A Lesson In Values
Earlier this month I was in Banff with the non-profit I work with part-time. We were running a mentorship intensive week for trans, 2 Spirit, nonbinary, and gender diverse film producers. (Pretty cool stuff, if you want to know more about it you can check out Spindle here.) One of my tasks for the week was to run a workshop for the participants that had something to do with leadership.
Now I wanna be clear, I pitched this workshop, it was my idea. I brought this on myself. Despite this, I wrestled with the content of the workshop for weeks. What do I have to say about leadership to a room full of film and tv producers? At one point I had a vague outline exploring Goleman leadership styles, at another point I was knee deep into a feminist deconstruction of those styles, which then led me on a merry chase for books I could read to feel like I was even remotely qualified to teach this stuff, including a side quest looking for a more complete description of ‘aesthetic leadership’, whatever that could possibly mean. If I’d given myself even an inch more, I am sure I’d have started researching master’s programs in an effort to feel capable of teaching about ‘leadership’.
But throughout this maze of a thought journey, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that teaching a room full of trans, 2 Spirit, and nonbinary humans the leadership theories that a bunch of old white cis men came up with half a century ago was somehow…misaligned to put it mildly.
When I arrived in Banff on Sunday afternoon I had landed on Values as the lens to approach leadership from, but I was determined to let the workshop be influenced by the conversations I had with participants in the first half of the week (embody a coaching mindset, and all that). What is the point of a workshop on self-discovery if it isn’t tailored to all the selves in the room? As the week progressed it became clear to me that talking about rejection and critique was going to be useful. In my mind that is easily connected to values. How do we ensure that feedback from the outside doesn’t shake our sense of self? A good starting place is to get good and clear on that sense of self. Things were taking shape.
Wednesday rolled up and I put on my group facilitation hat, wrote out the plan for my hour and a half, and collated my hand outs to keep things running smoothly. Naturally the actual workshop ended up having a bit of a ‘clown-turn’ energy to it. Two minutes into my introduction I dropped all my handouts, and shortly thereafter sprayed dry-erase-marker ink all over myself while trying to draw a diagram that looked uncomfortably like a boob. What can I say, I mean it when I describe my gender as eccentric professor, and there is nowhere that this shows up quite so clearly as in front of a classroom of people. Clown turn aside, I think something really special happened in the room that day.
When you sit a group of marginalized people down with a list of values and ask them to find what is important to them, they will get there pretty quickly.
They will notice things you missed when you made the list, they will approach the activity how they need to with or without your instructions. We may not talk about our values explicitly very often, but they are woven into what we do and think all of the time. By pulling them out and examining them we have the opportunity to make living according to those values intentional. And maybe, just maybe, that can give us a sliver of the agency we so desperately need in this chaotic mario kart race of a timeline we find ourselves in.
Listen, if you don’t consciously think about what it is you value, those values are still going to be guiding your life, you just won’t notice it. You won’t be able to identify when you made a choice because of this or that, you’ll just be making choices. But what if you could make decisions in a way that feels authentic, in a way that no matter what the outcome is, you can stand by your decision-making process? I am saying…
…what if you could start making your own decisions, instead of letting your decisions make you?
Sounds nice, but where do we start? Today’s application comes from Step 2 of the Transmutation Process. Start gathering some data. For the next week, whenever you make a choice try to notice what that choice says about the things you value. Observe your decision-making process, what does it prioritize? What does it bypass or overlook? Don’t worry if you miss some of the choices, we are making them all of the time so there will be plenty of opportunities.
What do you notice? What values do your decisions prioritize? What do those priorities say about you? Tell us about them! Comment here or on your preferred social media.
Curious and want to explore your values more deeply? Get on the list for Alchemy’s next Values Workshop here.