BSB Ep 66
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Size Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and I wanna start us off with a quote today. "If you don't know what you stand for, you'll fall for anything." And I tried to find the original person who said that, but unfortunately that quote has been attributed to five or six different people, so I couldn't give you a good source.
On who was the originator of that quote, but if you think about what it stands for, literally if you don't know what you stand for, then you could fall for anything. And this is why I created a new resource for you that's over on the shop page of my website, april darley.com. Right at the top, there's a shop tab and it's called the Values Advantage Workbook.
And I created this resource because so many of my clients are professionals, leaders, entrepreneurs, corporate managers, and they could almost to the person tell [00:01:00] me what their company values or their company mission statements were. But when I asked them, "Okay, what are your personal values?" Crickets. They would blink at me slowly and go," I don't know. I've never thought about it." So I'm gonna turn this question to you, my friend. If I ask you, what are your personal values? Can you rattle them off to me immediately? Just like you could your company's values. Have you even stopped or slowed down enough to think about it? Do you even know what values are?
And I know that seems like a strange question. It's a term that we're familiar with. Every politician is going to have some value platform that they run off of. Family values or freedom as a value. So we're used to hearing that concept somewhere in our world, but not necessarily applying it for [00:02:00] ourselves.
And when we don't do that, we are missing a huge chunk that could be leading us astray. Because what your personal values do is they help you make aligned decisions. And what do I mean by that? So too often we tend to rely on external information to inform our decision. Sometimes it's people pleasing what would make other people happy.
Sometimes it's judgment. What do other people think I'm supposed to do or what should I do? And we don't really filter that down strongly enough to go, what do I stand for? What is at the core of me that's going to guide me to make the best decision for me that I will be happy with? And often I will ask my clients to define values in this way.
When [00:03:00] there's a definition that just isn't clicking for them, it's to go. Values are something that's so important to you that you would fight for it. You would strive after it, you would chase it, you would even sacrifice for it. Maybe it's that important. You will go out of your way to make something happen.
You will go out of your way. To be in alignment with it because it's that important to you and my personal values. Normally if you can narrow it down to the top three or five, you're doing pretty good. And there's an exercise in the Values Advantage workbook just to get you jumpstarted. It's gonna be a list of common values.
And first I'm gonna ask you and take you through an exercise to circle your top 10. There's no right or wrong. Circle anything that you're drawn to. And out of 10, you're gonna go through and refine and ask yourself questions like how important is this to me? How much [00:04:00] does this matter in my life?
How much do I spend of my life trying to make this happen? Or how much of my life am I looking forward to this happening? And for me, some of my top values, number one, is optimism. Across the board, I can find a silver lining in any dark cloud. You just wait. And because that's a value of mine, it's also something I value when I see it in other people.
So some of my favorite clients are the clients who have been knocked down, but they're gonna get up again. Because when you have optimism as a core value, it allows you to see hope. When other people see struggle. Right, and I love that about myself. I love that I'm able to find the silver lining. So yay.
Value number one. Number two for me is knowledge. I am constantly learning [00:05:00] new things, not just for my own benefit, but for my clients as well. It really helps to have an eclectic knowledge base when I have a client base, because we're all individuals at the end of the day, and you never know when some piece of random information that I get from an article or a book or a saying or a quote is gonna be the very aha moment that someone else needs. So I do it for my own personal satisfaction. It's extremely important to me, but I also use that value to enrich the lives of others. Number three for me is resilience. And I do admire people that can keep on going.
If you're Gen X, do you remember the old Timex slogan, the Timex Watch, take a licking and keep on ticking. That's what it was. And I admire people with that because life doesn't stop ing just because bad things happen. We gotta get up. And we gotta keep going. And I admire resilience and I [00:06:00] also help my clients foster resilience in themselves if that's something that they want as well.
Number four for me would be time freedom. And it's time freedom specifically because a lot of people have freedom as one of their top five values or some version of it, like autonomy, but. I noticed when I did this deep values work that if you put money and time side by side together and we as humans both need and want these two concepts, money and time, I would choose time freedom a lot of the time over money freedom.
