What are you willing to drop?
This article addresses one of the core tenets of Rebellious Leadership for women. Over three months, my flagship program brings a group of women together to step into this paradigm so they can feel more freedom and regain agency over their own experience.
Rebellious Leader core tenet: A Rebellious Leader determines what is most valuable to her and unleashes her creativity to satisfy that.
All humans want to feel satisfied with and fulfilled by their lives. The ability to have that experience relies on your knowing what you value — the things that are most important and meaningful to you. When that’s present in your life, you come alive.
The problem is that identifying what you value isn’t as easy as it seems it should be. Part of what makes this process so hard is there’s an instinct to look outside of yourself to inform what’s important. You see the way others are building their lives or showing up at work and, because they seem happy or effective, you’re drawn to emulate what you see. And it’s confusing when you feel depleted and confused rather than satisfied from your effort.
The real way to know what’s important
Rather than turning outward to determine what’s important, I guide women to go back to a time in their own lives when they felt alive and satisfied with what was. We explore that experience to unearth why that experience was so meaningful to them personally. Through this process, their unique set of values emerges.
Through the lens of values, your approach to navigating life begins to make sense to you and you’re given an opportunity to deeply know and delight in yourself. Enthusiasm for centering those values in your life emerges, and you unlock your creativity to guide that process. Your values become less aspirational and more available to you because they’re rooted in your real experience.
A time I often revisit to surface my values is the first time I rock climbed to the top of the Flatiron mountains in Boulder, Colorado, just before my 30th birthday. I’d hiked those mountains hundreds of times in my 10 years living there. The experience of those hikes was almost meditative. Yet sitting atop the summit roped into climbing gear was euphoric for me. I’d been given an opportunity to have a similar experience through a completely different perspective. And therein lies a value of mine: perspective. Shifting your perspective even 10% reignites power and possibility.
The power of values
Once you understand what elements create aliveness within you, you have access to incorporate those elements into what you create for yourself or how you infuse meaning into what emerges in your life. You can make decisions with your values leading the way. For me, seeing something from a new perspective creates aliveness. Longtime readers of my newsletter will see how much of what I create in the world is designed to evoke a new perspective in people. That’s an example of me creating a life aligned with my values.
The consequence of values
The challenge with creating a value-led life is that, alongside clarity, values also create constraint. Every decision to bring a value forward in your leadership has an equal and opposite choice to let something go. For every value you decide is important, there is something else you have to be willing to let rest. Those choices can be hard for women. Decisions to turn your focus away from something can feel like you’re disappointing someone or relaxing responsibility you’ve been told is your responsibility to own.
Satisfying your values requires getting comfortable with disappointing others, dropping certain things from your focus, and being bad at things. A Rebellious Leader gets comfortable with that paradigm, because she’s driven to center creating a life she values with her leadership.
Call for reflection:
What is one thing you know is important to you? What in your life satisfies that for you?
Shine On,
Alicia
(Image by Denys Nevozhai via Unsplash)