For the last couple of weeks I’ve been part of a group of women, convened by coach Sara Smeaton, who are reflecting, connecting, and embracing our next chapter. One of the exercises we’ve worked on is to figure out our values.

If you read my coaching blog you know I bang on about values a lot. I’m a big believer in the utility of knowing your own values and using them to set goals and priorities, and to figure out how to spend time and money.

In fact, I think it was in the context of spending money that I first started doing values work. Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, the authors of the book Your Money or Your Life invite readers to use their values as a guide to decide how to spend (or not) your money. I read that book in 2014, which means I’ve been thinking about my values for seven years, so I’m pretty clear on what they are:

• Respect / Love
• Camaraderie / Community / Connection
• Adventure / Challenge
• Serenity
• Independence / Agency
• Curiosity / Learning

(This is the secret of values: that you can almost never capture them with just one word, but they definitely cluster.)

In the discussion group for Sara’s community, I mentioned that I’m ever so terribly busy lately. Sara invited me to consider all the stuff I’m doing in light of my values, which is something I’ve done before but not lately.

So I sat down with a big piece of paper (a BIG piece of paper) and wrote down everything I am doing lately, and mapped them all to my values.

For example, my coaching work serves the values of respect and connection, it’s a challenge, and there’s lots to learn. Running my own business allows me to be independent, learn, and it’s a challenge and an adventure. Looking after my house, although I hate it, serves my value of Love because making a home for my children is one way I show my love.

The result of my soul searching was, anti-climactically, that pretty much everything I do either honours several values or is something I’m obliged to do because I haven’t figured out how to get out of it yet. (Ahem, yard maintenance.)

But the big ah-hah was that it seemed I’m not doing anything in particular to honour my value of Serenity. My first impulse was to add something — I must do something serene! But the very thought of adding another task made me less serene. I don’t have time for that!

Upon further thought I realized that I already, by design, do lots of things to bring more serenity into my life. I always step away from my desk for lunch, I don’t work on weekends, I go for long solo walks, I take a ridiculous number of weeks off.

The thing is, they’ve become automatic. I’ll go for a walk and spend the time thinking about social media strategy. I’ll take a bath and try and get through a backlog of magazines and do a face mask at the same time.

It’s funny how you can set your life up to be the way you want it to be, and then forget to appreciate it. Habituation’s a bitch. I think about people I’ve met who live in places that the rest of us save up to vacation in — Florida, the Cayman Islands — and who are somehow as miserable and crabby as a Torontonian in February.

So what to do?

I’m trying to pay attention.

When I’m doing a serenity activity, I try to first notice that I’m doing it (because lots of these things have become habit), and then to take a moment of gratitude that my life allows for these moments.

And then I milk it. When I take lunch away from my desk, I eat outside if I can, or set myself a place at the dining table instead scarfing something down at the kitchen counter. I pay attention to my food. When I go for a walk, I lift my head up and look at the leaves and the birds.

Lately it seems like attention is the answer to a lot of problems. It’s definitely helping me bring Serenity back.

---

Further reading: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell