The Conflict Within

There are times in life where you the choice that needs to be made leaves you with a rather difficult battle in your head and your heart. It is at these times that knowing your values is of paramount importance.

Knowing your values and what you believe in is the first step, but the outworking of that is a different ball game. What happens when your line manager asks you to destroy some information which may be critical to the company? What happens when that information may be used against your company? As we have said before, your values limit the bounds of what you will do, but when you value loyalty as well as integrity, which one "wins" in this situation? That is where it becomes important to distinguish which values hold more weight for yourself, and a company should be doing the same.

One of my values is kindness, while I also hold honesty in high regard, so when it comes to challenging someone on something that I feel is not right, how is it possible to be both honest and kind? While it is possible, to do both in the same situation, if is where not, I would have to choose which is more important. For me, honesty is of greater importance than kindness - if I may offend you by telling you the truth, I would still be honest and speak the truth at the risk of loosing relationship.

The crux of the matter is that you need to know which of your values is most important to you, as well as which ones you are willing to negotiate on. A time will come when this WILL happen. The way we respond to situations will show what we value and often others will be able to tell us what is of most importance to us but the way we interact with them The thing is that we need to know beforehand what it is that we value and change the way we respond so that it is clearly seen by others.

Previously I suggested that you write down your values, I would now strongly encourage you to rank them in order to importance and then be intentional about how you respond is  situations so that others can see and know what we stand for.