Core Values

My most recent employer spent a significant amount of 2010 and 2011 navel gazing and thinking about what their values were, as an organization, and how to align goals, action plans, and ultimately department missions and work flow with that in mind.

I spent a large chunk of time in those years helping business owners and prospective business owners write and develop business plans. And, the first section of any good business plan is the mission statement. Often, if I would find items later in the plan that weren't working it was either because someone hadn't seen the longer term of logistics they were plotting. But, even more often than that I ended up in discussions with those people about checking the business decisions and progress they were planning against that stated mission.

We ask businesses and organizations to make statements of their mission and values, so why do we not ask ourselves as concretely what we strive for at our core? Someone recently, without me asking, stated simply that for him, he can strive for nothing more important than having connected deeply with his creative side and shared that in whatever way he could. It was actually . . . astounding to me. It's rare that someone can distill what most matters to them down to one sentence.

It got my mind onto what the mission statements would be of the people I love most in the world? (If I could author some of them, my bet is I have a friend whose mission statement would read,  "To pave a way of changing things for the better by a culture of learning and positive, thoughtful change." Another friend would be, "To do good by doing everything thoughtfully and well." And a third would be, "To know I chose.")  And how would it change people at large if they had not only a good grasp of their core values, but were checking in and aligning their actions and decisions and lives with that well defined core?

Is it shocking that asking myself what it feels like to change is really about thinking about what is most important to me and shifting myself to match up with that? No. And at this point, I shouldn't be surprised that my same blog-assigning friend said, "one of your next postings should describe your core values and how they drive your day to day decisions. What does it feels like when you are aligned with your core values and what did it feel like when you weren't aligned?"

It felt like a bone break. It felt like . . . it hurt so much to make every decision that I had to turn my thoughts off so I wouldn't notice. I have some experience with this. When I was in grad school, I had an adviser, who to put it mildly, was a nightmare. After stealing, well, a lot of things from me, and promising me things that she didn't deliver on, it was clear I had to leave grad school. My idea of what research was and could be was pretty wounded at that point, but, also, she was the only person working on language in my program. It was clear we couldn't move too much further forward, but also that it would be hard for me to do what I wanted to do without her. I determined that I would leave, but not without a piece of paper showing what I had fought for - not without my master's. What followed was an agonizing 4 months where she and I were in an unspoken grudge match. And because I had expressed concern about not only how she was handling her students and lab, but how my program was handling her, at that point, I was in a grudge match with the program as well.

I had no funding, so that summer I had to work a camp job from 7am until 3:30 or 5 each day, in the blazing heat and humidity, and then come home and somehow write, read, and revise every night. I settled into a pattern of cold shower immediately after work, dinner of yogurt, cucumber sticks, and vodka, and 5-7  hours of work before falling asleep on the hard wood floor underneath the paltry and ineffective air conditioner some time around midnight or 1am.

I wasn't often drunk while writing, but I wasn't often sober either. It occurred to me in the second week of this routine (such as it was) that the fact that I was crossing things off my grocery list in order to buy the vodka wasn't good. (I was so poor that summer. Ooof ) I promised myself that once I defended and revised I would take a drinking sabbatical for up to 6 months (and importantly, lived up to that promise) but I didn't stop drinking that summer. I explained to a friend, who I also used to help keep me accountable for this unhealthy behavior, that I needed to drink otherwise the voice in my head screaming, "This hurts and it is AWFUL" would be so loud that I would have no choice but to set fire to my master's and walk away. And I had locked myself down to needing to get it done so that I could walk away with more than ashes and scorched earth.

That decision offended me so deeply because it was an acquiescence to dishonesty, to fraud, to abuse. To doing the opposite of good. Nothing I was doing was going to change things in any measurable positive way - I wasn't going to change the horrible truth of how she treated students, or how the program held faculty accountable. I wasn't going to change what she had stolen from me, tangibly or metaphorically. All I was doing was making sure I didn't leave empty handed . . . which wasn't going to change my prospects significantly in the future. It was what I needed for closure, but it wasn't going to give me, or anyone else, anything bigger than that. It helped a little when in my exit interview from the department the chair admitted that the department owed me an adviser and a chance to dissertate and had let me down, but nothing could give me back those four years or the debt (financial and otherwise) that accompanied them.

That's how doing something against my core values feels. It hurts so much that I have to anesthetize. What worries me is not that I did it with vodka in 2005, but that I now do it without any conscious choice or substance involved. I realized this in mid-2011 when I was taking a respite in NJ with smart, awesome friends, and all of a sudden found that I was using a larger working vocabulary, handling more complex analysis, and feeling AWAKE. Then, startled, I realized, I had been numbing out for the months before. Waking up, showering, and then resolutely unplugging my brain so that I could go through the motions without having to look too hard at what I was doing or feeling. I said to my friend then, who happened to be the very same one who was my checkpoint during the vodka-soaked-second-master's-thesis days, "I somehow learned how to dull the roar of the voices inside me without alcohol." We both had a really long, sad, quiet moment then.