So that lets me know, you know what, money is fabulous, but time is priceless. So when I'm thinking about projects that I wanna do, I run it against this value and go, do I feel optimistic about this? Is this gonna increase my knowledge? Will this help me be more resilient? And will this give me the [00:07:00] time freedom that is so important to me?
And number five is transformation. I really do value growth and transformation of the mind, the energy, the spirit, the body, all the things. So I tend to prioritize activities in my life that are gonna bring me transformation on some level. And that's an example of how knowing your values can help you enrich your own life and the lives of others.
Now, because I'm a business owner, I also have business values and they are slightly different. Value number one in my business is connection because it's really important to me. It's the reason why my business is currently structured only at one-to-one is because I value deep connections and I help you make connections within yourself to that mind, body, spirit to help you see things from a different angle, to give you that aha moment or things click into [00:08:00] place, or you're finally ready to let something go and make a shift.
Number two in my company is wisdom. And this is the higher level of knowledge because I don't just want you to know things. I want you to be wise in how to apply that thing, that knowledge, that peace, that it sets you free. And wisdom is what's gonna help you with the discernment of when to use that knowledge, how and where to use it.
And then freedom. Of course, I want you to feel mentally, emotionally free in your life at all times and transformation again, because that's part of our purpose here on this planet is to learn, to grow, to share and to love. And I think you kind of need all of those things. I hope that this episode, it has at least gotten the wheels turning for you, and I'm gonna share a client's story.[00:09:00]
Recently, one of my clients, she came to me, she is a realtor and she was wanting to switch teams and go to a new Realty team, right? New company, new team. But she was warned before she went that said, Hey, the person on your team who leads it she's stubborn and she walks away from perfectly good deals and I don't know why.
So you wanna watch out for that. She tends to shoot herself in the foot, that sort of thing. So it made my client really suspicious and it made her second guess her decision, is this what I really wanna do? Do I wanna work with someone like that? But she ended up listening to her own intuition, her own values.
She took the job, loved the woman, but came to me one day and said, I can totally understand why people say that about her, because recently she did walk away from a deal. And I decided to take it [00:10:00] over because the connections closing this deal was going to give me are way more valuable than what the commission terms were.
And my client's coworker had walked away from this deal because the seller kept changing terms. Over and over and over, and there was no consistency and it was a little bit unfair. Even my client said, Hey, this is an unfair deal and it kind of sucks, but I'm gonna take it anyway because I think the connections are good.
So I brought this up to my client. I'm like, do you realize you are living your value system right now? Because connection is one of her top three values. So of course she would look at that situation and go, the connections matter more to me than the money and then I don't know her coworker. That person is not my client, but I hear a lot about them as I do in one-to-one sessions.
And I said, I've got [00:11:00] a feeling that your coworker may have justice or fairness as one of their top core values because of the stories that my client had shared. That tended to be a theme I could see. And when I shared this with my client, she said, you know what? I can absolutely see it. She has a strong sense of justice and fairness, and I believe that to be true.
So this is an example of how other people can look at you and what you do, and because they don't understand your values, they may think your actions are crazy or that you're being stubborn or you're sabotaging yourself. But in reality, if you're aware of your personal core values, what you're doing is acting in alignment, in accordance, and you're unwilling to accept things that go against your values or you're able to accept things when you weigh one value against another like me in [00:12:00] financial freedom or time freedom, what was more important? Time, freedom, and for my client. Fairness about the commission or the connections for future business to her, the connections were more important. So you really have to be aware of how these things are shaping up in your life to really see how they all connect.
And that is one thing that I can help you with. in a couple of different ways. So if you've been inspired by this episode, to explore your own personal values, head over to aprildarley.com and snag a copy of the Values Advantage workbook. Right now, it's only $9, so a really affordable way to get in alignment with your life.
If you would like to dig even deeper in a one-to-one personal session, then you can do that over on aprildarley.com as well. Click the booking tab and you can set up either a free consultation or if you're a fast action taker, just set up your appointment right there. Alright, my friends, I am wishing you [00:13:00] an aligned, happy, healthy life.
Until next week, goodbye.
