Step

4

Don’t know what you value in life (and if you do, lose sight of it)

In the first Superman movie, Lois Lane asks Superman what he stands for and, quick as a flash, he replies: “Truth, justice and the American way.” We might not agree with his values but boy was he clear about what he stood for and what mattered most to him (besides, of course, the right to wear your underpants on the outside). Do you know your values? Do you know what you stand for? Do you know what matters most to you in your working life and at home? I hope not. Values drive how we feel about the things we do, before, during and after we do them. So if you are unclear about your values, you can make terrible decisions about what you should and shouldn’t do in life and business.

Values should drive all your behaviour at work. Here are two from a great client of mine, Pets at Home: “Pets before Profit” and “It should be fun”.

Can you see how that shows anyone at Pets at Home how to behave? They act as a sort of compass to guide you. That’s why, for instance, colleagues at Pets at Home take their pets to work because it’s fun. It’s also why they look after the pets in their care so well.

You’d find the solution to most of your problems would be a return to your true values. Still, if you haven’t a clue what your values are in the first place, you can be optimistic that your problems will remain.

A way to think about your values is as those emotions, moods or states you most enjoy being in, most of the time. So it stands to reason, if you are to enjoy maximum job dissatisfaction and the worst possible home life, you’d better remain unclear about what’s most important to you and avoid any surroundings where your values will be satisfied.

“A way to think about your values is as those emotions, moods or states you most enjoy being in, most of the time.”

What’s more, most people have an endless set of rules of what needs to happen for them to feel a certain way. For instance, if I said to someone: “What would need to happen for you to feel happy?” they might reply: “When I’m earning £200,000 a year . . . when I can go through a week or longer with everyone being nice to me . . . when I buy something expensive like a car . . . when I win something unexpected like the lottery . . . when everybody returns my phone calls on time . . .”

Can you see how this person has set up the rules of life so they can rarely, if ever, win? Whereas contented, happy people have consciously set up the game with rules that make it as easy as possible for them to enjoy desirable emotions and rules that make it as difficult as possible for them to experience undesirable emotions. When I run a marathon, my only rule is “Smile every mile”. That means, even if I only manage just one mile, I still have a good time. A client of mine, David, had a heart attack at a very young age. If you ask him what it now takes for him to feel happy, he says just one thing – waking up above ground. Still, unless you’ve had a health scare, you can’t live by this one simple rule for happiness, can you?