Your value is not found in your career (rebroadcast)

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Today is a rebroadcast of an early episode that focuses on understanding your true value. Your value is not found in your career, it’s not found in being a mom, it’s not found in your successes or accomplishments….it’s not found in anything you do, but instead in who you are. Separating your accomplished value from your human value is essential in a balanced life because it ends the script that is constantly nagging at you to do more and be more. In this episode I break down both your accomplished and human value and give you some tools to begin to separate the two.

Topics in this episode:

  • Accomplished value vs human value – what’s the difference?

  • Why ambitious women tend to focus too much on their accomplished value and how it causes imbalance

  • Why you need to see yourself through the lens of your human value and what will shift when you do

  • How working less hours is dependent on your human value

  • A helpful exercise to help your brain start to understand who you are at the core

Show Notes:

  • Ready to discover who you are and what you want outside of your job? Book a free breakthrough call and let’s begin the process of rebuilding clarity and confidence by first understanding your human value. Schedule your call here: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book

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Transcript

Hey, working moms, how are you doing today? We're going to be focusing in on a topic that I find foundational to balance. And that is your value.

Now I have discovered that there are really two different types of value. There is your accomplished value and then there's your human value.

Now this is really important to understand because if you believe that your accomplished value and your human value are one in the same, you're always going to work more hours than you want.

You're going to have a hard time shutting down your brain at night.

You're going to have a hard time saying 'no'.

You're going to care way too much about what other people think.

You're going to spend way too much time just trying to get things just right.

You'll choose to work at night and on the weekends, even when you don't want to.

In other words, all of these behaviors that are making you feel imbalanced are caused by your accomplished value and your human value being too closely tied together. 

So, it makes sense that if this is where the majority of our brains are, that we feel the only option to creating balance is often just to pull back - to pull back in our careers, to pull back in our ambitious goals, to pull back on all of our commitments and so forth.

But with a lot of the women I work with, I ask one very important question. I ask them 'what percentage of their imbalance is their job?' - anyone in this position in this company would work the amount that they're working; and what percentage is just them - their work habits, their fears, their mindsets.

And usually what I hear is about 25/75, 25 percent of it's their job and 75 percent of it is just them.

Take a moment and really ask yourself this question: How much of your imbalance is caused by your job and how much of it is caused by you? 

Now the problem is that if you don't fix that 75 percent that's you, you’re just going to take that into the next job and then the next one and then the next one, because it's not the job that is ultimately creating the imbalance.

That is why this is such a foundational principle to creating a balanced life.

You ready? Let's dive in.

First, I'm going to be doing a quick overview to both your accomplished value and your human value. And then we're going to talk about what it takes to separate them, and I'm going to give you an exercise at the end to try to help you do that.

Let's talk about value for a moment. That word, what does it even mean?

Value is essentially the worth that we have given something.

It's the amount of worth that we have given something based on some level of measurement that we have decided. Now, if you think about money or currency, we have pennies and quarters in dollar bills and hundred-dollar bills. And all of those have different levels of value based on how much worse we have given to it.

So, when we're talking about value here today, we're really talking about the same thing. We're talking about how much worth we are wanting to give towards something. 

Now your accomplished value - which is where I'm going to start - it's very simple. It's essentially the amount of worth that you have accumulated based on how much you've achieved in your life.

It's the value that you have put out into the world or the impact that you've had because of your effort and your skills and your knowledge.

Essentially, this is your value because you just simply get up every morning and you do something. 

So, another word we might use for this is just simply success or achievements. Those that have a lot of accomplished value, we tend to label as being much more successful or we call them high achievers.

They've made big impacts in the world through the things that they've done. Your accomplished value is very much centered on your doings, the amount of worth that your doings have - so the quantity or the quality of things that you've done.

My client, Erica, is constantly needing to put her accomplished value in check, because she is very driven by a to-do list. If she can just squeeze one more email in or one more chore, she's going to do it. She adds things to her list that she's already accomplished just so that she can feel that surge of energy that comes when you check it off.

I know she's not alone out there. I know many of you are probably not in your head because you do that too. The problem is that it never feels like enough to Erica.

She rarely feels accomplished, and even when she does, she can't allow herself to stay there very long because there always feels like there's more to do.

That's the trap of aligning too much of your value, your worth, your personal worth, to your accomplishments.

You never feel like enough. You always go, go, go and your brain is always focused on what you didn't do instead of what you did. So that's your accomplished value.

Let's talk about your human value now. Your human value is the worth that you have simply because you were born. Now my guess is when you look at your child, you see a beam that has an immense amount of value.

They bring life and joy and challenge and beauty and wonder, not because they've accomplished or done anything in their life, but simply because they were born.

That's their human value.

It's the essence of who we are because we exist.

Everyone has human value. There is nothing you can do to lose your human value. You are uniquely and wonderfully made and have something to offer this world simply because you're alive. 

You don't have to prove it to anyone because it existed before you even did anything.

I want you to really sit with that concept for a moment. Your human value and the belief that you can never lose it - that everyone on this Earth has something to offer, not just because they've done something or accomplish something, but just simply because they're there and their potential is there.

Now, my guess is you can already see how these two values kind of get a little mixed up. Because pretty early on in our life, we begin to be told that we have to start doing something to be valuable. And maybe we've even learned that there's kind of a right and a wrong way that we can do that.

So, we have to start doing something with our life. Who we are doesn't seem to just be enough anymore. We have to start taking correct action in order to be good, and feel good, and feel valuable and worthy.

