Episode 19 – Clarify Your Core Values as They Relate to Work

Hi Professors!

If someone were to ask you today about your core values, would you be able to articulate them out loud? Have you ever spent the time to think about your values, especially as they relate to your professional work?

When I asked these questions to a former client of mine in our very first session, she was stumped. She was at a crossroads in her life, where she had essentially come to the decision to leave her job. But she was full of fear and unsure of what to do next.

The only thing that she was sure about was that she could not stay where she was. It was no longer tenable for her.

In our next few sessions, we decided that she would work on identifying what her core values were. Because by gaining clarity on her core values, she would then be able to make intentional decisions about what her next steps would be.

She explored possible career pivots and used her values as a guide for what felt right for her at the time. This practice helped her to alleviate some of her anxiety and she was able to make strategic career choices with what aligned best with her core values.

Although my client was not in higher education, I’d like to suggest here that the same process of reflection is useful for academics who are considering some kind of career pivot or shift.

In this 19^th episode of the Rise with Clarity Podcast, I’m going to be discussing 4 tips on how to uncover and clarify your core values as they relate to your professional work goals.

What are Core Values and Why are They Important?

So, how do you go about articulating your core values? The good thing is that there are a lot of tools and resources out there to help you identify what your core values are.

Put simply, core values are the beliefs and principles that are meaningful to you. They often help to guide you to make decisions or to set goals.

Although it may seem counterintuitive, I think it’s actually useful to start with the aspect of misalignment in relation to your core values, and how this can play out in your workplace setting. What do I mean by this?

Let me give you an example.

So you’re a professor and you are finding yourself at increasing odds with how things transpire in practice at your university. Although you are in agreement with some of your university’s values and mission that are clearly stated on its website, what you see in reality does not match up to the espoused values of “open-mindedness, understanding, and compassion” for instance.

When you observe examples of the exact opposite happening to some of your colleagues or students, you can’t unsee this. And you start to feel deeply uncomfortable with this hypocrisy.

Here, the misalignment comes from your university’s stated values and what happens in practice. And this misalignment runs counter to your own values…which you’ve now been able to uncover and clarify.

I think that acknowledging a feeling of misalignment in a work situation can be pretty upsetting and disconcerting. But it can also be a blessing, because it can assist you to really think meaningfully about your core values and how to engage them more artfully in your professional life.

Use Core Values as Your Guideposts in Your Professional Life

Once you can more clearly identify these, you can use them as guideposts to decide on whether to pivot into a different role, a different department or institution, or pivot into a different career that is more in alignment with you.

I went through this process of uncovering my core values with a life coach a few years ago. I realized that my own core values of integrity, autonomy, creativity, preparedness, and service were not fully aligned with my former workplace and also with my career in higher education.

In doing this exercise—which took me a while, by the way, I came to discern that two values that I thought were prioritized in higher education—autonomy and service—were not in line with what I saw in practice. Nor did they jive with how I conceptualized them.

Now that I’ve left higher education, I can define autonomy and service on my own terms. As the founder of my own coaching and consulting business, I can create my own career path, decide my own work schedule, and work with clients of my own choosing.

And the concept of service—which I define in terms of the act of helping other people—is not framed as a metric of how much committee work you need to tally in order to prove you’re a good departmental citizen or to go up for your next promotion. Outside of the ivory tower, service—to me–feels much more immediate and gratifying.

Now, uncovering and clarifying your core values doesn’t have to lead to something as drastic as leaving higher education. But you might better be able to discern if you would be more aligned with a different role at your university. And you can begin to plan your next steps accordingly.

4 Tips on Uncovering Your Own Core Values

So here are 4 tips on how to identify your guiding core values so that you can move forward with more clarity in your professional life.

1) Do a search for a “core values words list” and you’ll come up with any number of resources online. You can look through the list of words and circle the ones that resonate the most with you. And take plenty of time to go through this exercise. Dr. Katie Linder has an excellent podcast episode devoted precisely to this topic. I’ll link to that episode in this transcript and I’ll also include a list of values words as well.

2) If you don’t want to consult a list of words, then just start with these simple questions: What values are really important to you? And how have these values shown up for you in the decisions that you have made in the past? You can write your responses in a journal and reflect on your answers.

3) As I mentioned earlier in this episode, consider where there may be elements of misalignment in your work situation. Those values misalignments may actually be clues for you to unlock what is really important to you and to discover what your non-negotiables are moving forward.

4) And somewhat connected to that, the last tip is to practice discernment. Figure out how YOU want to define your own values words, and how they make sense for you in your life. Practicing discernment can be a way of getting clarity on the meanings of your guiding core values. It also entails not having other people define these terms for you.

So these are 4 tips, and really just some starting points for you. If you have other tools that have worked for you in the past, I would love to hear them. And if this episode resonated with you and you would like a thinking partner in navigating a career pivot or a shift in the future, then do feel free reach out to me through my website at RisewithClarity.com. I’m happy to do a discovery call with you or point you in the right direction for your next steps. I look forward to hearing from you!