Values are critical to your growth as an engineer, as a person, but sometimes it can be a little bit daunting to try to figure out what your personal values are. In today's episode, I'm going to give you a handful of practical ways to help you find your values more effectively and without having to go through a bunch of painful processes. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. You're listening to Developer Team. My goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers, and part of your purpose will inform your values. But what's interesting, it doesn't just stop there. Your values will help provide you with the right tools to help you find your values. Your values will help provide clarity. Your values will help provide perspective. And interestingly, perspective will help you define your values. So this is totally wrapped up in the fundamental purpose, the mission of this show at its core level, and I want to help you figure out what yours are. But this sounds like a daunting task. It's something that... It also seems a little bit lofty, maybe even unnecessary. You may find this to feel too fluffy, not practical to your day-to-day life. Amazingly, even this kind of response can be expressed through the lens of your personal values. For example, you may value practicality. So even if you don't necessarily immediately identify why or how these values translate in your life, I hope you'll listen in. Because the exercises here are intended to take out some of the fluff, to take out some of that abstract nature of values that we're so used to, and instead provide you real tools to understand why they matter. At the end of the day, they may be useful for you to use when you may want to use these At the end of the day, they may be useful for you to use when you may want to use these out. If you've ever Googled a list of values to try to figure out what yours are, or if you've ever done this exercise with, let's say, your company, trying to figure out your company's values, almost certainly you have onboarded to a company that has defined their values. And if you were onboarding to a company that is like most other companies, those values tend to feel a little bit amorphous, a little bit difficult to put your finger on exactly what they really mean in practice. So that's what I want to connect you with today. And I'm going to give you two specific ways to do that. What you actually value in your life. Values may have some overlap with ethics, but the important frame that I want to provide you in today's episode is that it's not just basic ethics. It's not just basic ethics. It's not just basic ethics. It's not just basic ethics that you hope all humans share. Your values are likely personal to you. They may be unique from your co-workers, for example. Okay. So the first exercise I want you to perform, and you may guess this already if you're a listener of this show, it's going to involve your calendar, or at least a notebook where you have taken down notes of your recent interactions, your recent activities. And I want you to take a look at your calendar and see if Look back over the course of the last, let's say, three months or so. And you can use your memory to do some of this as well, just whatever you remember from the past couple of months. And identify areas or times when you felt a particularly intense emotion. That doesn't really matter if it's positive or negative emotion. It's going to be instructive one way or the other. So a positive positive intense emotion. Maybe you felt excitement or joy. Maybe you felt a sense of deep flow, a flow state. And that's an extreme, a type of extreme emotion, even though the feeling of that moment may feel very even keeled. Or maybe you felt anger, sadness, fear, something that was extreme. And dig into whatever that extreme emotion is. What exactly was interesting to you about that particular moment? What exactly was stoking that fear or that anger? Or what kind of work were you doing when you reached that flow state? What was it that you did that got you to be to that extreme emotion? Was it an environmental factor? Maybe it was the people that you were working with. Whatever it was, try to wrap your head around what conditions led to that emotion. And you can kind of test this out. You can imagine, okay, what if I changed a couple of variables? Maybe I did the same thing, but I did it alone rather than with people. Would it have had the same effect on me? And what you're trying to do is identify what things really stand out to you. What experiences, what emotions were really strong and why? Where did they come from? This is a pointer in most cases to things that you value. Another thing you can do in the same vein, this is kind of a second version of the same exercise, is to look at the things that you do the most consistently. Now, this is not a perfect version of the exercise, it works well because things that you choose to do consistently, you likely value, or at least you don't devalue them. This version of the exercise gets a little noisy because the data gets a little bit noisy because a lot of the things that we do on a day-to-day basis are the results not of our values necessarily, but rather of our habits. So be careful when you use this version to try to identify, am I just doing this out of my head? Am I just doing this out of my head? Is this something that I would stop doing if I could? Or is this something that I would start doing differently if I could? Maybe it's something that you do on a regular basis that actually gives you that negative emotion, and now's an opportunity to evaluate that as well. But our goal isn't to change our schedule, it's to observe it. Our goal isn't to adjust something here. Instead, it's to observe how we've reacted to our own interactions with the world around us. This is something that we do on a regular basis, and now's an opportunity to evaluate that as well. This is something that's very difficult to do in the moment, but it's much easier to do retrospectively. Now, this isn't a perfect system. Understanding we have a lot of hindsight bias, for example, and maybe we don't actually put our finger directly on the thing that made us happy. Maybe we get it wrong a couple of times. But that brings me to my second point about values for today's episode, and that is you don't have to get them perfect. This isn't an assignment. Nobody's going to judge you based off of your personal curiosity. You don't have to judge yourself based off of your list of values. You don't even have to show anybody this list of values. This is just for you to develop and understand yourself. And so if you adopt a value, you can just as easily drop it. And that doesn't say anything about your character or your consistency or anything like that. It's you trying to figure out what exactly it is that you value. So my advice as far as that experimentation process is to adopt a value for a while, try it on and see what operating with that value in mind feels like. If it feels foreign, if it doesn't feel like it's actually something that you value, that maybe you put it in there because you aspire to valuing that thing, but you don't actually value it, then take it away. We're going to take a quick sponsor break, and then we're going to come back and give you a second practical exercise, practical advice for finding your values and eliminating all the fluff around this conversation. 