The Self-Care Lie Part 3: Crafting Your Values

If you missed them, make sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.

Have you ever noticed how cold a barbell can be even in warm weather? Leaning on it, the knurling digs a little into your forearms while the steel contrasts the warmth of your skin. It always catches my attention. I’ve noticed that it feels even colder on days when I don’t feel like lifting. I had one of those days not long ago.

I raised the bar up to shoulder height in the squat rack at my friend Leann’s gym and put it on the J-hooks. The plan was to front squat — I’d planned three sets of five reps. I did not feel like doing a single rep. No one else was there; I could have easily bagged the workout, called it a day, and drove home. As I leaned against the bar, the cold of the steel made me think of mountains — frigid streams, frigid air, frigid snow. Thinking of mountains led me to think of my friend Rabetta and the sheep hunt she asked me to join her on this year. When she asked me, she said that I was the only friend she trusted to go with her. The weight of that statement fell on me, but not like a burden. It felt instead like an honor.

You are the only friend I trust enough…

I heard her say it again in my head as I stood there leaning against the squat bar. Then, I envisioned the mountains of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Dall sheep live high up in those mountains. It’s a long, hard walk to get into their country, and it’s just as hard to stay in that country with them. It takes a lot more than most people are willing to give, and I need even more than it takes.

Create excess.

I said it out loud to myself while leaning my head against the bar. It’s one of my core values. I wrote a statement to accompany it so that I know exactly what it means and how to live it out:

…train my mind and body to have huge reserves so people can count on me when the chips are down.

There is a lot that can, and does, go wrong in the mountains. The chips could fall at any time. And my friend trusts me.

I picked my head up off of the bar and walked to the weight tree to pull off two 45-pound plates. I slid one on each side of the bar and I started warming up.

My values overcame my inertia. I cared for myself in a way that allowed me to act as the person I know that I am — the truest form of self-care.

Values = Self-Care

It Begins with Self-Value

The term “value” has several definitions. A Google search produced these ones from the Oxford Language Dictionary:

Noun: The regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.

Verb: Consider (someone or something) to be important or beneficial; to have a high opinion of

These definitions don’t exactly give us what we need to understand personal values, but they are foundational for a person to define their own values. It’s not necessarily the definitions that are crucial to defining personal values. Instead, it’s how these definitions influence how a person thinks about themselves.

People must believe that they are something of value, something important, something useful, something beneficial to the world around them. It is foundational that a person values themselves before they define their personal values. Otherwise, why act in positive ways that define who you are and move your life forward?

I say this not to be soft or New Age-y, but because it’s true and many people — even people that seem driven and confident — struggle to appropriately value themselves. I’m not talking about valuing themselves enough to go get a good career or make money or whatever other proxy for self-value and validation we’re led to believe is a true valuation of worth. I’m talking about an internal sense of validation that grows from self-honesty. Externalize that thought for just a second. How do you treat someone that you truly value and appreciate? You’re honest with them. That honesty, of course, is best packaged in a way that the person can hear it. (Sometimes they don’t hear it anyway, but at least you’ve made the choice to kick someone the real deal.) No matter the package, willingness to tell the truth is the highest value to bestow upon a person. It says, you’re worthy, and I’m willing to expose myself to the risk that you’ll be unhappy with me because you’re worthy, and I know that unhappiness you feel with me is temporary because you understand my intentions.

Now, consider how you care for a person that you’re willing to consistently tell the truth. You take pretty damn good care of a person like that, don’t you? You show up for them in good circumstances and bad. And you’re there when they need you. You’re happy to be there for them, and you don’t judge them when they need a hand — you simply extend one of yours, acting selflessly on their behalf. Just as importantly, you celebrate their victories without envy.

See where I’m going with this? The things we’re so willing to do for others we must internalize and do for ourselves. We must be honest with ourselves. Sometimes that means putting a foot in our own ass, sometimes it means reminding yourself of the truth about the progress you’ve made. No matter the specific situation, self-honesty is the foundation of self-value. That leads to consistent, long-term self-care, which is mostly action aligned with living out your values.

Without an inherent sense of self-value, it is difficult to consistently behave in self-caring ways over the long-term. Alignment, then is the deepest and purest form of self-care. It begins with self-valuing honesty. That, then, gives us the necessary foundation to define what we’re about and what we’re living out in the world, from the core of us and in the specific aspects of our lives.

