it my body, I’m guided to make change as it disturbs my sense of Inner-Harmony
As I look around my new Home, I am called to cultivate into a space of safety and creativity, and in my mind those things contradict consumerism
No matter how long it has been, now is as good of a time as any to learn, or revisit your values. Do you know what you’re working toward? What do you lean on when moving in that direction gets hard?
Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash