Never wanting to miss out on an opportunity to develop myself I attended a training day on career coaching with David Clutterbuck. I found it really thought provoking both for my work at the RSC and also for myself outside of my role.
Following on from my discussion the other week in LinkedIn regarding what makes you feel valued at work, I thought I might share an exercise (copyright David Clutterbuck) you can do to discover or perhaps rediscover your values. It's called the Values Triangle.
Why are they important might you ask? Well, if your values aren't being met, either in or out of work, you may find that you are feeling unbalanced in your work-life balance or feeling like there is something not quite right but that you can't put your finger on it. Let me tell you, this is not a quick thing, it took me about 6 hours. I did have breaks, go away and think or do something completely different in between but over two and a half days it came to about 6 hours in total. However, I found it very beneficial and it has already started to make a difference and challenged me to make some changes.
So, what do you need to do? Identify three deeply held values:
1. One relating to how you treat others
2. One relating to how you expect others to treat you
3. One relating to the nature and quality of the work you do
e.g. empathy, respect, innovative
Write them on the sides of a large triangle. Now consider what connecting value links each side to the other. For example:
empathy/respect = integrity
respect/innovative = professional
innovative/empathy = impact
This gives you a new triangle inside the first, repeat until the same words or phrases keep repeating. These will usually be your deepest core values. You may also want to think about people you admire, your past successes and failures and what you learnt/felt from these situations to give yourself a starting point. The words are up to you and will be different for everyone. You can use the same word more than once. (There are lists of personal values available on the internet through your search engine if you get stuck).