If you question whether or not you’re doing this well, start by pausing and asking yourself the truth about your behavior in a given situation. Maybe start with your effort during your most recent workout. Did you dial in and do it as well as you could have? Or did you let some influence stop you from doing it as well as you could have? That’s just an example of one question you could ask yourself. The point is to check in with yourself. You will know whether or not you’re telling yourself the truth. If you feel the urge to fib, pause and then tell yourself the truth.

Let’s say you have all of this handled. How, then, do you create for yourself a set of values that guide your actions? We’ll handle that now.

Crafting Your Values

Personal values have a slightly different definition, and the difference is pivotal. Here’s what Google populated:

Ideas or beliefs that a person strongly holds and that guide their actions and goals.

I’d add one word to this definition: drive. Let’s write it again.

Ideas or beliefs that a person strongly holds and that drive and guide their actions and goals.

Personal values are about action, about living, not just about nice thoughts and nice ideas about who we are and what the world might be. Values must be embodied and acted on, otherwise they are nice ideas, not values. That’s the pivotal difference between value (worth) and values (actions worth taking).

That brings us to the two most important verbs in the definition: drive and guide. Values drive our decision making and our actions. But they also guide us at times of uncertainty or when we’re about to act out of alignment with who we want to be. My squat story from the introduction is a great example. My Seek Adventure value is driving me to go to the NWT to hunt with my friend. My Create Excess value guided me to do the thing I needed to do even when I didn’t feel like doing it. We lean on our values in times of strength and clarity — they inform our actions to help us create the future we want. And we lean on them when we’re about to disregard the person we know we’re capable of being.

The question is, how do you craft your own set of values?

It’s not as complicated or convoluted as it may seem. But it does take effort and attention. Let’s get started.

Values are Emergent

It’s important to start this party with the right rhythm. People get off rhythm when crafting values because their expectations don’t sync up with reality. They expect that they can just sit down and write a list of meaningful words that drive and guide their actions. But that ain’t how it works, and it frustrates a lot of people. Then they end up thinking that defining values is a waste of time. But it’s only because they didn’t go about it using the correct process.

Values crafting works from the bottom up, not the top down. That means we craft our values by capturing them as we observe ourselves while we live. They emerge from our actions as we pay attention to see how our behavior teaches us what is most important to us. I’ll use Chris as an example.

Chris’s main value — at least when it comes to exercise — is the ability to say yes to whatever physical activity or challenge he wants. He didn’t come up with that by sitting down at his desk and just writing it down. It came to him as he took on physical challenges and realized the depth of meaning and enjoyment he got out of using his body however he’d like.

He’s since risen to my challenge of taking on the Georgia Death Race and achieved his blue belt in jiu jitsu. Next up for him is HYROX.

It’s his say yes value that drives him to seek out new challenges to take on, and that same value guides him when he feels like acting out of alignment with who he truly is. Chris is not a “I’m just going to do one thing” kind of guy. He likes exploring and he likes challenging himself, and his body, in new ways. If he were to commit only to doing one form of challenge or exercise, he would be out of alignment with the deepest part of who he is. The old boy wouldn’t be as happy as he is now and he wouldn’t get as much out of his training or his life.

But he created that value for himself by living and by being honest and by using his self-knowledge. He lived and he paid attention. And he was honest with himself about what is truly important.

Now that you understand that values are emergent, let’s give you some tools that will help them emerge for you.

The End and The Worst

The End

Years back, I wrote a little book for one of our coaching groups about defining core values. It’s called Discovering Your Core Values, and it lays out the processes I used to develop my own values. Your core values are a little different than your values with something specific like exercise. But the defining principles remain the same. So, I’m offering you a thought experiment that helps offer framing to capture values as they emerge.

I want you to imagine yourself at the end of your life. Close your eyes and see yourself as happy and contended; you’ve lived your life well. Really pause and take the time to put yourself in the situation, don’t just gloss over this. What do you see? Who is there? How are you rounding out your final days? As you envision this, you’ll start to glean insights about what’s valuable to you. But there’s one more step in envisioning yourself at the end. You must answer some more questions.

