Let's Start the Year off Right with a Focus on Core Values
A New Workshop Coming Soon about Mapping Your Path to Meaningful Work
Hey Changemakers!
I want to start the new year by asking you a question:
How do you make decisions at your work and in your life?
What happens to your decision making skills when you have a tight deadline? or a limited budget? How do you make a decision when there’s a feeling (even fear) of risk?
These questions may seem basic, and yet they are foundational to everything we do as changemakers. Our lives and work are constantly filled with situations when we must quickly adapt to changes, often with huge responsibility involved. And in these moments, relying on a core set of values can make the difference between getting stuck and moving ourselves toward positive, meaningful change.
In fact, I would go so far as to argue that at the end of the day, being an effective changemaker is all about: being keenly aware of your core values, and sticking to them.
This isn’t just a core skill for us as individuals.
When our organizations have a clear sense of mission - a North Star, so to speak - we can work together more effectively to do the kind of meaningful, human-centered work we love.
Of course, this is all easier said than done, especially when there can be so many competing demands and pressures at any given moment, and so much pressure to act quickly. I have talked a lot over the past several months about how the culture of productivity affects our mental health. It’s also one of the biggest obstacles to wise and effective decision making.
This is why it’s absolutely vital for us to regularly explore and define the values that we as individuals and as orgs are doing. Having a set of principles and understanding the actions that we affiliate with them are the blueprint that we need moving forward.
Introducing a NEW workshop coming this February
I’m really excited to share that I am beginning this year with a new kind of online Intensive focused on this very theme.
In a three-part workshop series, we’ll be exploring, defining, and creating a plan for personal values and talking about we can adapt and expand what we learn for work with our teams.
We’ll also work on how to make our values action-oriented, how to face obstacles, and how to align our values within an organization.
I’m calling this workshop "The Value Blueprint: Mapping Your Path to Meaningful Work."
What I’m envisioning is more than your typical professional development workshop. Imagine an online community of peers that can help individually and collectively define and refine what your values look like right now. Imagine an experience that gets you pointed in the right direction and feeling grounded for the year ahead.
Through a 3-week series of online activities, workshops, and discussions, we’ll be digging into some of the core questions and challenges that can help us find our sense of self and purpose.
I have been working with my co-director Bryna to develop this as a space that will ideally be for both early career professionals as well as those in leadership positions. We’ve found that making connections across individuals at different places in their careers can create a profound space for deeper personal learning and community building. There is a lot that we can learn from each through this process.
For me, this Agents of Change community been about staying motivated to embody the change we want to see, AND developing action strategies that help us push through the challenges we’re facing.
This workshop is the foundation from which all other actions can be taken. This will help you clarify your own North Star, and develop your own values-based blueprint for the year ahead of us.
Dates and details coming soon
The 3-part "The Value Blueprint: Mapping Your Path to Meaningful Work" workshop will be happening in February (dates and details to be announced soon). I’ll be using Zoom as the main space for connecting, and will provide worksheets, emails, and resources throughout the process.
I want to hear from you
Are you interested in being a part of this workshop?
Tell me a bit more about yourself in the Comments below, including your schedule preferences for participating in something like this (days of the week, morning or afternoon, etc). I always enjoy hearing from you, and planning these workshops during times that work for most people.
If you haven’t been able to participate in any previous Agents of Change workshops or institutes yet, then this is your time to take that step. I’m really excited to launch this, share more details, and bring together an incredible group for this first-ever Values Blueprint workshop.
This sounds great! I would love to do this on a personal level, and to see how I could apply it in other areas of my life. I have been wanting to do an exercise defining my values so I can see them clearly and use them to measure the choices in my life and work. I work very part-time as an educator in a school garden and a progressive school in NJ, and have a long history of working in museum education, as well as forest preschool. If it worked out, best timing for me would be mid-morning to early afternoon. Thanks, Mike!