Category: values

alues clustering. A blog by Dana Mitra. D Dana Mitra is a faculty coach, career, coach, and leadership coach. She specializes in coaching academics, women leaders, and professionals making career changes. She coaches on purpose, balance and productivity.
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Know your values, know your path

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Whether choosing a political candidate or a new career, a great way to discern your choice is to tap into your values. What are your core beliefs that structure your decisions?  

Think about what matters most to you in the world.  Values can be formed through experiences, influential people, family structures and culture, and even difficult times.  Common values that changemakers identify include: giving back, creativity, innovation, making a difference, order/control, and equity.

Getting greater clarity on these beliefs can create a scaffolding that weathers the ups and downs of a lifetime. It can keep you focused on a longer-term vision of purpose. Without knowing your values, it is more possible to slip into dismay, disenchantment, aimlessness, and cynicism.   

Identifying values is not just stating them but living them. The gap between your work and your vision should feel inspiring and energizing rather than depleting. 

Aligning with values also helps to dispel notions of perfection. Values can define a sense of inner standards rather than external judgment. When you feel judged or beaten down, ask yourself how those external judgments align or do not align with your inner values. This mindful work also allows a re-calibration of yourself that can keep critics at bay.

Values may change over time. They might even conflict with some of the expectations of your job, your family, your religion, your politics. Be true to what feels right in your core, not your head. Articulating values and seeing how they align and do not align with your big goals in your life can help you to discern when its time to take the leap and shift to something bigger, more true—how you really want to be.  

Resources for Living Your Values 

  1. You can help to distill your values by considering lists of words and debating which ones connect most with you. Here is a list to get you started.
  2. Ask everyone to tell you about your gifts. Feeling really brave? Post the question on social media—a request for others to list your gifts. Create a visual collage, like a word cloud, of the words shared with you. 
  3. Revisit a rewarding moment of success. Think back to a time when you felt fully alive —a moment in time when you felt a huge energy hit and felt like you were flowing in the stream of success. Use your senses to remember the details of where you were, how your body felt, what the light looked like, who was with you. Then consider—what values/beliefs/principles underlie the meaning of this experience for you? 
  4. Journal about your values: 
    • How do I define “meaning” in my life?    
    • What does it feel like when I live my values?    
    • How do I express my values in my work? my relationships?
    • What are signs that I am not living in my values?  
    • Who can champion me to help me to live my values? 
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academic coaching/coaching/find yourself/life coaching/purpose/values/writing coach

Feeling Stuck? Seven Strategies to Get Back on Track

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Everyone has gifts to share with the world. Living a fulfilled life includes finding pathways to share these gifts. Doing so brings meaning to our lives and intrinsic worthiness. Working on projects that align with a sense of purpose tends to be energizing rather than depleting. We tend to feel most energized and tapped into our lives when engaged in tasks that align with what sparks creativity and curiosity.

But what about when we are stuck? listless? uncertain? Then it’s time to reconnect with our values. Re-anchoring to core values creates a scaffolding that can weather the struggles of a career, a relationship, a passion. It helps us to keep focused on a longer-term vision. Without values it is more possible to slip into dismay, disenchantment, aimlessness, and cynicism.

Anna came to work with me because she could not finish her writing assignments for her job. She had deep writer’s block, which led to a negative performance review. She had a piece of writing rejected that she had labored over for months. The reason given was that they did not find her topic compelling to their readers. The rejection sent her into a tailspin. It led her to believe that her field doubted the value of her work.

Untangling the threads of her experience, Anna discerned that the piece aligned with deeply held core values. We talked through whether one set of editors could judge the value of her work that is so close to her purpose. We even considered–if most editors rejected her work, would she stop working on these issues?

Anna realized that she would want to persist despite the judgement of others. Future rejections would fuel her fire rather than extinguish it.  She redoubled her faith in her work going forward. She honed her purpose instead of shying away from it. She decided that part of her purpose was to push the dominant paradigm and to encourage her profession to embrace a broader understanding of viewpoints.

Honing her purpose helped Anna to understand why she did the work intrinsically. She could use this sense of purpose in the future as a rubric for discerning difficult career decisions. She had found the strength to engage in her work from within.

Deepening Purpose by Identifying Your Values

Identifying values is not just stating them, but living them. By paying attention to what is our passion in our work, we define a sense of inner standards rather than external judgment. This process helps to fend off the perfection demons. We seek to be our authentic selves rather than a generic standard that may not even fit what we believe. This mindful work allows a calibration of the importance of self-improvement with destructive inner critics. The gap between our work and our vision the can feel inspiring and rather than depleting.

