[00:00:00] Karen: Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals. 

[00:00:09] Paul: I'm Paul Tevis. 

[00:00:10] Karen: And I'm Karen Gimnig. 

[00:00:12] Paul: Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, is this what I value? 

[00:00:19] Karen: So this is really picking up on a piece that we started last week, where we were talking about what our impact may be.

[00:00:27] Karen: So when we behave a certain way, it has a certain impact. And we may be super surprised that that's the impact we have. And also disappointed or unhappy that we're having that impact. And so we talked about it last week in the sort of like, in the moment as we live it kind of space, how this shows up. And we want to look this week at kind of the bigger picture of that.

[00:00:48] Karen: So looking at what are our values? And how do those compare with our sort of long term patterns of behavior? And so the premise here is that we have things we value, we have things we say we value and I'm just going to kind of assume that what we say we value we actually do. For the purposes of this episode that may not always be true, but we're gonna start there.

[00:01:10] Karen: And then we have behaviors. And the thing is that we learned to behave not by, you know, in our early infancy, doing a values exercise of figuring out what's going to be important in my life, right? And building my behaviors on that, that is not where our behavior came from.

[00:01:26] Karen: Our behavior came from what we saw around us, what we tried out that worked, what the social norms are, what felt good in the moment, sometimes from fairly immature spaces, because we were very young when our behavior patterns began to be established, all that kind of stuff. So there's lots of things that result in us habitually behaving the ways that we do.

[00:01:47] Karen: And most of them are not because we thought, Oh, we value this thing. So we're gonna do the thing that will support what we value. So we want to talk about today is how often we consciously hold values and we unconsciously behave in ways that don't support them.

[00:02:05] Karen: And what can we do about that? 

[00:02:07] Paul: I think that is, at the core of one of the things we talked about last episode, which is why it can be hard to hear that we had an impact that we did not intend. Because oftentimes, that means that we behaved in a way that created this outcome that's at odds with the way we see ourselves, like the things that we value, there can be a real sort of threat to our identity.

[00:02:29] Paul: Cognitive dissonance can pop up. We can push it away. We can go, no, I didn't really do that. Or we can blame all sorts of things and external circumstances, and I think it's because we're confronted with that disconnect between our habitual, patterned, often unconscious behavior and the conscious values that we aspire to.

[00:02:51] Paul: I do think that's a thing about values is they are often aspirational, right? These are ways that we want to think of ourselves as a person who works for fairness. We want to think of ourselves as someone who really embodies these values.

[00:03:05] Paul: And it can be really jarring because people will rarely say. Well, you know, you did this thing that's out of alignment with your values. Instead, they say, you did this thing or this thing happened, and we interpret that as, Oh, this means that I'm out of alignment with justice or collaboration or whatever are these things that I kind of value.

[00:03:26] Paul: And that's a hard thing to sit with. I think we talked a lot sort of in the last episode about like, how do we get to the point of being able to hear that and not need to respond to it, right? To get to that point of understanding. In some ways, the kind of next step is what do we do about that?

[00:03:41] Paul: And what I think we're pointing at here, and that I find really useful is having a relatively explored and sort of understood set of things that I value is a useful tool for me to step back in moments where and in really in sections of my life where I'm noticing some disconnect, where I'm either feeling it weirdly, right?

[00:04:07] Paul: I feel like I'm stuck in some way. I'm frustrated. There's a thing that's happening, or I'm getting this feedback that's telling me that I'm not having the impact that I want. Values can be a really useful way to help us make sense of that disconnect and sort of figure out what to do from that place.

[00:04:23] Karen: Yeah, one of the things I think about this is that I think we don't do that introspective thing that you're talking about and we'll talk more about partly because we in society, what I think of as a very normal thing is framed very negatively, right? If you don't walk your walk, you don't have integrity.

[00:04:44] Karen: If you're not living your values, like, there's a ton of judgment about that. Like, you're a terrible person if you don't do what you say you want to do, or if you don't live your values. And I want to say, I don't think there's a human being on the planet. That has their behavior aligned with their values.

