Part III: Bringing your values into your daily life

This post is part of the Decoding Rohail series.

Part I: Quarantine Chronicles: How COVID-19 Helped me look inward
Part II: Unearthing Your True North
Part III: Bringing your values into your daily life

An article harder to write than expected

When I first created this website, my primary goal was to create series articles: Write mostly technical content that needed exploring over a series of posts. This desire sprung from the large number of posts I had read online, which would introduce a topic at an introductory level and leave it at that. Oftentimes, I wanted something that went a bit deeper and far too often, google searches would amount to nothing in the end. Every once in a while, however, I’ve come across authors who took a more series oriented approach. I’ve benefitted immensely from such series, for example, while making this website. Hugo, the engine i’m using to render this website from markdown content, didn’t ship with a very natural way to create series blog posts and I had to put something together for myself. Adding this functionality delayed my launch ( publishing my fist article) far longer than I care to admit (ahem, 6 months).

Why say this all anyway? Have we gone off topic when this article was about how to embed your prioritized values in your life? Well, yes and no. The short answer is, I wish there was this one golden tip, or even a few, that I could share with you, which would magically allow you to get clarity around your values and find ways to embed them in your day to day life. I certainly wish it was possible to be described within a thousand word article. I delayed & hesitated writing this article, hoping for an epiphany in the meantime, that I’d be able to share with you. This last point prevented me from writing more & eventually I broke through it with the article & here I revisited my motivations for even putting this blog together. I hope what I’ve come to learn is still worth sharing.

Values are only words you breathe life into

The first few years of COVID had been a time of real introspection for me. I’ve come that once you’ve decided on a few values to live by, embedding them in your daily life still has some pre-requisites. It’s a process, which will be personal to you & which would evolve much as you evolve as a person. Wait a minute though-if we’re evolving as a person, then are our values also something that need to be revisited? If our reference, the values & our process to embed them, are both changing, then how do we make any sense of it all? In my experience, you do not need to revisit your values every fully moon cycle. You can, if you want. However, if you earnestly went through the process of defining them the first time, I’d leave it at that. This is because values in themselves have no meaning. They are only words. It’s your actions, what they mean to you and how you decide to live them that brings those words to life.

At a given point in time, you shortlisted “values” from a list of 100. You made tradeoffs and assessed how you saw yourself. For example, loyalty, strength & patience. If you had to choose one of these, and I presume everyone would choose differently, can the choice of these words really change who we are? Does choosing strength mean loyalty becomes any less important? That I think patience is only for idiots? Of course not. What’s important here is to take note of the mental process which led you to choose one value over another. Making that choice is critical to reduce the noise and to have a sense of direction. The tool we’ve just achieved will help guide us when we’re in need of direction. When there’s a moment you’re faced with a tough decision and you’re able to water down that conundrum in terms of values that you feel are conflicting with each other.

Values are like post-it notes

Remember writing reminders on the palm of your hand for something you’re likely to forget? Maybe you didn’t need to do that like I used to as a kid, but the point is these values are little post-it notes for you to use for course correction. Anytime you hesitate & feel lost you can revisit the choice you made to be a certain version of yourself you had envisioned at a time of clarity. Another reason why it’s not so important to get too attached to the value itself is that your interpretation of the value will keep changing as you move through life. Strength may mean something completely different to a youth in the prime of their life and an elder with decades of wisdom behind them. Your attachment to the word keeps deepening as you keep revisiting it, letting the words sink deeper & deeper into the palms of your hand.

The importance of having space in your life

There is a crucial ingredient in making any of this work. You can choose your values, commit to them, but without having “space” in your life, you won’t get too far. I’m talking about mental space where you can look inside yourself; be willing to make some decisions about who you aspire to be. It is critical that you understand and appreciate that these are choices YOU are making about yourself and that these choices are more important than many other choices we make in our day to day life. These are choices where we cannot let anyone else’s opinions colour our own. This is your inner world. This will be the lens you use to view the world around you. Therefore, we must learn to create space in our life on an ongoing basis where we can come to get to know ourselves, be gracious for who are, compassionate for who we are still unable to be and understand that much like how the outside world can impact our inner being, our inner state can have a massive impact on our outside world.

Decision fatigue and the misconception with space

A possible misconception about “space”, as we use this term, is it’s magnitude. Do you need days of space? Hours? I often find myself falling for this trap, and it’s the prime way to let procrastination get in the way of your goals. I don’t know if this is an actual japanese rule, but it’s how I came across it: 5 minute rule. The gist of this rule is to plan spending no more than 5 minutes when you initially plan on getting a new habit. Have the discipline to stop when 5 minutes are over. Continue with this process for a fixed duration of time, until you’re ready to bump it up to say 10 minutes, and then later at some point, maybe fifteen minutes and so on. What this technique helps you avoid, is the mental laziness of avoiding something when you’re feeling decision fatigued. Don’t know what that is? It’s the feeling you have when you come back from a long day and you have to decide what you want to eat. To make matters worse, there’s no groceries in the fridge either. That is decision fatigue.

In summary, we tend to stay more consistent when we have a pre-determined, predictable time allotted for a new habit. Giving a 100 percent inconsistently, does not yield better results than taking out small amounts of space, consistently, to think about your values and how to embed them in your life.

Much remains to be said

There’s a few other mindset shifts, or perspectives that remain to be shared on living your values. However, to keep this post from being longer still, I will keep that for another article. This article will be picking up on the importance of surrender and how by changing the way I understood this word, had a profound impact on the way I saw living my values. We will explore what it means to live effortlessly and how living effortlessly, doesn’t necessarily translate into living complacently.