Your Values Aren’t a Word

Five words off a list isn’t values work. It’s a personality quiz with better branding.

Freedom. Creativity. Integrity. Family. Growth. Everyone lands on roughly the same ones, because those are the ones that sound like a good person. And then the follow-up question never gets asked.

The word is decoration

Freedom from what? Freedom to do what, on which day, with whom? What would you give up for it?

Without those answers, the word is decoration. You can’t hold a real decision up against “freedom” and get an answer back. You can absolutely hold one up against “I need to not ask permission to leave the house at 2pm.”

The first one makes you feel like you know yourself. The second one makes the choice for you at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night.

Three questions

Here’s the whole method. Take one of your words and ask three questions.

“I value creativity.” What does creativity mean to you? Making things. What kind of things? Things nobody assigned me. Why does that matter? Because everything else I make all day belongs to someone else.

See what happened? The value was never creativity. It was ownership. And ownership can actually decide things. It can tell you whether the promotion is a yes, whether the Saturday commitment is a yes, and whether the thing quietly draining you is worth what it costs.

Most people stop before the first question. Not out of laziness, but because the third answer is usually the one that asks something of you.

Certainty isn’t the output. Criteria are.

This is why so many smart women stall on big decisions. They wait to feel sure, and when sure doesn’t show up, they start polling friends until someone’s opinion sounds convincing enough to borrow. Nine people later, you aren’t more certain. You’re just more accountable to everyone else’s vision of your life.

“Should I take it?” has no answer. “Does this give me more of what I need, or less?” has one, usually right away. But you can only ask it once you’ve done the defining.

Pick one of your words and finish the sentence: to me, this specifically means ___.

That’s most of what happens inside Hausmates: somebody else asking the third question, because on your own you’ll let yourself off the hook at the second.

Liz