[00:04:59] Karen: I think this is why I have a job doing what I do. This does not make you a bad person. It doesn't mean that you don't walk your talk. It doesn't mean that you're a hypocrite. What it means is that you are a normal person. Who arrived at your behavior in infancy, mostly, and arrived at your values through a long adult process of thinking about what matters in the world, right?

[00:05:20] Karen: There's just a disconnect between how they arrive. So of course there's a disconnect and how we exhibit them. 

[00:05:27] Paul: And one of the things that happens there is that both often our behavior and our values are formed in response to things that we experience and are exposed to. The thing is that our behaviors tend to conform to the things that we saw people do and what worked and things like that. And we unconsciously pattern ourselves off of those sorts of things, but our values are often formed in opposition to those things where we go, I never want to do that. Like, I had this bad experience, I want to be better than that.

[00:05:55] Paul: This shows up all the time with, you know, I work a lot with engineering managers and most people, when they become an engineering manager for the first time, a lot of their model is what is a good engineering manager is not like that bad manager I had, right? And so they go, I just want to do the opposite of that, except that all of the things they learned how to do, all the behavioral stuff that they saw, the only model they had was that.

[00:06:19] Paul: So our behavior is often modeled on things that we've experienced, but our values are very sometimes formed explicitly in opposition to those things. So it's not surprising that we're not skillful at aligning those things 100 percent of the time. 

[00:06:33] Karen: Yeah, so I really want to point to, like, this thing that we're talking about of looking at myself and going, wow, I'm doing a thing that just doesn't serve what I say is important to me, what I believe is important to me, what I value, what I care about, that is not equivalent to saying, wow, I'm a terrible person.

[00:06:49] Karen: That is just saying, I am human and look, I can take a minute and try to think through how would I make this decision differently or behave differently or do a thing differently. If I was really attuned to what I value, and I did some work a number of years ago that I think really reveals this. It wasn't since a nice example, I found myself in a position to be helping parents make decisions about what school their kid was going to go to, like, do I keep them in the school they're in or do I go to some other school, whatever.

[00:07:20] Karen: And I did an exercise with parents where I gave them a board of a bunch of cards of different things that could be outcomes from an institutional school experience, whether that's private school, public school, different kinds of schools, the range of things that might happen and said, put them in like most important, less important.

[00:07:40] Karen: I really don't want school to do that. Right. So like for religious values, for example, might've been in the, it could happen in a school setting. And I don't want that to be where my kid gets it, or I don't want them to get it at all or whatever. So I had them do that. And one of the things on the list was academic success.

[00:07:56] Karen: And the thing is, it's only one of a whole lot of things that can come out of education. And we'd probably have a whole conversation about that. But the point is that most parents instinctively put academic success first, because that's what school is for, right? That's what school has always been about.

[00:08:11] Karen: That's what society says school is. And if you're not academically successful, the straight A student is going to be wildly successful in the world, right? No, but, but that's where the starting, like, we're just in that habit. And what would happen then is as parents sort of talked through their various values, they tended to rearrange things and say, Oh, when I look at it, actually social skills, which also is a thing learned in an educational setting.

[00:08:37] Karen: That might be more important. Collaboration skills might be more important. Communication skills might be more important. Like a lot of the sort of EQ stuff also potentially is learned in an academic setting. And also those things are more aligned with actual success of human beings later in life than academic success.

[00:08:53] Karen: So, they started with this like assumption because it's just so normal in society. And then when they stopped to really think about it, and I had the benefit of I usually had 2 parents, so they got to kind of talk to each other and like, deepen the thinking and what do I really care about? And I will say parents who had themselves been strong academically had a bigger shift usually to get.

[00:09:16] Karen: So maybe that's not the priority for my kid, but it was just an exercise that really centered the like, let's stop and really look at what do I value and because it was so outside the story of society and the story that we grew up with. It took better part of an hour usually to like talk through and make that shift happen and then people would have these epiphanies of, oh, I'm looking for a totally different thing.

