Total Leadership Exercise – Page 46
Values that are important to me:
1. Honesty
Being honest with yourself is most important. Be able to self reflect and admit when things are good or bad helps gain the trust of others. Secondly, be an honest person. Understand what others expect of you and don’t let them down. Lastly, I feel it’s important to allow others a forum to be honest with you. Otherwise, you may get a subset of the information you need.
2. Integrity
Integrity, to me, means the ability to stick to doing what’s right no matter what other choices may present themselves. It’s walking your friend through the bad part of town because you said you would, even though all of your other friends are having a good time on the other side of town.
3. Follow through
Always do what you said you were going to do. This ties in directly with be honest and integrity, but it has to be said separately. All too often, we’re left wondering what people have been doing “all of this time” when we’ve expected they do something that they said they would. Follow through with your word.
4. Challenge
Challenge is important to be because without it, life becomes boring. I seek challenges in my life – both social, physical, emotional and mental. There’s a fine line where you can seek challenge so much as to create it, which is something to look out for.
5. Aesthetics
To me, aesthetics is anything that is pleasing to one or more of your senses. This is important as it helps with comfort and the phycological health of interacting with other things in your life. If a phone is aesthetically pleasing, you’ll feel less frustrated, and more likely to deal with the things that actually matter in your life.
6. Community
Participation in a community is extremely important. Communities give you an identity. Receiving and giving help within a community is great for your mental health. Also, communities make greater things happen than individuals.
7. Courage
This is a two parter, too. 1.) Stand up for your beliefs. Too often do I work with people who say one thing and do another out of fear of falling out of line or playing politics. If you stand up for your beliefs, others will set the correct expectations about you. 2.) Don’t be a pussy. This means when you want to talk to a girl, do it. What you want a raise, go ask for it. When you see the company leaking millions out of a sieve, go fix it. Courage is the single word summation of the oft-used phrase “Do what you think is right, apologize later”
8. Knowledge
Without holistic knowledge, decisions are based on experience alone. With knowledge, one can supplement experience and make more informed decisions, solve tougher problems and set better directions for everyone in their lives.
9. Creativity
“Think outside the box” or “there is no box” as a friend says it is thinking that helps people state or breakdown a problem differently. Even though I work with and meet a lot of very creative people, most have a hard time actually doing this. I feel that knowledge and creativity go hand in hand, but that creativity by itself is just as important. Creativity can affect change, which is what allows people to have jobs, eat new types of food, travel to new places, wear different clothes, drive different cars and everything else they do in their lives. Creativity is about to become very important when we start to focus on nutrient depletion of the world’s soil, water table loss and global warming.