Value Your Month to Value Your Life
A non-fiction work by leadership coach Rosa Say
Founder of the Managing with Aloha workplace movement
Synopsis: Value Your Month to Value Your Life presents a self-coaching process aimed at value alignment: We call it value-mapping in the Managing with Aloha sensibility for worthwhile work. Value mapping strengthens you. You can practice it immediately to improve the daily quality of your life, boosting your confidence by building better values-based habits. It’s a way that good begets good, beginning with the good which already resides within you in the form of your personal values. To illustrate, we’ll cover two workplace how-to’s: The Value of the Month program, and Value Steering for Projects, both which help foster healthy business cultures.
The coaching titles within my $4.99 ebook series have originated in one of two places: The Talking Story blogging community, or the interactive learning groups of my coaching circles in the business community. Both have been exciting laboratories for learning, questioning, collaborating, creating, and then producing writing that can more quickly respond to your needs as you add to your skills and grow.
I welcome your feedback on how we can improve future editions, for I’m able to update this ebook to incorporate edits and proven process improvements quite easily. Share your knowledge with others by letting me know of any suggestions you may have for me.
Write to Rosa here (web link)
Copyright 2011 Rosa Say
Smashwords Edition Version 3.0. Updated January12, 2011
Discover other titles by Rosa Say at Smashwords.com
License notes:
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only, and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy as your gift for them. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your exclusive use, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for your integrity in respecting the work of this author.
Table of Contents:
Prologue: Our Values Vocabulary
Introduction: The Managing with Aloha Story
Chapter 1 - At the Heart of the Matter: Our Values
Chapter 2 - Where did our values come from?
Chapter 3 - Value Immersion and Value Steering
Chapter 4 - The Logistics of Value Immersion
Chapter 5 - Your Projects with Value Steering
Chapter 6 - The Logistics of Value Steering
Chapter 7 - Take a Stand and Learn More
Addendum: 19 Values for Value Mapping
Knowledge is power.
~ said often, by those who experience the power of learning
Learning about your values is the most powerful knowledge of all.
~ Rosa Say
Prologue: Our Values Vocabulary
Values - Not to qualify something financially or otherwise (e.g. What’s the value of this particular thing?), but as the guiding philosophies you believe in. We’ll be talking about the values you already hold or can choose to adopt, which in turn will proactively drive your behavior. (A few examples: truth-baring honesty, deep-seated responsibility, an obsession with learning, or an unwavering desire for justice.)
Value Alignment - A strategy for aligning behavior with the values you hold both personally and professionally. You invoke this strategy so you actually do what you believe in with greater intention. As a result, Value Alignment is a self-actualized state of being where you consistently honor your values each day: You live your life in a way which assures personal integrity. It’s a genuine lifestyle, in that you’re living a life true to the person you actually are; you feel authentic, and you feel more confident.
Value Mapping - The process which achieves value alignment for you through deliberate planning and consistent work. As you tweak your process, you design a trusted system which helps you thrive in both your personal life and your professional accomplishments. This is something you can do on your own, however you’ll zoom ahead in your momentum when you adopt value mapping with your workplace team, and work on it together, given all the time you’re likely to spend on the job with them.
Value Immersion - Think of this as How-to #1
Value Steering - Think of this as How-to #2
I’ll be giving you a much clearer way to differentiate between Value Immersion and Value Steering as we continue. Referring to them collectively as the How-to’s for now will help you remember our values vocabulary as we get started.
Introduction: The Managing with Aloha Story
Managing with Aloha is a book I published in 2004 to share my workplace philosophies because I felt I’d achieved good success with them. I addressed my book to managers, because I feel that we (I’m a longtime manager too) have a profound responsibility for good in the workplace, and that management is a calling we answer; it’s much more than a lucrative promotion or title on an org chart. I believe managing and leading are verbs, and everyone can do them well, even if choosing them strictly for self-management and self-leadership. In a business, these two verbs require value aligned practice so workplaces will be healthy, and so that everyone associated with those workplaces will thrive in a healthy manner too.
Those sentences in the last paragraph sum up a few of my driving values, and my practice of them over the course of my working life had become the collection of workplace practices referred to as ‘managing with Aloha.’ Aloha is the Hawaiian name for what may be most universal value of them all: Love. It’s the love and respect of self, and of others.
There is a definite ‘Language of Intention’ within Managing with Aloha. The book covers 19 different values using Hawaiian names and English translations. Thus over the years it has lent itself well to a very basic workplace Value Mapping process: Adopting a value of the month to learn it and stand up for it. The program name states exactly that, as coaching in the present tense: Value Your Month to Value Your Life.
I’d be thrilled if you picked up a copy of Managing with Aloha and started reading it because there are more conversations we can have, but you don’t have to. My goal in writing this ebook was to have it be self-contained, and I believe I succeeded. No further resource or research is needed.
Honestly? Value mapping to achieve value alignment in your life is a straightforward concept and easy to learn. What I’ve done for you is clean up our vocabulary and frame a success structure so we can zoom ahead in the process and make it optimally useful. What can be tough is the self-discipline required with going the distance, and that depends on you. Let’s dig in.
