What do you value? Values aren't always easy to find. In today's episode, we talk about using the lens of fear to understand our values better.
What do you value? Values aren't always easy to find. In today's episode, we talk about using the lens of fear to understand our values better.
Discover.bot – a digital space for bot developers and enthusiasts of all skill levels to learn from one another, share stories, and move the bot conversation forward. Want to learn more about building bots? Get started with their Guide to Bot Building Frameworks
If you have questions about today's episode, want to start a conversation about today's topic or just want to let us know if you found this episode valuable I encourage you to join the conversation or start your own on our community platform Spectrum.chat/specfm/developer-tea
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.
This is a daily challenge designed help you become more self-aware and be a better developer so you can have a positive impact on the people around you. Check it out and give it a try at https://www.teabreakchallenge.com/.
What do you value? The answer to this question is different for everyone who is listening to the show. Some people will have similar values. Many of us do. Some people will have totally different values, polar opposites it may seem. And determining your values is not necessarily as simple as it seems. If you try to answer this question based on your gut, you might say that you value family. What does this mean exactly? Do you value simply having a family? Or are you expressing something deeper, that you act on behalf of that family? Your values typically are the things that you're willing to, in one way or another, make a trade-off for. It doesn't necessarily have to be a difficult sacrifice. For example, many people value having great friendships. And to have those great friendships, they may sacrifice not having great friendships. It seems like the more enjoyable option to follow that value. But typically, the values that actually define us. The values that are unique from another person. That are not really universally shared or largely shared by a big number of people that you know. These values are often more difficult to discern. And not only are they more difficult to discern, but usually they require different decision-making than someone who wouldn't hold that value. In today's episode of Developer Tea, we're going to talk about a different type of value. A different angle that you can use to look at finding your values. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. Developer Tea exists to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. And the reality of values is that we all have survival instincts. We all have shared needs. Most humans have. Not only just survival needs, but also some higher level human needs. Like the need for acceptance. And arguably, all of these needs go back to some kind of evolutionary reason for that need to exist. For example, acceptance is likely good for your health. But it's also likely that at one point, acceptance meant that someone else would protect you. They would look over your shoulder. They would tell you when. They would tell you when a predator was sneaking up on you. So there are a lot of needs that we all share because they've kept us going as a race. But we're not all the same. We all have different reasons for doing the things that we do. And wherever these reasons come from, whether it's our upbringing or maybe something in our DNA, our surroundings, or maybe it's something that we don't totally understand yet. That we can't. That we can't put a label on necessarily. These are the things that define us. That define us and make us unique from each other. And we have to inspect our own values if we want to really work from them. If we want to make decisions based on those values. And this can be really helpful. If you make decisions based on your values, not only are you likely to make decisions that, uh, you don't regret, for example, but you're also making more intentional decisions rather than accidental decisions or impulsive decisions. As we've talked about plenty of times on the show before, we don't often agree with ourselves. In other words, we have a lot of warring and conflicting ideas in our heads about what we should do. In a given moment or in a long-term scenario. This is why we're so important to us. This is why we ask others for advice. It's also why we have to make resolutions to change our habits. There are things that we say that we want or that we kind of slow down and we can write out who we want to be or how we want to be. And then there's our actual actions. And we have to actually do that first part. Understanding who it is that we want to be. The kinds of things that we want to do with our lives. With the time that we have. And if we don't have those things figured out, then often we can make decisions blindly. We'll walk down the path of that decision just to realize that we didn't really want to make that decision in the first place. But finding your values isn't as simple as asking yourself, what do I like? Values and preferences are not the same thing. And in, in today's episode, I'm going to provide a different lens, maybe an inversion that can help you find your values in a little bit of a different way. Before we do that, I'm going to talk about today's sponsor, discover.bot. Discover.bot is an online community for bot creators. It's designed to serve as a platform agnostic digital space for bot developers and enthusiasts of all skill levels to learn from one another, share their stories, and, and move the conversation about bots forward together. Discover.bot is built by Amazon Registry Services Incorporated. So Amazon's very serious about bots. Hopefully you knew that by now. They regularly publish how to guides on the latest bot building resources. So for example, how to design a bot's personality or how to stop shopping cart abandonment with your bot. In the community, you'll also see more expert advice. Like for example, why are emojis breaking your bot? And how can you write an engaging chat bot dialogue? And if you're new to bots, this would be the category that I'm in. There's a beginner's guide to bots article. This guy will teach you how bots were invented, the basics of how they work and what they can do. Go and check it out. Head over to discover.bot slash developer T that's discover.bot slash developer T all one word. To get started in this community today. Thank you again to discover.bot for sponsoring today's episode of developer T. In today's episode of developer T we've been talking about