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Stand up
In the long run you do not have a choice about whether or not to stand up for your values. Your only choice is how you go about it. Using emotional intelligence skills and insights can help equip you to achieve the best outcome you can in your particular work situation. Putting your head in the sand will simply delay the inevitable. Disappointment. Failure. However you decide to frame it.
Acting on your Values and the Risk of Not
In this piece we will explore the risk to you, as a professional worker, of disappointment in yourself and others if you fail to stay true to your own values and beliefs when you are at work.
This situation is to be avoided at all costs. Trust me I know. If you do not stay true to your values you will find yourself constantly buffeted by the interests of others. And if you are unfortunate - dumped. Just like a wave can dump a surfer forcing them under the turbulent water and to hold their breath before they can surface.
If you have an inkling, that this issue might apply to you, then you will find, in the following, a series of provocative questions to ask yourself about your working life. Gifting to yourself 10 minutes to seriously reflect on these questions just might help you avoid, what I repeatedly faced into, in my professional career.
Threshold Questions
The first step is to consider and answer the following 3 questions:
Are you working with your values as front of mind - or instead do you find yourself dumped occasionally by a wave of self-interest that threatens to drown you? In a sea of indifference?
Are you moving towards being the person, the professional worker you most want to be?
Is your working life congruent with your personal values and priorities?
If you can answer yes easily to these 3 questions then congratulations you are on the way to a successful and satisfying career. However before you become too self-congratulatory please answer the next questions.
Workability
Are you ever disappointed in yourself because you did not stand up for yourself, or your values at work?
Is your approach to your professional work going to serve you and your organisation in the long term as well as in the short term?
Will your current approach at work help you steer others in a direction that furthers your organisation's collective purpose?
And your profession's?
Are you taking a step toward being the leader you most want to be and living the life you most want to live?
The Value of Equine Experiential Education Programs
Our Equine Experiential Education programs can significantly assist you to draw on your unique strengths and attributes. And to make a difference to your acceptance and enjoyment of life. Particularly your working life. And to come to terms with the reality, rather than the illusion, of whether you are standing up for yourself and your values at work.
Horses require us to live in the present moment. This is their greatest gift to we humans. When we are beside them our focus must be on the present, not on our past or our future. Purely the present moment.
This experience, of simply being with a horse, can be a liberating experience for busy professionals. To step out of our daily working life and to make a conscious decision to be fully present in the moment with a 500 kilo animal - who is a prey animal not a predator. Horses have no intention to harm other creatures. Their innate focus is attentiveness to the danger of predators in their environment. Over thousands of years we humans have learnt to bond, join up with horses to achieve our human needs. In our modern world we have become far more sophisticated, in our requirements of horses, than asking them to plough a field. Because we humans realised how much we could benefit from their active presence in our lives.
We invite you to take time out of your busy schedule and gift yourself a day to check in and evaluate just how well you are currently tracking in your career towards activating your beliefs and values. And standing up for them. When it counts.
Dr Deborah Hann
4 March 2024.
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