Chapter 1: At the Heart of the Matter
Values drive behavior. Ours and everyone else’s.
We do stuff because we believe in it, and we resist or refuse when we don’t believe in it. You can’t, and won’t pass Go if you don’t buy in. So you begin to disengage instead; there are more signs pointing to “No” for you than there are pointing to “Yes.” Often everything will simply slow down and eventually stop: When you get stalled by non-belief you’ve lost momentum, and you’ve no sense of urgency with getting it back. You’re not willing to play the game anymore because you’ve stopped caring about it.
In contrast, your personally held values put you on automatic pilot; they’re already strong, steady and sure. They make you sprint past Go because those particular beliefs have miles of proven experience behind them already, and you don’t need any pit stops to refuel. You’ve got more than momentum, for you’re in the groove of high-energy peak performance, like a perfectly maintained machine; a power player.
In a business, you can’t simply say, “I don’t want to play this game anymore.” Not out loud, and not silently by merit of your actions (or non-actions). Thus value mapping will serve as refueling for what you signed up to do. If you’re in charge, managing and leading well, you’re making that pit stop much more interesting for the rest of your team too. You’re also pulling in those people in your organization whom you need to better engage: Their Go has been on a different game board even though they’re supposed to be on your team!
Chapter 2: Where did our values come from, to start with?
From other people. Behavior is something we learn. The process of value mapping started when we were children, learning, (as happens with most things, not just values) by watching our parents, our siblings, neighbors, teachers, and a whole assortment of other people. Children are like thirsty sponges that way, and you were too! As you grew up, the web of your belief system was strung together by practices you bought into, and then found you had personal successes with, whether those wins were big or small.
Something clicked with you, and it worked for you, working really well. Experience corroborated belief morphed into personal value.
That’s how it all started, and it doesn’t end. Value mapping comes pretty naturally to us. We keep doing it as our modus operandi with making our way through this world. And now? The web of your belief system has become pretty complex within the adult you are. If I pressed you to describe it to me, you’d probably say something like, “It’s just me. Me, myself, and I.”
To adopt value mapping as a deliberate and consistent life strategy is simply doing it on purpose instead of by accident or happenstance. Instead of being passengers or bystanders to how our life happens, we grab control of the wheel and start driving. Instead of cruising the open road and ending up somewhere, we chart our course and map it out.
Adventurous road trips aside, it feels way better knowing that we’re in control of our own destiny, doesn’t it.
I’ll mostly talk about the workplace as we proceed, but value mapping can be adopted as a completely personal life strategy too; it certainly is one for me! I’ve applied the Value Your Month to Value Your Life program to my calendar for years now, rotating through those 19 values of Managing with Aloha, and testing the waters with other values I want to learn more about and possibly invest in. I do this constantly with work teams in my business coaching, and I’ve done it virtually and digitally within interactive learning environments and blog-based communities. To study values is to appreciate our universal humanity, and I love it.
If you try this on your own first, consider sending this ebook sample to a friend you feel shares your values, and will be a good coaching partner for you. Design a program you’ll do together for the next 6 months, and build the value mapping habit together.
Chapter 3: Value Immersion and Value Steering
Onto our How-to’s.
Quick Review: In a business, you can’t simply say, “I don’t want to play this game anymore.” Not out loud, and not silently, by merit of your actions (or non-actions). Thus value mapping will serve as refueling for what you signed up to do. If you’re in charge, managing and leading well, you’re making that refueling much more interesting.
Value immersion and value steering are your two choices in workplace value mapping. You can choose one or the other, or both.
Value Immersion — is about choosing the Value Your Month to Value Your Life program for your workplace team
Value Steering — is about using values to shape and guide specific Projects
Value Immersion:
The most effective Value Your Month to Value Your Life programs I’ve seen succeed, do their magic in the workplace because they’ve gone for value immersion with an all or nothing attitude and enthusiasm. When you’re immersed in something, you haven’t just dipped a toe in to test the waters. You’ve jumped in, you’re completely wet head to toe, and you’re swimming in it to stay afloat. However you splash around to explore and have fun too!
For example, if responsibility is the value chosen for the month, you’ll look at everything happening during that month through the lens of responsibility-colored glasses, with the intention of tweaking processes for more value alignment. And I mean everything. People put their hand up to work on sorting out whatever comes up as an uncovered “responsibility target.” Bosses give the green light to stretch inter-departmentally, encouraging those beyond-normal conversations, and knowing a welcome mat will be in place because the value has been adopted everywhere, even if temporarily. A value of the month program creates a kind of DMZ — a demilitarized zone where it’s safe to tread. Perhaps you’ll win a battle you thought was long lost and forgotten, but you know what else happens? People play, experiment and explore again.
“Everything happening” means everything and anything: Businesses don’t stop or go on hiatus during these months! And if they did, there wouldn’t be much ‘real stuff’ to work with in the program. You’re going with the flow as events and activities naturally happen because of past habit or current developments, and what you’re “tweaking” is largely your responses to all those things inclusively.