This is ingrained in us as kids and then it's cultivated through our culture and ultimately our educational system. So, it makes sense that when we become adults, we learn that we have to keep doing - and doing things right - in order to feel valuable, to feel good, to feel like we have something to offer, to feel worthy.

That doing less or doing things wrong or failing all of that means that somehow, we're less valuable in this world. We imagine our worth almost like a sliding scale that moves up when we're successful, and when we do things well; and it moves down when we fall behind and we make mistakes, or we say 'no'. 

So, you can see that with this mentality, we as women have a really hard time saying no, pushing back, making mistakes.

We spin in indecision in order to make sure we get things right. We have a hard time asking for help. We don't put ourselves out there as much because we fear failure and what other people may think, because those would be all the things that would move us down the value scale.

I really want to paint a clear picture for you for how when your accomplished value and your human value are all one in the same, it has a snowball effect of behaviors and ways of operating that are not helping you create work life balance.

It is really hard for your brain - and on a side note here, you're going to notice that I really like to refer to our brains almost as if they're like a whole other entity because it kind of feels like that sometimes like our brain is operating outside of us and that we don't have any control over it.

So, it's really hard for your brain to get on board with you, for example, not logging back in and working after your kids go to sleep, when your brain thinks that you're going to be going down the sliding value scale. If it thinks that you're going to be less of a worker, that you won't be as good as your colleagues, that you won't have as much to offer, or you'll be seen as less valuable.

If your brain is making that connection subconsciously, it's going to be really hard to not log back in. 

Or as another example, it's going to be really hard to leave work every Thursday to go see your daughter play soccer. When your brain thinks that you're going to be seen as less committed or less valuable, or overall, you'll be seen as less of a worker because you leave work early every Thursday. 

Is it really true that you're less of a worker, that you're less committed, that you have less value to offer the company? Of course not. You seeing your kid's soccer game has nothing to do with your work or your value to your company.

But you're going to have to start separating those two things in order for you to actually go see the soccer game that you really want to see guilt-free.

Now a balanced life feels more like a curated life instead of a life of obligation.

You control your schedule and your commitments in a balanced life. And in order to do that, you can't think of yourself less when you decide to do less.

So, let's talk about that. Let's talk about how you begin to separate your human value from your accomplished value so that you can actually start to balance your life. Because what happens if you start to try to change those ambitious to-do list driven behaviors without actually shifting your value first, well, two things are going to happen really. 

One, the change isn't going to last that long because you aren't changing the core issue; or it going to feel so hard and so uncomfortable, like you're just forcing yourself, it's going to cause more drain and exhaustion. And eventually you'll give that up, too. 

We have to align your value first.

We have to get your brain on board with where your value truly lies and build a foundation of that first and then begin to change your imbalanced habits and behaviors after.  

So much of what we're going to talk about in the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom podcast is going to be diving into lots of methods and strategies for doing just this - for separating your human and accomplished value, so that you begin to make more confident and balanced choices for your life. 

But right now, I want to narrow in on just one thing, one thing you can do.

It's the starting point: you have to define your human value.

I literally want you to create an exhaustive list of who you are at the core.

With my clients, I walk them through this process. I walk them through things like defining their values and their identity and their purpose. We essentially just create an entirely new lens for how they see themselves.

The focus here should be on adjectives that describe yourself versus the accomplishments or the successes. So, your list is going to have words like determined and focused and team player and patient and listener and driven and ideator and good at problem-solving.

If you have trouble just getting this list started - sometimes just the inertia of starting is the hardest point. And once you get into it, you'll go, go, go.

But if you're still having problems with that, you might start with answering these two questions:

The first being what makes you good at your job?

And then the second is what makes you a good mom?

When you answer these, remember, it isn't about listing job duties or responsibilities that you have. You're thinking about the way that you go about doing your duties and responsibilities that's unique to you - that makes you good at it.

And as in the case, whenever we're beginning to shift thought processes or mindsets, ultimately remember it takes repetition and time. It isn't really a one and done kind of exercise.

This is a shift in the way you think about yourself. It would be more effective for you to spend five minutes a day thinking about this and journaling a little bit, than it would be 30 minutes one day in the week.

Because we really want to push your brain to start seeing yourself and your value and your worth and who you are in a different light.

And the more often that you can do that, the faster it's going to happen. It's about consistency more than it is quantity. All right, ambitious working moms, that's what I have for you today.

I get so excited about talking about human value with my clients.

And if this is something that resonates with you, and you know that so much of who you are and your identity is just wrapped up in your doings and in your career and in what you have accomplished and you want some help guiding you through a process of really realigning your value and seeing yourself through a whole new light so you can actually make lasting change, then I encourage you to book a free breakthrough call with me.

This is going to be a chance to really dive deep into the core of who you are and really begin the process of building that foundation today in this call. So, I'll link to that in the show notes on how you can book a free breakthrough call with me and begin that process of coaching together.

All right, working moms, let's get to it.

Hey, before you go, I want to take a moment and tell you about an opportunity to speak with me directly. If you've been listening to this podcast and still feel like you need help balancing a fulfilling career with motherhood, then I encourage you to schedule a free breakthrough call.

On this call, we will get crystal clear on exactly what it is you want out of your career and how you want to balance that with motherhood. And then we'll craft next steps for you to start moving toward a more calm and fulfilling working mom life.

Head over to www. RebeccaOlsonCoaching.com/book to apply for this free call.

Till next week - and working moms, let's get to it.

Rebecca Olson