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Create your first free feature flags by heading over to split.io slash developer tea. That's split.io slash developer tea. Thanks again to Split for sponsoring today's episode. Let's take a step back a moment. And talk about the usefulness of values. When you talk about leading from a position of values, what that really means is how do you develop your own opinions about things that are not necessarily cut and dry? In other words, you decide in your career, in your life, how you want to spend your time, what you value. And this can be different from what somebody else values. For example, you may really love the idea of working in a fast-paced, kind of quick-moving company. And you may be willing to give up something for that. There's not anything necessarily wrong with the thing that you gave up. And there's also not anything necessarily wrong with a fast-paced environment. It's just what you value. Now, our values can sometimes lead us to or away from a given role at a given company. Our values can align with those in our company. Or maybe we have enough overlap that we have a shared value or two with the culture of our company. But you will inevitably interact with people who have different values than you. And so when you are in a position, especially a position of leadership, but this also applies. In your personal life, it applies as an individual contributor. When you encounter people with differing values from you, this is often the source of disagreement. I think we should go this direction, or I think we should go the other direction. If you see each other's underlying values, not only can you understand and develop empathy for why the other person is disagreeing with you, but you both may be able to find a way to get along. And that's when you can find a way to better common ground for the objective at hand. In other words, you can compare your values and say, I think we should go this way because I care about this. And they say, I think we should go this other way because I care about something else. And then you figure out, okay, how can we satisfy our values and move forward with a decision? That doesn't mean that everybody will always be happy. It doesn't mean that you'll always get to optimize for your values. Sometimes, it's useful to just know what your values are so you know why you disagree with a given direction. Disagreement doesn't have to be the end of the conversation. It can be a point of growth for you and for the people that you work with. Our values inform all of this. It may help you understand your personal working style, and it'll help others understand how to work best with you. So whether you want to work with someone who's disagreeing with you, or you're disagreeing with someone who's disagreeing with you, or you're disagreeing with someone who's disagreeing with you, whether you want to go through this exercise or not, your values do exist. You do care about one thing more than another, and you do care about things that are different from what other people care about. So it makes sense to take some time to figure out what those things are. But it's not easy. As we already mentioned, one of the ways that you can do this is by observing yourself, your past self, trying to remember what exactly was I feeling in that moment. Another way, and this is the second kind of exercise that I want you to perform if you can, is to employ some scouts. And what I mean by this is finding people that you trust, finding people that interact with you on a regular basis in various settings. For example, your co-workers, maybe your family members, your spouse, your children even. And find people who interact with you on a regular enough basis that they can identify to you, they can reflect back to you what your values are. This is an interesting opportunity because it allows someone with a different perspective who is observing you from the outside in to provide you the insight that they have about what they perceive your values to be. Here's the key insight. Someone else observing you may actually know what you value more than you do. I'll say that one more time because it's really hard to grasp if you've never actually encountered this before. But there are people in your life, possibly, who know you well enough or they observe you often enough. They see your actions, they see your interactions, they have intuition about your emotions, however it is that they've gleaned this information. They may have more insight into what you value than what you have. And so, if you're a person who's been in a relationship for a long time, you may have more insight into what you value than what you have. Now, here's the interesting thing. When you have these conversations, don't try to correct what they're saying about your values. You're asking them for their input. Don't change what they are saying about what they perceive. That's not the goal of the exercise. Instead, listen intently to what they have to say and evaluate it. Evaluate it against your self-perception. If there's a major gap, then something... is off. Especially if that gap is consistent across multiple people that you talk to. Now, here's where it gets really interesting and perhaps even more powerful. As you look forward, these scouts, as we're calling them, they operate as an alarm system for you. It's very easy to become blind to our own actions, to have a misperception of how we are interacting in the world. If you talk with these scouts, you're going to be able to see that they're not just people who you have asked explicitly, please observe me and I'll do the favor back for you, for example. Please observe me in our various interactions and keep in mind this short list of values. Maybe one value that you really care about, that you've discussed with this person, that they perceive in you. Ask them to identify to you when you are violating that value or, this is very important, when you are... exhibiting that value. What this will do is it will reinforce both the behaviors that you care about, the behaviors that align with your values, and it will help you recognize when you are operating in those values. This awareness will help you develop a better connection to what those values are and what they mean for you. This may feel, once again, like a lot of fluff, but if we aren't... able to accept that we choose how we spend our time, we choose how we optimize, we make choices that make us different from other people. If we can't recognize that, then we cannot grow well in our careers. And that's why values are absolutely critical for your growth. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Thank you again to today's sponsor, Split. You can head over to split.io slash developer tea to get started with your first feature flag for free. It's split.io slash developer tea. Split is the feature management and experimentation platform that reimagines software delivery. Go and check it out. Split.io slash developer tea. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed this discussion, I'd encourage you to go right now to developertea.com slash discord and join our discord community. The reason for this is very simple. If you're a developer, you're going to need to go to developertea.com slash discord. It's very simple. It's totally free and you have nothing to lose. You only have gain, potential gain here. If you find out that you don't like the community, if you find out that it doesn't produce value for you, then you've lost nothing but a little bit of time signing up. So go check it out. Head over to developertea.com slash discord. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea. Split.io slash developertea.com slash discord. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this