Values: the real foundation of career choices

It turns out, values are a major player when it comes to making career choices that fit you.

Values can also be pretty tricky to define. They can shift over time, and we often don't know what we value until something forces us to see those values.

Some areas we hit on:

• Why values are so critical to career decisions
• Where will values show up in your work?
• How do you figure out your values?

Links mentioned in the episode:

• VIA Character Strengths: https://www.viacharacter.org/
• Mark Manson article: https://markmanson.net/life-purpose

Transcript

Devon: Welcome to The One About Careers with Devon

 Sarah-Jane: and Sarah-Jane,

Devon: the career podcast for adults involved with teens navigating life after high school. 

Sarah-Jane: We help you help your teens make informed education and career decisions by providing quality information and resources.

Devon: Join us for weekly bite sized conversations covering various aspects of careers, including insights from professionals in different fields.

Sarah-Jane: New episodes available every week at theoneaboutcareers.com.

Sarah-Jane: Today we're talking about, how do values impact career decision making? And I can tell you, in my own practice, they are huge. And I'm very curious about where they come into play with your practice, Devon.

 Devon: Well, they certainly come into play because I forced them very early on. Values is typically where I start. I actually got feedback from a client once that was like, "I never really thought about values, but once you said it, it was like that was the obvious thing to talk about first." That was really funny. So probably almost nobody knows about it because we were all thinking about other things in 2020, but there was a study released in Canada, I want to say it was around January, and it was looking at career regret. The survey had been done. I remember I responded to it and it was surveying career services professionals to find out what do our clients say about regret and how they feel about their careers and stuff. And it's interesting because the number one regret people had, more than 70% of people said it was, "I wish I had understood myself better and chosen a career that is aligned with my values." And I mean, to me, that tells such a big story. I definitely see a lot of people, they want to do something that aligns with their values. Whether they know what that means is a little different. 

Devon: But values are something that show up in so many different ways at work. It's not just about the work that you're doing. It's how they show up in your coworkers, in the organization you work for, in the projects that you're doing, whether or not the place you work actually lives their values, or they just put them on a sign on the wall and nobody talks about it or how that shakes out. And then what does it look like when you have your family? Do you feel embarrassed to tell people about where you work because of their values or there's so many different ways it can come out. So to me, values absolutely are the natural place to start the conversation. And people are usually like, oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that sounds great, let's do that. Which I think is good. I think it's a good thing that people are thinking in that way. Where do you see that values conversation? What does that sound like on your end?

 Sarah-Jane: It's actually usually a place they already start because they've already worked for a number of years, something's gone wrong or just hasn't worked out the way they thought. And all of a sudden they're like, yeah, I don't think it was aligned with my values. They can't  necessarily articulate what their values are, which is part of the fun, trying to figure that out and use words that are meaningful to them so that it makes sense. I think that determining what those are and then keeping them in mind are two sort of separate things and how they play into making choices. One of the things I'm a bit anxious or nervous about or concerned about is I'm seeing some research come up from young individuals that when they're looking at what they value in the workplace, satisfaction with their work is number one. I think I got that wrong, actually. I think it's life work balance. Although of course, they call it work life balance. *meowww* Yes, I have an issue with that.

Sarah-Jane: And the second one was money. And that's the thing that I got really anxious about  because I've seen the damage when we value money as number one. And I'm not saying not be mindful. I'm just saying understanding your values impacts and some of the choices we make. And as you said, sometimes in some cultures, frankly, the career decision is made for you. You have three choices you're a lawyer, you're a doctor, an engineer. Those are your options. In other ways, values might impact the kinds of organizations you look at. If you value the environment, that might actually impact the kinds of places you're interested in working. If you value spirituality, you might not want to sell pants all the time to people. I know that for us it seems obvious because we're in the career world, but when you're not in the career world, these things don't necessarily come up until they come up. 

Devon: Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. I find a lot of times when you're...for younger people talking about values, it's still very much in a vacuum. They might understand that piece of I want to be environmental lawyer because environment is very important to me and I'm going to save the planet by doing all these things. And they do have very altruistic and value-based motives, but where they do not have the capacity is looking at values in terms of how they play out in the workplace. Right, okay, so maybe what happens is the organization you work for, sure you're environmental lawyer, but they only represent big oil or you're on the side where you're always trying to find the loopholes in the law, or you can even get frustrated or beaten down from the system constantly failing. Or maybe...there's not a lot of thought that goes into what if it doesn't work the way you think it works? Which makes sense. I mean, you don't know what you don't know. It's exactly what you said. It doesn't come up until it does. And that's where I like to guide some of those conversations of like, okay, so you value autonomy. How would you handle a workplace where you have a micromanaging boss? You're definitely not getting autonomy, and that will seriously impede your ability to do the work the way you think it needs to be done. And so values can be this really big thing, and then they can come right down to this very granular level and that's where it's trying to get people to understand from a young age that this works on multiple levels. 