SEVEN WAYS TO RECONNECT TO YOUR VALUES

  1. Revisit a rewarding moment of success. Think back to rewarding moments in your life—a particular moment in time you fully alive and were flowing in the stream of success. Drawing on your senses to bring you back to the exact moment—where you were, how your body felt, what the light looked like. By feeling the moment fully, you can distill the essence of what made that moment special. Sitting in those feelings—what values/beliefs/principles underlie the meaning of this experience for you? If you have a photograph of this moment, hang it up in a place you see every day.
  2. Choose from a list of values. Choose what defines you the most from a list of values. Try to narrow down to three, or even one as a guidepost for the next year. Create a way to visually remind yourself of these words daily.
  3. Reread performance reviews/critiques and highlight ONLY the positive words. We tend to only listen for the negative. Instead, take note of your strengths. Focus on the verbs especially–“ I inspire. I build bridges. I organize.”
  4. Ask everyone to list your gifts. Ask colleagues what is important about your work.Choose your most trusted peers. Ask them what they value about your work. An even braver strategy, post on social media a request for others to list your gifts Create a visual collage of the words shared with me and posted them in my closet where I get dressed every morning.
  5. Journal about your values, Research on finding your values suggests that you focus reflection on “what” questions instead of “why” questions. Some prompts to get you started:
  • What do I wish to accomplish?
  • How do I define “meaning” in your work?
  • What academic work inspires me and why? 
  • What does it feel like when I live my values? 
  • What drives me to do excellent work?
  • How do I want to show up as a scholar?
                Why did I choose a career in academia?
  • How do I express my values in my work?
  • What are signs that I am not living in my values?
  • What struggles do I have with my scholarship?
  • When do I experience conflicting values within my scholarship?      
  • What does support look like? Who can champion me to help me to live my values?

Ready for something bigger? Contact me about how to jump start your future. Schedule a no-hassle consultation at dana@danamitra.net

decision making/find yourself/gratitude/inner critic/life coaching/purpose/values

Weeding Our Emotional Gardens

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Doing the tough stuff of change in our lives reminds me of work in my garden at the end of the season. I can celebrate the beautiful blooming that has happened over the course of the year. I can marvel at the growth in the blooms and all of the ways that nature has chosen to expand the beautiful

I also need to notice the parts that are not thriving. That despite my love and money and effort, some things were not able to grow in my space. In some spaces I had been trying to grow something for years but nothing seems to take. Others were neglected or the victim of happenstance–a patch of mildew or a bad storm.

In the garden, at the end of the season, we need to take stock of the places that we need to remove the plants that have failed to thrive. It can be hard work extracting that stuff. I can feel sad because we planted those living things with hope. Some take a few tugs and are gone without a thought. Others have rootballs that can take hours to extract. The tree stumps need professional help.

Once the hard work of getting rid of the stuff that didn’t take is done, there are empty spaces. We can be viewed as space is a possibility. Spaces of unknown they give opportunity for growth. For the healthy plants to spread out and stretch become even more glorious. Or a time to plant new seedlings and try again.

I can feel really impatient, noting that those spaces are not filled with joy yet. I have found myself focusing on the empty spaces instead of seeing the beauty of the plants around them. When we focus on the empty, and sometimes we can’t help ourselves, it can feel lonely. Maybe the spaces leave the garden feeling vulnerable to outsiders. Exposed. Unsure. What might others think about the failure?

Then there’s all the time and effort invested in those spaces. No matter how much was invested that failed, we need to move forward and think about how we can grow the garden. I can choose more wisely what to plant now based on what I’ve learned.

When I find myself stuck in looking at the empty spaces, I need to breathe air into growing the new. Into celebrating and focusing on the beauty of what is there. The gratitude for what works. And promise patience and grace for the spaces I haven’t figured it out yet. Waiting. Hoping. Trying again with new wisdom.
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Feeling stuck? I can help you get from where you are to where you want to be. Contact me for a free coaching session to see the possibilities at dana@danamitra.net

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boundaries/coaching/decision making/life coaching/purpose/values

Boundaries

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One of the hardest parts of “adulting” is placing boundaries when you need them. The more important the person, the harder the work.

They say in coaching that you get the clients that you need. I wonder if that’s true with all relationships. Our child needed–and still needs–parents with a much more rigid line than we like to take. We had to focus on absolute consistency. It provided safety and scaffolding. The scaffolding included a nonnegotiable bedtime. Clear expectations and visible consequences. Without these boundaries, our lives would fall into chaos, and we would suffer the consequences of a miserable child.

The same is true for the business world. I had a client recently tell me, “I think my staff is waiting for me to make some rules. They will be relieved when I do.” And even with that knowledge, it’s still hard to do.

I don’t like that part of relationships—parenting, friendships, business. I don’t want to be the “heavy.” I don’t like rigid rules myself. I find myself putting my energy toward wishing that I didn’t need to do this important work –why can’t the other person change so I don’t have to do the work?

The paradox is with boundaries is that the tough up-front work is what sets us free. They can give us back our energy long term instead of handing it away over and over because we didn’t do the work.

Holding the boundaries requires self-care. Enough energy to do what might be harder up front but takes care of issues down the line. Remembering the boundaries and keeping them firm.