How did you live to create such a happy end? What relationships did you have? What did you do with your time? How did you manage the good and the difficult times? Beyond actions, what were the characteristics that you embodied that helped you live such a good life?

Don’t rush this. It might take you several sessions of thinking, visioning, and writing to get the clearest answers. Remember, we want a good frame for living so that our values emerge.

The Worst

This exercise isn’t quite as cozy. Now, I want you to envision yourself at your worst. I want you to envision a time that makes you want to grab former you by the neck and give them a good shaking. What happened? How did you respond? Why are you disappointed with what happened and how you responded?

Think deeply and clearly about the characteristics you embodied and the actions you took.

What do you wish you would have done differently? Be as specific as possible about the actions you wish you would have taken and the characteristics you wish you would have embodied.

This is like using the negative space of a photograph or painting to create meaning. Whatever makes you angry with yourself for acting like a dipshit in the past is an arrow pointing at what you currently value. It wouldn’t bother you if you didn’t care about it.

Now, as you go about your life, you’ll have these frames buried in your subconscious. They’ll work something like a dredge to pull your values to the surface. Then, you have to put them into words and definitions that matter to you. I have a technique to help you with that.

Write Your Rules

When I was a much younger man, I read Nate Green’s guide on lifestyle creation called The Hero Handbook. I recently re-read it after Chris mentioned it. It’s a great little book, broken into four sections: The Hero Heart, The Hero Mind, and The Hero Body, The Hero Diet. What I’m about to share with you comes from The Hero Heart section.

About halfway through that section, Mr. Green implores us to define our rules. Really, what he’s done is developed a cheeky way for us to make values statements. It’s difficult for folks to find and list values. But rules? They’re much easier to write. In fact, I took Mr. Green’s advice. My current set of values are written as rules.

He asks us to, “Think of your rules as your moral compass, your ‘code’, if you will.” The work we’ve done up to now, and the living you’re currently doing, brings some of these code items to the surface. But you want to be really fucking serious when you write these down. As Green says, “Everything else in the world can crumble or fall into utter fucking chaos, but your list shouldn’t budge or fall apart.”

I approached this by writing a rule/value and then defining what I need to do to live it out. Here are mine:

Pay my rent: Live an interesting and fulfilling life and share what I learn with others
Create excess: Train my mind and my body to have huge reserves so people can count on me when the chips are down
Be abundant and generous: If I can give it, I give it. My efforts create a bigger table for everyone.
Seek adventure: Say yes. Do new and incredible things to pay my rent.
Choose love not fear: In each moment, and with each decision, choose the openness of love and not the seclusion of fear.
Commit and kick ass: Go all in and fucking do the thing

You’ll notice that they are specific. They aren’t generic terms. They mean something to me and are defined to drive and guide my actions. Here’s another thing — I’m excited to live these out. It’s not just about pressure and guardrails. I’m pumped to be the guy that lives these out every day.

Notice, also, that I didn’t make a super long list. Six rules, that’s all I need to stay in alignment and live life as the man I know I am. It’ll help you to keep your list short, specific, defined, and actionable.

Review Your Rules

My rules are listed in a document called “My Rules” on my Remarkable tablet. That document is in a folder called “My Guide” that contains other documents that help me define and live my life as I want to. Most days of the week, I open up that folder and go to “My Rules” and read them over. I read the rules. I read the statements about how I’ll live them out in the world. Then, I go live with my rules top of mind.

You can’t write your rules, file them away, and then expect them to impact your life. You must make it a habit to review them.

Back to the Barbell

I needed a guide on that day that my arms rested on the cold barbell. My immediate feelings were doing their damndest to motivate me into acting out of alignment with who I am. Creating excess kept me on track. My rule gave me a reminder of how to care for myself in the deepest possible way, by staying in alignment with who I am and who I continually want to be so that I could continue to appropriately value myself. You can do the same.

Use the thought experiments in this article to create the best possible conditions for your values to emerge as you go about living. Then capture them and write them down. Values give us the framework from which we can make decisions about how to care for our current and future selves in the best ways possible. That is the truest form of self-care.

Sometimes the best decision is to squat when you know you ought to. And other times the best decision is to take it easy on yourself. We’ll talk about how to best make those decisions in part four.