[00:09:40] Karen: And maybe, you know, lording over my kid until he does his very best job on his homework isn't actually the thing that's going to support what I value in terms of what I want for my child. So I think that kind of thing comes up a lot. Except the part about where we actually stop and think about our values, not so much. 

[00:09:58] Paul: And what that points to, I mean, that is often the way that, for example, when I'm working with coaching clients and we're talking about values, it's the getting an understanding of what we really value, right? What's actually important to us in these situations to use as a compass for sort of making decisions and deciding what to do, revealing new options that we hadn't considered before.

[00:10:20] Paul: Like for me, that's how I find them practical and useful and like how you can actually hear, like, I value practicality and pragmatism and things like that, right? There's a value statement, even in this of like, look, if we're going to go to the trouble of articulating these things and having the hard conversation, let's put them to use, like, let's not waste that time.

[00:10:39] Paul: Again, you can hear the value laden language and what it is that I'm saying, but that is often the case of where I find things useful is to be able to go again when I'm in that place where I'm stuck, where I'm going, what's really going on here, where I'm catching, I'm caught up in inertia or deeply patterned behaviors.

[00:10:56] Paul: I'm in a situation that just doesn't feel great having that understanding of that's what's important to me at a slightly more abstract level allows me to step back and go, Oh, that's why this feels this way. Because I'm noticing that while I value connection, I've structured my work in such a way that I never interact with other people like, there's a sense making peace to it.

[00:11:19] Paul: And then I get to decide, okay, given that, but given that I also value autonomy, right? The ability to make choices right now, we start to feel attention. And I go, Oh, okay, this isn't an easy problem to solve, but by sort of sitting in that and being able to name these things and go, I can now start to explore other options.

[00:11:39] Paul: Well, what are things that would move me? I've really landed hard in this place of autonomy and not a lot of connection. There's a great line about how there's a lot of productivity systems that give you the freedom to never see your friends. Because they optimize for you making all the choices that you want to make, and it doesn't line up with anybody else's schedule.

[00:11:57] Paul: And it's like, for some people, that's fine, right? But it's not as important to you. But if I'm noticing that, I'm going, what's a thing that gives me more connection that maybe I'm willing to give up a little bit of autonomy for, or I'm willing to trade this thing off against that. Like, it starts to expand our sense of what's possible.

[00:12:16] Paul: Going back to your education example, it's like, okay, so if we realize that maybe academic success isn't the be all and end all of this. Or I want a degree of success, but I'm not willing to sacrifice social connection and development of EQ and things like that. Then I start to go, what are other options that balance those things intention in a more useful way than either the situation I'm in, or it feels like the only options I'm considering are.

[00:12:45] Karen: Yeah, I think that really where we're wanting to get with this is, yeah, now and again, you may go on a personal soul searching retreat and do this whole big values conversation and then that's great like that can be a good process. But in day to day life, we're not going to stop and have that whole huge conversation very often.

[00:13:05] Karen: But the times that it's a good idea to just sort of take a step back, mostly it is the emotional state that's going to tell you that. So if you're feeling frustrated, if you're feeling dissatisfied, if you're feeling like stuck, like I'm just doing the same thing and I don't have any passion about it, or if you like, I keep going to this board meeting and I dread it every time.

[00:13:26] Karen: Why am I on this board again? Why am I making myself do this thing that I keep dreading? Like, it is those feelings of dissonance, of dissatisfaction, of unhappiness that point out to us probably that there's something out of alignment between our values and our behavior. Conflict also, by the way, will do that.

[00:13:46] Karen: If we mostly hang around people who share our values and somebody that I'm hanging out with who generally shares my values is unhappy with me, it doesn't mean for sure I'm out of my values, but it's a good warning sign to say, let's go look like- 

[00:13:59] Paul: It's a great opportunity for growth, whether you wanted it or not.