Sarah-Jane: Yeah. And that values can change throughout your life too. I think that's something that people aren't always aware of. I think careers and who we are bit like a tapestry. It has a lot of different colours, a lot of different depths. Some shine, some don't. And at different stages of our lives, some are bright and some are dark. I'm curious about are there any specific tools that you tend to use when you're talking about values? Do you have specific assessments or is it more of a conversation? 

Devon: It's a couple of different things. So definitely the conversation. There's two tools I like to use. One is...it's a simple...there's a ton of different versions of them online for free and it's a simple ranking. Or there's two different versions. So it might be, here's a list, rank them from one to ten or your most important to least important. Or there's other versions where it's like just pick ten things from this list that stand out to you as super important. Very common in coaching/counseling circles, for sure. 

The other thing I like to use is it's the VIA Character Strengths assessment, which is a free assessment. You just create an account on the website and they have two different versions. One is like the grown ups and one is the students. The only difference between them is if you're 15 years old, they're not going to ask you about stuff like your projects in the workplace and how you handled situations with your boss and stuff like that, because you probably don't have a lot of that experience. They'll ask you more about school related examples and that's really the difference between the two. Otherwise they're assessing the same stuff. But I like that one too, because it'll tell you what your top character strengths are. And those might be things like working in teams, it might be humor, it might be influencing people, things like that. And the whole basis of the assessment is positive psychology, which when we think about psychology, it's the idea something's wrong with you and we need to fix it, right? You have depression, we have to fix it. But with positive psychology, it's what's going right and how can you do more of that? And so when you look at the character strengths that you have, your top five, the idea is you want to be using as many of those as possible, as often as possible, so that you can thrive. That's your area of flow, that's your jam, that's where you want to be, and I love it for that. And then the conversation piece often comes out of those two tools to say, how do you think this plays out in the types of careers you're interested in? In the work you want to be doing, in the workplaces you want to be in?

Sarah-Jane: I use the same assessment. I'm laughing because with my clients, they don't necessarily realize. But then when I go through the results, it's like, no wonder you got into trouble at your last workplace. And when I mean trouble, what I mean is that emotionally something went wrong. And so, I'm not saying that an individual went wrong. I'm saying that something happened in the workplace. And often it's about the values. That values weren't honoured. And an individual might not actually have the emotional intelligence to figure out how to navigate their way through a narcissistic, toxic bully of a manager. And so to me, it's like I feel like sort of the choirs, the heavens open and the choirs sing because it's this revelation about this is just so obviously why it didn't work out. And it doesn't lay blame.

Devon: Right.

Sarah-Jane: It simply makes a picture.

Devon: Yeah.

Sarah-Jane: And then we talk about so exactly like you said, how does this come up in the workplace? And I also suggest we talk about questions that you might ask in an interview.

Devon: Yeah, 100%. 

Sarah-Jane: You can't say, "is your environment compassionate?" Because most people might say yes or some will say hell no, but you don't know if you're actually going to get an accurate answer. So there are other things that one can ask to try to suss out some of this information or use some other resources in terms of connecting with people or online sources to dig a little deeper about what is an organization actually like? Not because we're trying to find utopia in a workplace. I don't think that's reality. But figuring out what are the deal breakers for us and being able to ask the questions to get the information we need. To know is that a place that we can in fact thrive because our values are unrecognized, or is it a place that we need to just back away from? 

Devon: Yeah. And the way I often talk about it came from an article I read, gosh forever ago, that was written by Mark Manson. And it was before he published the book everybody knows him for, which is The Subtle Art of Not Giving an F. And he had written this article on, which we can link in the show notes, but it was an article on how to find your life's purpose. And one of the questions was, what's your favourite kind of shit sandwich, and does it come with an olive? And that's exactly it. And that's one of my values listed on my website, is every job comes with a shit sandwich. And so a lot of this values piece is figuring out what's negotiable for you and what is not. What is an absolute hell no, I'm not doing that. I'm not working for that kind of person. I'm not managing that crap. And what of it is you know what? It's not awesome, but I can handle it. And figuring out where that space is.

Sarah-Jane: Yeah, absolutely. Well, once again, been an enlightening conversation. Have a great week. See you next time on The One About Careers.


Devon: Thanks for listening to The One About Careers podcast.

Sarah-Jane: You can catch up with past episodes at theoneaboutcareers.com.

Devon: Join us next week for another bite-sized conversation.