Are you valuable?

Weeks 11 & 12

Part of my midlife coaching methodology is helping women (and always myself) find better balance between reacting to all those external demands and expectations that can feel overwhelming in the mayhem of midlife, and responding to our internal needs, desires and energy.  One of the missing jigsaw pieces that helps us make that balance better is knowing your values, and your value.

Values are those intrinsic core drivers that everyone has, unique and individual to us all. Some can be inherited from your family and culture, but most are inherent to our temperament, experiences and core self. 

Some may be obvious and many are less visible, hidden parts of our programming that help make so much sense of what’s working and what’s not in our lives.  And it’s the more unconscious values that can be the most important because knowing what is intrinsically of value to you can help you understand why you might be feeling resentful or lost, or overwhelmed or scared. It can also guide you to making better decisions... not based on what you think you should do, but what will align best with you. 

Often when I have a client and we reveal her core values, so much makes sense when she realties how much friction or disconnect she might have been feeling. I had one client who was a freelance engineer. We discovered that one of her core values was security (others were achievement, belonging, and solutions). This explained a lot of the stress and overwhelm she had over her unpredictable monthly income. Knowing security was a core value meant she now understood the level of her near-constant anxiety. She didn’t give up being a freelancer because it brought her other benefits that also fitted with her other values and lifestyle, but she knew that to support this core value she needed to get clearer on basic information like how much she needed each month, what base level of work would cover that, and ways she could build some longer term security within a freelance framework. Some simple systems and a bit of book-keeping support and her anxiety reduced significantly, because she now understood where the friction was coming from.

One of my own core values is agency. (I like to think the Universe has been having a right laugh at me, given my years of sandwich year care of my mum after her stroke while parenting and then single parenting three kids….. situations which rarely scream “AGENCY!”)

But having a core value of agency doesn’t mean I’m only happy being free and sipping a Pina Colada on a beach in Bali. It means that even though my life is anchored by significant care roles and responsibilities, and I can’t just run away and skip through a field of sunflowers whenever I like, it does help me make choices that allow me to live with, not against, this core value. As Mark Manson explains in his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, you have to choose the set of problems you can live with most, because nothing in life is problem-free. Knowing agency is my core value, I choose the set of problems that come from working for myself (and there are definitely problems!), over the problems of working for someone who will have control over my time. As a single parent this makes more sense. If security had been a higher value (it’s not that it’s not important, it’s just not one of my driving core values) taking a reliable job would have made more sense. Both options as a single parent are fucking hard, but knowing one of my values is agency (others are creativity, achievement, growth), allows me to make the choice that will feel most aligned to me.

When one of my clients discovered that one of her core values was fairness, it made so much sense as to why she felt so resentful in her family life… while she was so busy trying to give everyone else what they wanted, she wasn’t actually being fair to herself. Your values can cross a broad spectrum from sense of belonging to recognition, discipline to creativity, fairness to adventure.

Knowing yourself is the golden key to living a life of purpose, passion and most of all, connection. Knowing your own value is also really important, especially at midlife when we can be washed away by the external conditioning that a woman’s value lies in her output to others.

As part of my year long Midlife, redefined Daily Journal Guide, I give you 14 daily prompts every two weeks to help you journal each day (or as many as you can muster) to get, and stay, connected to yourself. The prompts below for the next two weeks are about exploring your values and how they are affecting your life right now. They also cover how you feel about your own sense of value.

For those of you newly following me on Your Midlife Matters (thank you for being here!) I’ve already explained how this year-long adventure with yourself will work in Power is in Your Hand. You can start this journalling guide at any time of the year because it’s not date related: The daily prompts from Weeks 1 to 10 are here.

In this year long adventure with yourself, this opportunity to spend a few minutes every day (or as many days a week as you can) thinking about yourself will transform your relationship with yourself and to matter more in your own midlife and to build self-knowledge and empower yourself to live life for you.

A quick reminder we are now starting the second section - Passion, Purpose & Priorities for the next 8 weeks The first 8 weeks was Self-Discovery and the third part is Action and Living with Intention. Then we repeat these directions (with new prompts) for the second 6 months.

We started with self-discovery because you can make all the plans and checklists in the world, but if you aren’t coming from a place of current self-knowledge - who, how and where you are at this age and stage of life - you could be making the wrong plans, or signing up to someone else’s (culture, society, Instagram, the school gates, the patriarchy, your partner, your parent)’s version of success. 

So this section is all about reconnecting to all the parts of you that still are there that may not have had much attention. Or just needs to get a bit of a shine.  Or you have lived and loved and laughed and learned and have developed new areas of interest and discovered new talents 

For just €5 per month, this Midlife Daily Journal Guide (and lots of other content and discounts on coaching) is for my paid subscribers. For ALL my lovely subscribers there is my free Midlife Daily Journal Template in my previous post here which you can use as a guide each day - and what I use every day.

So let’s get into the prompts for Week 11 and 12 of your journaling journey.