Values In Conflict

I had such a great personal growth moment this week with the participants in Wandering and Wayfinding (my virtual course on using values, strengths and purpose to navigate life’s ups and downs). This group is really connecting over the hurt and struggle that come with transition and change, the releasing of long held resentments, and the terrifying activity of embracing the unknown. Their courage astounds me. They are also wicked smart. And as we talked about values this week, I suddenly realized that I had been missing a huge opportunity to explore the power of identifying core values and using a values-lens to understand inner-conflict.

If you’ll recall, I introduced this month’s question—What matters most to you?—in a post that described a process for reverse engineering your way to your values by thinking about times you have been thriving and looking for evidence of your values in action during those experiences. When I first found this exercise, it was a huge break through in my endless attempts to distill a set of core values that really captured what matters most to me. And with that set of core values finally in hand, I was able to look at decisions through a new lens: which option will give me the most opportunity to align with my values?

Last week, during my prep for Wandering and Wayfinding, I was reminded that values can help us sort out conflict as well. I started reflecting on some of the more emotionally painful conflicts in my life, looking for evidence of my values in conflict with each other, or my values in conflict with someone else’s values. But something was off—a couple of what I would consider to be some of the most painful conflicts in my life, some of the conflicts that have kept me up at night, clearly had one of my values present, but it wasn’t at odds with my other values. One of my brilliant WW participants suggested that perhaps my values list is incomplete, and that maybe we should mine our conflicts for our values instead of mining our moments of alignment.

*Cue the clouds parting and a chorus of angels singing.*

It seems so obvious to me now—if we can look for evidence of our values-in-action in our thriving experiences, we should also be able to look for evidence of our values-in-conflict in our strife-ing experiences.

It took me about 30 seconds to realize that my tidy little list of core values was obviously missing one of the most important values in my life—compassion. It was as if compassion is so central, so much a part of my values DNA, that I hadn’t even noticed it, like white noise that just blends into the background.

With a revised list in hand, I was able to better understand two areas of strife in my professional life, and better able to manage my emotional resources around that strife. Here they are, so that you can see how to reverse engineer values out of your strife-ing experiences too:

Strife-ing experience 1—Part of my work as a university administrator is to oversee our academic honesty policy, including meeting with students who have plagiarized or cheated, wherein I review the evidence with them, make a determination, and assign a consequence. I always try to do that work with a balanced approach that includes both compassion for the students who have made a mistake, as well as respect for the integrity of our degree and systems of knowledge creation and attribution. But occasionally I find myself in knots, as compassion and growth (core values of mine) bump up against each other. Sometimes it’s hard to be compassionate with someone who is trying to deceive you. Sometimes it’s hard to insist on a set of consequences that you know will disproportionately affect already vulnerable students. Sometimes I have this strong empathic urge to just make the consequences go away, despite the fact that I know growing pains are a part of authentic learning. Sometimes I find myself emotionally pulling away from a difficult conversation with a student and just leaning back on a “pain is how we learn” mentality. Being able to see the way that these two core values of mine (compassion and growth) are struggling to co-exist is really helpful to me on the nights I lay awake reviewing all the details of a particular case. I deeply believe in the importance of both things, and some inner turmoil is to be expected when it’s hard to have both.

Strife-ing experience 2—I do a lot of work for non-profit boards. I love sitting on boards, as it exposes me to the mission, values, and cultures of different organizations and industries. I love taking an anthropological view at board meetings—watching the group dynamics, how decisions get made, how conflict is handled, etc. I not only find it fascinating, but it also activates one of my strengths (Learner) and one of my core values (Growth). But I was recently on a board where every time I left a meeting I was upset, uneasy, my thoughts spinning in circles. While pretending to be an anthropologist will get you a certain amount of objectivity, I wasn’t just a fly on the wall at these meetings. I was asked to give a short committee report, I participated in debates, I voted and sometimes cast a dissenting vote. And while those are typically low stakes activities for me, in this setting, with this group, I got sweaty and agitated just thinking about using my voice. I just didn’t feel like I fit in, like I had any social capital, or like I was a valuable part of the group. I felt like the odd gal out, and that left me really unsettled. When I applied a values lens, here’s what I discovered—while the experience did align with my value of growth, it did not align with my values of authenticity or compassion. I did not share the group’s core assumptions, I did not agree with the metrics they used, and they were entirely uninterested in any kind of dialogue that did not affirm the status quo. They had an agenda (which they believed was politically neutral even though it wasn’t) and they had no interest in examining the pros and cons of that agenda. Their agenda supported their financial growth goals; end of story. I couldn’t be my authentic self in those meetings. I couldn’t be open-hearted; I couldn’t practice humility and compassion. I told myself that I could be the anthropologist and learn and grow through observation. But I’m a participatory learner and grower, and my participation in that group only left me feeling full of self-doubt. So when my first term expired, I did not accept the invitation to apply for a second term. I re-purposed that time in my calendar in service of a board that cultivates a space of constructive disagreement and radical inclusivity. In this space, I can both grow and be my authentic self, and when I leave those meetings in knots, it’s not because my values are challenged, it’s because I’ve been blind-sided once again by my own privilege, or because my ego is threatened. And those are exactly the kind of knots I want to be in.

Give it a try for your self and let me know what you discover. A 30-minute coaching consultation is free, and might be just the thing to help you put your values into action.