finding your values. This is something that's very hard to do, and it's very hard to even nail down exactly what a value is. So you kind of have to have a working definition to really have a conversation about it. In today's episode, we said that values are kind of the things that make you unique. It's not just a, a preference and it's not something that is shared by, you know, most of humans. Like for example, having a value that is your family is probably not something that you can really strongly wrap your decisions around. You have to, to dig a little bit deeper and decide what specific values do you have for you and for perhaps another group of people like your family, your contribution to those groups of people. So, you know, it's, it's difficult to dig this up because they, they aren't just printed in our brains somewhere. A lot of what we have to do is observe the past, observe our own behaviors, our own feelings and emotions. And this can be really difficult to do. Reflecting on events that have occurred in the past is difficult to do because we don't have a perfect record of it. Our memory is so, our memory is spotty. Often we fill in details that weren't necessarily even there to begin with. And we have to do this. Our brain has to do this to make sense of the world, but we don't remember our feelings very well. And we also don't predict our feelings very well. So one piece of advice, if you're trying to uncover your values is to keep a journal, keep a very simple journal that you write down, especially, especially moments of strong feeling and do this regularly. The idea here is to capture the things that cause you to feel strong emotions, whether those emotions are positive or negative, something as simple as a, a daily check-in kind of journal where you write down, you know, on a scale of one to 10, or maybe you use a better scale, like one to five. How do you feel today? And then you provide some justification for those feelings. And this can be a valuable way to explore your values. And the problem that you're going to face is that it takes a little bit of time for you to uncover these values. So another signal that you can pay attention to, to kind of uncover your own value set is to look at the inverse of your values. What things do you anti-value? Now, what does that mean? Well, you can probably find your values by looking at your fears. In most situations, we are responding to some kind of fear, whether that fear is small or maybe it's overtaking everything that we can process in that moment. A lot of the time, the emotions that we have could be traced to some kind of fear. Even positive emotions could probably be linked to the absence of something, that we fear. And many times the more complex emotions that we have like impatience or anger, those can be traced back to some kind of fear as well. Let's take a very simple example. You're impatient with a coworker. Let's say you're on a team with someone and they're writing code very slowly and you're impatient with them. You wish that they would move faster. So let's try to uncover what fears, fears might be behind this impatience. Perhaps you are afraid that the other person is going to drag the whole team down. And even though you aren't necessarily at fault, you will have to carry their fault. Or maybe you're afraid that since the other person is slow, your manager or somebody is going to rely on you to pick up their slack. Or maybe you're afraid that, if this person is slower than me, but they're still getting promotions, then I'm going to be treated unfairly. And I don't want to expend more energy for the same level of appreciation. So that fear would be the fear of being in some kind of unfair situation to you. There's a lot of fears that you could attach to almost any example here. But if you can find those fears, then often the value is the inverse of that fear. If you fear either being in or creating an unfair situation, not everyone necessarily shares that fear. Some people are actually okay being in unfair situations or creating them. But if unfair situations in general make you very uncomfortable, you fear them, you avoid them, uh, you don't want to be in that situation. You want to, you know, create the opposite of that. Then perhaps one of your values is equanimity. Maybe the value is, uh, justice or, uh, maybe you want balance or transparency. There's a lot of values here that could be on the other side of that fear. If you have a very strong fear of not being liked by your colleagues, again, this is something that many people have, but many people don't. Uh, perhaps one of your values, is harmony with the people that you work with. If you have a fear of being seen as lazy, and maybe that's driving you to work very hard, then maybe your value is effort. Not that you are overworking. That's not necessarily your value, but you want others to see you as a dependable, hardworking person. So there's a whole host of these values that you can uncover, uh, by inspecting, by being aware of not just the things that you like and appreciate, but the things that you fear and often our fear is more expressive. So I encourage you to dig these up for yourself. Try to figure out, for example, your ideal scenario. What are some of the characteristics of your ideal scenario? Some of these are going to be hard to predict. So use previous, scenarios and aspects of those that you liked. Take a moment to write down how you feel more often. And then when you have a reasonable number of those records of how you felt over the past couple of months, for example, it may do you good to go back and look at those and you can uncover your values little by little. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of developer T. I'd love to hear from you. If you are uncovering your values or if you found something in this episode, particularly enlightening, please reach out to me. You can find me on Twitter at developer T. You can also leave a review for the show in iTunes. There's a link in the show notes to do just that. Thanks again to discover.bot for sponsoring today's episode. Have her head over to discover.bot to join a community of bot developers. And enthusiasts that are looking to share information with you. Thanks so much for listening. Today's episode wouldn't have been possible without spec head over to spec.fm to find other shows that are designed for people like you. You'll find tons of awesome content on all kinds of topics that are relevant to designers and developers who are looking to level up their careers. Today's episode was produced by Sarah Jackson. My name is Jonathan Cottrell and until next time, enjoy your tea. .