In grad school, I had aimed my life at certain accomplishments and milestones. It didn't negate my deep seated commitment to honesty, to fairness, to doing what's right, but it did back-burner some of those things some of the time. Ultimately, enough had gone wrong that I chose to leave, though I'm sure some people would tell the story differently saying I had to leave. Both things were eventually true, but one was true first. With my last job, that story was reversed, and it would have been better for me if it hadn't been. I should have made the same decision I made when I was in grad school. But . . . one of the things that made it hard to see how unhappy I was was that for a long time, I was doing some good there. And then when I wasn't, I spent an almost equal amount of time convincing myself I was making a difference. I thought I was pushing through something hard for the right reasons. Or that's what I told myself. I failed to pay attention to the fact that if something hurts so much that you have to turn down your brain, it usually means something is horribly off kilter. Pain exists for a reason, and it's to let us know when something needs attention. And usually what needs attention is for our health and well being.

Happiness isn't a value, but it is the canary in the coal mine. Someone very smart said to me, "Your core being defines the happiness you bring to your life." So many times I've seen the evidence in other people's lives that they are creating their own pile of misery. I can't pretend I haven't sometimes done the same. Or, to be clear, at least four memorable times in my life, I have signed on that dotted line for big-ticket unhappinesses. And that unhappiness was always-always-always about my choices, my actions, or something being so misaligned that even if I was acting on one value, another was slipping off the side of the proverbial table.

My values are clear to me. I don't have any hazy moments on what they are. I do have some concerns about trusting myself to act on my own best interests. I'm as self-involved as anyone, but I sometimes forget that acting against my values, even a little bit, wounds me so deeply.  So I need to make sure I sleep on things in order to check everything out with my gut and make sure my values are my first and last check point.

My values are:


Being truly awake - I identified this one very early in my life. You can't get far sleepwalking. You can look like you're doing well, walking down the street, whatever, but if you're not awake you're missing what you feel, what you see, what you hear, the chance to make choices, music, poetry, strange and weird moments, the things that you can pull together later to make sense of where you are and how you got there. I want to be AWAKE.

Honesty - I believe in all honesty, all the time. That doesn't mean I say everything at once, but it does mean I try not to leave things out, if that makes sense. It does mean I think the best thing I can do in most situations is to be honest over being nice.

Redemption - I am so bad at forgiving and forgetting, and am worst at this with myself. But I believe in second chances. (And sometimes third chances too.)

Life long learning - I think part of me would die if I stopped being interested in things I don't know about and just started spinning my wheels on things I'm already knowledgeable about. I am most alive and alert when I'm actively learning

Fighting for the right things - it matters to me to stand up when things are wrong. It doesn't have to be loud, or dramatic, but it has to happen. It matters to me to have the courage of my convictions. Conviction alone isn't enough - the courage to act on it is what makes our convictions a mission statement with an action plan attached.

Responsibility - If I commit to something, it's important to me to take responsibility for getting it done, taking care of it, and stewarding in the right way. Goldfish, work, treating people right, making changes in my life. And if I say I'm going to do something and then can't deliver, I have to own up to it.

Leveling playing fields - I believe that life isn't always fair. I believe that I learned as much from injustices as I did from mercy and fairness. I also believe that when injustices are on a large scale, and brutalize people that don't have the ability to choose other circumstances, it limits the accomplishments, the success, the right-ness of everyone else. I believe in doing what I can, however small, to locate and defend rightness, and to try and change wrong-nesses. My tool for leveling fields tends to be education and honesty, rather than bulldozers. In the same way that I think injustice makes all of us a little worse, I think that giving back makes all of us a little better, including, and maybe especially for the person doing the giving.

Words - I believe humans were built to use language to communicate. My linguistics training tells me that is about some magnificent intersection between evolution and biology and need and accidental benefits. It also tells me all kinds of nerdy things about how language is actually not always a completely efficient or effective for communication. Words fail, processing fails, wet computers in our brains fail, pressures and time and attention let us down. But, the me deep inside tells me that the trying matters. I believe in words, in writing, in language, in talking, and in communication, however imperfect and ongoing.


Your core being defines the happiness you bring to your life. Yes. This is who I am if you strip everything down. I'm not quite ready to pull this into a cleanly stated mission statement, but if I stop, and take a breath, everything that feels right to me, everything that makes my heart happy, boils down to one of these things, or a combination of them.

This is what I believe.