When you have your work in alignment with your values, life becomes so much more fun. It’s very easy to be drawn into doing work that isn’t really right for you. When that happens it can suck a lot of the joy out of your work.
The big reason why doing work in alignment with your values matters is that it removes a lot of friction. Think about a mountain stream. When it’s able to just flow down the mountain, it has enough energy to turn a hydro-electric turbine and power a city. But when it has rocks in its path, all the energy gets churned up, and most of it is wasted just getting past the obstacles.
That’s what’s going on when you lose alignment between your work and your values. Too much of your energy is used doing work that just doesn’t light you up, and that’s a waste. When the work you do and your values are nicely aligned, everything feels so much smoother.
Flow comes from alignment with your values
Talking about the smooth flow of water down a mountain brings to mind the concept of Flow in your work, excellently explained in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book by the same name: Flow: The Psychology of Happiness*. When you’re doing the work that you’re here on the earth to do, you get to experience that feeling of Flow. A good way to work out what kind of work will help you be in Flow more of the time is to use a psychometric profiling tool. There are lots out there, but for solo practitioners I find Wealth Dynamics amongst the best (which would be why I use it, of course!)
That can help you to get a good feel for getting your work and values in alignment at a surface, “doing”, level. And to go deeper, you need to understand your values. I believe we all intuitively know what our values are, but we often can’t articulate them. So it can be useful to go through a “values elicitation” process to get properly in touch wit them. If you have a coach, and they haven’t yet done this with you, ask them. Or you can use this MP3 exercise I use in my “Discover Your Genius” e-course – get the download here: Values Elicitation Exercise.
Deeper alignment with your values
But while it can be useful to have some words to use as labels for your values, deep down you know whether your work is in alignment with your values. I make a distinction between our knowing, and our knowledge. Knowledge is the stuff we can write down, and we get a lot of it from books. Where other people wrote it down.
But that kind of codified knowledge is nothing like as useful as the intuitive knowing we all have. We know when something isn’t right, when it’s not aligned with our values. It just feels ‘off’. We can’t explain why, but we know. That’s what I mean by our ‘knowing’.
The best tool I’ve come across for reliably accessing that knowing comes from Access Consciousness. It’s called “Heavy & Light”, and it’s very simple. If thinking about something feels all heavy, dark and constricting, then it’s almost certainly not true for you. Not in tune with your values. And when something is aligned with your values, it feels light, bright and expansive. The trick is to allow yourself to trust those heavy and light feelings.
Alignment with your values = trust
In exactly the same way you intuitively know when something is ‘off’, so do your clients. If what you’re doing is out of whack with your values, they can sense it. And they can also sense when you’re being completely congruent with your values in life. That light feeling they get makes it so much easier for them to trust that you’re going to do a great job for them.
And having your work aligned with your values also makes it a lot easier for you to trust that you’ll do a great job. So your client can trust you’re going to be brilliant, and you can feel trust in your genius. The outcome is a smooth working relationship that’s a joy for both of you. And that creates fantastic results.
What’s not to like?
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If you’d like to go beyond surface-level psychometric profiles, or simple labels that tell you your values but don’t really help you to access your deeper knowing, take a look at this video:
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