Values as Compass
My life partner and I engaged a coach to attend to wealth redistribution related to reparations. We entered that first session with many questions. Many more have surfaced since then. Some of our first homework was to look at our values.
What did we do?
I Googled values and found this “Personal Values Card Sort”. It was created by W.R. Miller, one of the founders of Motivational Interviewing, along with his collegues J. C’de Baca, D.B. Matthews, and P.L. Wilbourne. These cards are meant to help people identify what their strong values are, for the purpose of living life most in accord with those values. Three or more blank cards can be custom-made to include a value in the deck not already there.
The cards each contain a different value and a brief description and cards that say “Very Important to Me,” “Somewhat Important to Me,” and “Not Important to Me.” I used those as headings on a continuum and formed about 5 columns by sorting the value cards under those headings. I, then, sequenced those columns according to more or less importance to me. Wallah! I had my values sorted. Done, right? Nope!
I was doing this with my life partner. I asked her if this card deck might be a helpful way for her to consider her values. Yes. So, after I took photos of the order of my values, we shuffled the cards and she sorted according to her values’ importance. Great!
Now we had two sets of values.
But how were we to look at them in relation to each other?
Thankfully, this values card set comes with creative commons permissions that allowed me to create a spreadsheet of them. In my case, I input the sequence number for my values priority in one column and for my partner’s in another column. Now, I could sort on either of those columns.
But finding where we are similar and where we differ greatly felt like another important data point to consider. So, I added a column that found the difference between the two and sorted it. That showed what I believe is far more important than she does, somewhat more important, and as important as well as what she believes is somewhat more important and far more important than I do. We talked about this a bit and came to understand one another better.
To look a little more closely at the values we hold similarly, I added the priority orders we each assigned and sorted on that column. The smallest numbers were those we both experience as most important and visa versa.
What did we learn?
We learned a lot. After 8 years to the day of our legal marriage, we saw the sources of some of our greatest appreciations about the other person and of our deepest disagreements.
For instance, while “Loving” was my highest ranked value, I thirst for “Justice”! Justice feels like the foundation of loving to me. Therefore, when justice is breached, I’m willing to disrupt relationship in an attempt to restore justice. That feels “Loving” to me. On the other hand, my partner places various aspects of relationship above all else, except her relationship to Spirit. As a result, she tends to be less likely than I am to disrupt and she’s more likely to offer generosity. I see socio-economic class as one of several factors in forming these values in each of us.
To guide our efforts in making personal reparations by redistributing wealth, we choose from among our top ranked values that seemed to apply to these areas. Lola was inclined to stop at 10. That would have left “Justice” off. We expanded the list to 12, with “Justice” among them. We listed them on the sheet with our coaching topic “To co-create and trial a joint anti-racism wealth redistribution plan that mitigates future harm and repairs past harm, done by resources available to us (time, talent, and treasure),” our guiding principles, and the phases we presently imagine advancing through with this joint project. We’ve added to that document artwork, projected budget, plans for wealth distribution, actions taken, measures of how we will track our intentions, and so on.
Together, it forms the beginning of a map to show us what we want to accomplish and how we’ll go about it. We’re on our way in a life-long journey toward justice in relationship. Thanks go out to the Personal Values Card Sort tool developers from the University of New Mexico.
And, if you’d like to simplify this process for your own use, you can take an on-line Personal Values Assessment and receive a report on your results sent to your email address from Barrett Values Centre.
