Putting the mask on you first: Living to your values.
Me enjoying family (Nigel is teaching me) fun and fitness all at once!
I remember quite a few years ago (circa a decade), I did an exercise about discovering what my values were. An interesting exercise to really bring to the fore what you really value in life. What you believe is important in the way you live and work. For me this was Family, Fun, Food and Fitness. Great! now what? How did knowing this actually make any change to my life?
Here is the gold, based on Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I did another and much more enlightening exercise. One that showed me in absolute black and white (actually quite a few different colours), that I wasn’t living to my values at all. In fact my Family, Fun, Food and Fitness was a ‘when I get the time then…’, or ‘when my kids are older then…’. Not something I was actually living on the daily. Another example of how I wasn’t putting the mask on me first.
So today I’m going to take you through this exercise and I hope it will help you discover how aligned your life is to your values or not!
Here goes!
Step 1 - Colour coding
Once you have figured out your values (and if you haven’t try this simple exercise), then chose a colour for each value.
For example Family, Fun, Food, Fitness
Step 2 - Filling out your calendar
You can either use your electronic calendar (as I did) or a paper one. Take one whole week, say Monday to Sunday, and put in every thing you do during the week. Book yourself in from the minute you wake up to the minute you go to bed. You can do this in real time for a week or simply draw up an ‘average’ week. For example, I write in 1/2 hour for my morning pages (journaling) at 6am, 1/2 hour for meditation at 6.30, 1 hour for my movement, 1/2 hour for getting ready….etc…everything you do. Getting the kids up, organising lunch boxes, walking to work, driving kids to sports, playing your own sports, drinks with mates etc… There should be no blank spaces on your calendar.
Step 3: Now comes the interesting part. I want you to colour in all your appointments that align with your values. ONLY the ones that align with your values. At this first pass, you might not find many parts of your day or week that do! That’s ok! This isn’t a right or wrong exercise. It’s purely to bring to light the reality of where you invest your time.
The calendar on the left is a very basic version of my calendar these days. In the past, there was a lot more pink (work), certainly no fitness (body or mind) and not a huge amount of fun, I just didn’t have the time! Or so I thought!
So have a look, what does your calendar look like? Does it have a good balance of time with the things you value or are you not in charge of your own calendar? Are you not in charge of your own life? What might need to change? What colour blocks would you like to see more of or less of?
Have a think about that this week and next week, I’m going to explain how I reframed my weeks and therefore my life using the calendar and a few rocks! Stay tuned!
Put the mask on yourself first, discover if you are living to your values and thrive again!
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