What boundaries and tough conversations are you avoiding? How does that serve you? You know it’s a big one if you hit an emotional block –queasy stomach, resentment, discomfort. Huge signs that your boundaries needs some adjustment. Avoiding the tough conversations doesn’t make them go away, they just get buried in our selves and multiply. We carry our unfinished work into all of the other relationships in our lives.

Be curious about all of those clear signs from your body that there’s some tough work to do. And you might not want to go it alone.

decision making/purpose/values

Half Assery as a Form of Excellence

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I work with a lot of clients who strive to be the very best they can be. Often they are burnt out, spinning their wheels, and exhausted.

I encourage these stressed souls to embrace Half Assery as much as Bad Assery. Not everything in our lives can be an A+. We should intentionally settle for pass/fail when we can. Know where life must be an A+; where your passions lie and you want the A+. But also give yourself permission to just skate by on the parts of life that do not bring you joy and do not require your best effort.

Especially during the holiday season, where doing it all perfectly can seem to be the unspoken expectation in the head of so many. By resting during the “need to” parts, we can save our energy and bandwith for the “love to” parts.
Today, I took my sixteen-year-old daughter with me to Baptiste Yoga—a form of yoga that is very intense, with high expectations of pushing yourself as far as you can. But we are running a half marathon tomorrow.

So, I told her we were going to stay for the whole class but work on being mediocre. Her eyes grew big, her body tensed. “Nope,” I said. ”We have permission to fail gloriously today.”

I’ve never felt so light and free in a yoga class When the rest of the class sank deeper into chair pose, I rose up higher. When others took a downward dog, I snuggled into child’s pose. It felt joyful. My daughter laughed throughout the class. Why on earth have I taken yoga so seriously all the time? And the kicker was, by being totally playful and relaxed, we still did about 90% of the poses, but had way more fun doing so.

Pass/fail instead of A+ can feel delicious. Let it be a gift to yourself. Be intentional about it. The space and rest you create with your Half Assery will allow you to then joyfully choose when you are ready to shine your light to the absolute fullest. And that is the greatest gift of all.

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boundaries/decision making/gratitude/values

Beware of Red Tin Stars

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We romanticize our past. Often what we remember is a story we tell ourselves, bloated with nostalgia-what we wish had happened. These memories can hold us back from embracing today. We find ourselves longing for a moment that never actually happened. It keeps us stuck in previous ways of being instead of taking the brave steps toward an unknown future that is bigger than we could ever know.

My friend BJ shared with me the story of her red tin star-a Christmas tree ornament she longed to retrieve from her ex-husband. She remembered it as antique, with beautiful dappled light peeking out. It carried great sentimental value, and she longed to have it in her new home. When BJ received the star, it was nothing like she had remembered. It was cheap plastic. A shell of the memory she held in her head.

Since that moment, BJ uses the phrase Red Tin Stars when she finds herself thinking longingly of what once was. It helps her to realize that each memory has many versions–stories of nostalgia, stories of happiness, and stories of regret.

Rather than looking back to memories that might fail us, we can stay present in what we can build today. The Red Tin Star reminds us that what we remember as sweet and perfect has all the flaws of any moment. Better to find gratitude in this day and build toward a future that shines bright just as we hope it can.

Ready to make the most of today? Contact me for a free coaching session to see what it feels like to make time for the growth you have been desiring. dana@danamitralnet

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find yourself/gratitude/values

Granule-sized Gratitudes

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With the Thanksgiving holiday approaching, the idea of developing a gratitude practice is worth considering. The concept is to keep a log of 5 or so moments of gratitude from your day. This focus on the positive and affirming the good can help to rewire our brains to look for the joy in our lives and to expand it.

The first time I tried a gratitude practice, I failed gloriously. I told my coach, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every night I write down that I appreciate my kids, my husband, my job, our home. I just don’t get it. It’s not working for me.”

My coach replied, “First of all, I call bullshit that those are the things you really were grateful for today. What if you were actually grateful when the door shut and you had a moment’s solitude? Would you put that down if it were true?”

Oh. Right.

We need to be honest about our gratitude. What really did give us joy that day, without shame or doubt about it.

Gratitude also works best when they are very small grained. When we can pull our senses into the practice. The foam on our cup of cappuccino. The warmth of an embrace. The glorious red and yellow of the leaves of the trees. The warmth in our heart when a stranger said thank you.

You know you’ve hit the gratitude jackpot when your list still has resonance as you write them down the second time. You can feel the sip of coffee, feel the emotion in your body from the thank you. It’s like getting a second emotional hit of joy and appreciation from those moments all over again. And then those feelings can expand and grow as you practice noticing them.

That’s the joy of gratitude. Mindful appreciation of the abundance of life.

Looking for greater abundance in your life? Contact me for a free coaching session to see what it feels like to make time for the growth you have been desiring dana@danamitra.net