Redesigning Your Life Around Your Values

You’re stuck somewhere in your life. In debt, in conflict, something’s just happened, and you’re running on autopilot just to get through the day. If any of that sounds familiar, I’m asking you to stop, take a real break, and get clear on your personal values.

I can guess you’re having some version of the thoughts I had in that exact spot: that’s crazy, I don’t have time to stop, I’ve got things to take care of, and if I pause for myself even for a minute, everything’s going to fall apart.

So you keep going. You force your way through a life you don’t actually buy into, not deep down.

You can do that for a long time. I did. Then I hit my wall: divorce. I got there because I wasn’t clear on my own values, my ex wasn’t clear on his, and naturally, neither of us was clear with each other. We were both living in a situation neither of us liked or understood, and we took that confusion out on each other instead. It’s not hard to see, looking back, how we ended up exactly where we did.

Eventually, the cost of not living according to your values surfaces one way or another. A lot of us seem to hit that particular wall in our forties. Midlife crisis, anyone? My ex and I were together ten years before we got married, and we managed fine that whole time; there wasn’t much at stake yet. Then we got married and suddenly had real decisions to make together. Getting married probably should have been the first hard one, but we assumed it couldn’t be that difficult since we’d coasted so long without much friction. We bought a house. We had kids. We moved countries, then moved back. Then we got divorced.

I’m grateful for the divorce now, since it forced me to actually go looking for my values in the first place. I finally made the connection: setting myself aside was driving my unhappiness all along. I spent months resisting the whole process of figuring out what my values even were, and now I spend my time retraining myself to actually operate from them. I still struggle with it. But I know it’s the only way forward.

I can hear the excuses you’re building right now, because I build the same ones for myself most days, excuses to quietly slide back into my old patterns. But I can’t unsee the connection between setting myself aside and my own unhappiness, and I can’t undersell how much joy shows up when this new way of living actually works, because I’m finally living according to what I actually value.

Building a new habit takes real time, and it’s easy to slip back into the old one. Consider this another nudge toward redesigning your life around your actual values.

Renée

Renée

My days these days are mostly advocacy, with my kids always first, and hiking, biking, and cold plunging worked in whenever I can. Winter cold plunges aren’t for everyone, but there’s a strange kind of beauty and calm in it that I’ve come to need.

Separation was a journey. It took time, and it taught me most of what I know now.

I write about what I learned along the way, and about the family justice system I ended up spending years inside of.