[00:14:01] Karen: So I do think that this isn't something that we're proposing, you know, all day, every day before you take a step, stop and think about what do you value and how does it line up? Because you can't function that way. But when you're dissatisfied, I certainly have an instinct that says I'm unhappy. I'm going to go solve that problem.

[00:14:22] Karen: I'm going to throw data at it, or I'm going to throw work at it, or I'm going to, or I'm in this power struggle and I'm going to like wind up my forces behind me or whatever, because those feel safer. They're not going to hit that internal, like, oh, I might be doing the wrong thing. They're not doing all the vulnerability stuff.

[00:14:40] Karen: And when I get in those places, I have learned that on my better days, not every day, cause I'm not that good, but on my better days. I step back and ask myself, what is this about and what do I value and okay, what are the reasons I'm doing this thing? I'm not happy about or what are the reasons this other person's not happy with me or what are the reasons that I'm feeling anxious or antsy or frustrated?

[00:15:05] Karen: And is it because the thing that I'm trying to make happen, even if it's generally a good thing, is just not as important to me as other things that are interfering. So, you know, as you were saying, maybe going to the gym five times a week is great. It's a good idea. But oops, it means that I never see my mother.

[00:15:28] Karen: And where are my values, you know, is my fitness level that I'm serving my value or is, you know, maintaining a stronger connection with my mother my value? Might not even be the same every day, but it's where it is right now, but stopping to really have that internal or possibly external conversation, but figure it out.

[00:15:47] Karen: Makes a world of difference for actually living our values, which in the end means we get more of what we want. Right? 

[00:15:54] Paul: Yeah. So to track where we've been here today, we're talking about the fact that we often run into this conflict between the fact that our behavior is often deeply patterned and habitual and unconscious.

[00:16:07] Paul: And at the same time, we also hold these values that are very conscious and sort of deliberative about who the type of person we want to be is and what we want to see more of in the world, things like that, and that those, unsurprisingly, because we are human, come into conflict with each other.

[00:16:25] Paul: That we never, you know, there's never a case where we're acting 100 percent aligned between those two things. Occasionally, we notice that there is some misalignment that's coming up, and it can be in conflict, it can be in that feeling of discontent, it can be in the feeling of stuckness, of feeling like the thing that we're doing is somehow out of whack, right?

[00:16:45] Paul: There's something here, there's a stuckness, there's a frustration, and that can be a really useful clue to and cue to sort of just take a step back and go, okay, where might there be a disconnect and a conflict and a lack of alignment between what it is that I'm doing and what it is that I value?

[00:17:03] Paul: And, you know, if you've done some sort of exercise over time where you've articulated, like, these are the things that I value, you can kind of come back to that and look at what it is that I'm doing, right? But we're not saying do this every day. We're saying, do this when it seems like you need a greater sense of options, a sense of understanding of what's going on to be able to get out of that place of stuckness.

[00:17:24] Paul: This can be a useful tool in your toolbox to be able to go back and go, okay, wait a minute. I'm doing this thing. Oh, but I value this thing. Or maybe this value is getting a little more priority in my life right now than I think it needs right now. And this other thing isn't as much. It can help us understand what's going on.

[00:17:41] Paul: And that if we can hold ourselves with grace and compassion and go, Oh, great. I'm not perfect. It turns out. So here's what I want to do. And often the question that I end up asking around values is, if I valued that thing, how would I be actually behaving? What would I be doing? And is that what I'm doing right now?

[00:18:00] Paul: And if not, that can help me to see the disconnect. And so then go, okay, given all of that. What do I want to do? Do I want to make a different choice or do I just want to understand in some cases, this is the best choice I can make right now for where I'm at. And that I have an understanding of why it feels odd and weird to me.

[00:18:18] Paul: And that often that can sort of help us keep going through. 

[00:18:22] Karen: I think that's going to do it for us today. Until next time I'm Karen Gimnig. 

[00:18:24] Paul: And I'm Paul Tevis. And this has been Employing Differences.