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“I’m terrified that I will learn I’m living a life 0% in line with my values and that learning them will make me feel worse. What if I made all the wrong decisions and must completely reinvent my life yet again?” This fear loomed large in my head when I learned that the training I was about to undertake would involve me actually going through the process myself.  

Any time I’ve worked with values exercises from a list in the past, it has been followed by the urge to completely uproot and reset my life. I was extra scared to do this because I had just uprooted my life out of necessity. I was already frozen and out of energy. Discovering I was doing everything wrong and had made only bad choices might have broken me. What I found instead was so much kinder, more compassionate, and more hopeful. It was still hard and painful, and I felt open to possibility instead of feeling trapped. 

It turns out that by discovering my values through telling stories about times I felt alive, I found and defined my values, not those I thought I should have. It was the opposite of what I experienced when I had lists of “value words” to choose from. And in discovering what my values meant personally, I realized I was much closer to them than I thought. That they had been attempting to surface for most of my life. And many of the most frightening moments of inertia and indecision were instances where my values were asserting their conflict with the messages I had received or what I thought I should do. My values had protected me by letting me know when I was straying too far from them, eventually bringing me to a halt. 

I learned that my values don’t simply guide the big decisions in my life. In fact, the direction of those big decisions is frequently in less conflict with my values than all the small things that add up daily. Although these small things may eventually lead to big things, it was empowering to realize what a difference I could make with the most minor changes. 

I suspect the belief that alignment required significant changes is why my countless attempts to burn down and rebuild my life were ineffective. I lacked the foundation to build change. And the basis of that foundation is practicing my values in all the small ways I previously thought were insignificant because I was judging my life by external measures rather than by what my body told me. 

I can find ways to come alive in my current life by making tiny course corrections. And while those may eventually lead to considerable changes in direction, I feel confident that I can now navigate without capsizing in an attempt to turn around or feeling the need to burn the whole boat and start over.