To take care of the kids? Clean the house? Exercise often enough to lose the baby weight?
It’s powerful to start with why. Taking some time to examine your life and identify some of your core personal values will not only give you some energy, but more strategically it will provide a foundation for layering additional truths and habits that will exponentially increase your energy for tackling life.
Values are not goals or principles, but they show what is important to you in life. They are reflected in your motivations for your actions, and the assumptions and decisions you make. Your core values are constant for you and can be applied to every area of your life, and they are things you care deeply about and are willing to make sacrifices for.
Unfortunately, we are surrounded by a culture that tempts and distracts us away from our real values. I believe we have invaluable roles as moms to proactively identify the values of our families and then help ourselves and our loved ones bring our lives into alignment with what really matters to us.
I learned about discovering my core values in 2006 when I met my future mother-in-law who is a coach trainer for Lifeforming Leadership Coaching, based in Virginia Beach, VA. She teaches a whole section of their coach training track on discovering your personal core values.
Over the past five years, I have been on a journey of discovering my values and beginning to turn and swim against the tide of our culture. As I’ve started to be intentional about living according to my values, I see all the forces that are working against me – notably marketing and our culture’s emphasis on material goods and consumerism.
Once I determined a list of my personal core values that resonated with me, I knew I had a good place to start. Then I thought about my husband and my children and was able to quickly adjust it and turn it into a list of our family’s values.
Quick Value Discovery Exercise
Download this printable Values Exercise. It is a list of common values.
All of these values are good things, but ask yourself what you really care about. Which ones stand out to you? They all sound nice, but which ones do you need? Which ones really bother you when they are missing? Which ones make your day?
Another way to approach this is to start by thinking about meaningful events in your past. Write down a list of events or decisions that were emotionally significant to you. Then go through and jot down notes about each one. Think about what you were trying to accomplish, what you were trying to avoid, what you remember and why. Try to identify your motivation and turn it into a single word or phrase. These can be positive or negative, but it can be especially helpful to think about times you were happy, proud, fulfilled or satisfied.
Write down a list of life categories and make notes in each one about what is important to your family and then look for consistent themes.
Finally, don’t overthink it too much. Think of it as a work in progress. It’s your list; you can always adjust it as you go.
Here is my working list of my family’s core values. They seemed to fall into two groups, so I think of us as pursuing some and practicing others.
We pursue: Adventure/Journey, Financial Independence, Family, Leadership/Growth, Learning/Discovery, Fitness/Beauty, Simplicity, Balance, Challenge
We practice: Authenticity, creativity, learning, productivity, excellence, perseverance, and teamwork.
Let’s revisit the question we started with. Why do you need energy?
Make it personal. For me, I have a 7 yr old, 5 yr old, 2 yr old, and 6 month old – all boys. I work part time and do most of the cooking and cleaning at home. What do I need energy for? Seems obvious, but it really matters what I think I’m trying to accomplish in this role called motherhood, and the narrative I say to myself about my life.
What do I need energy for?
To take care of the kids? Clean the house? Exercise often enough to lose the baby weight?
or is it:
To make life an adventure for my family, provide a nurturing environment for my boys, and live a healthy lifestyle that gives me the physical strength and mental energy to play baseball and do science experiments? (with my older boys – in between nursings and diaper changes)
Instead of looking for energy to survive, tell yourself you’re going to find energy and use it to thrive.
When you discover your values, you’ve taken the first step toward being intentional about life, and giving yourself a mental and emotional foundation. On good days you can build on that foundation in various ways that energize you and unleash you to be creative and productive. On bad days you can fall back on that foundation to weather the storm.
And we all know that there will be bad days. The key is that when those days come, your underlying mentality is one of hope. When you identify and practice your values, and work toward bringing your life in alignment with your values, then even when you have a bad day – the ones that we laugh and cry about when we share the stories with friends – you have peace in your circumstances, and hope for the future.
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Alicia Eichmann