How to Find Work You Love (and that will love you back)
Uncovering & Embodying Your Values
A little while ago we attended a workshop hosted by our friends at Amazing If, designed to help identify what our own unique mix of values are, explain why they are important, and how to use them to make better decisions, build stronger relationships and most importantly, to live a life which is full of passion and purpose.
Over the course of the workshop, we dug deep, explored some of the big choices we’d made in our lives to date, and examined our own sense of the people we believed ourselves to be. The outcome for me was landing on two core values, which (it turns out), are at the heart of all the big decisions I make in my life - FREEDOM and PROGRESSION.
By understanding this, I began to reflect on my career patterns and job choices, and in doing so I realised that what had seemed to be a path guided in the main by luck & circumstance, had in fact been hugely influenced by my own underlying values. From my very first job after university, where I was confronted with the choice of two roles, one in recruitment (which paid far more), or another in a graduate position with a media agency (where the starting salary was much less but it promised an exciting path for growth & development), I had in most cases gone with the option which provided the prospect of greatest freedom, or progression.
Those roles that I had loved the most, were in fact when there was an equal balance of both freedom and progression, where I had been given autonomy and space to grow and develop.
It all made sense, and also explained why I had now finally landed at my true calling of creating something of my own, Work Well Being.
If I had unearthed these values sooner in my career (and had had the courage to follow them), I think it may have influenced some of the choices I made. It would have provided me with greater clarity to make decisions based on those roles which were honouring my true self, not simply following others, or doing what I thought I ought to.
So, I encourage you to do the same, dig deep and challenge what it is that truly is important to you. Once you have that understanding, along with the conviction to trust in that, you’ll see that things begin to flow much more naturally.
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