Saying "YES" to Play: An everyday example of taking Valued Action

Before I undertook my journey to becoming a coach, I’d sometimes heard the term “values” or the question “what are your values?”, but I never fully understood what it really meant, or engaged with it meaningfully beyond personality type quizzes and workplace team building. During my coach training it came up as something we might explore with clients, but it still felt a bit wooly to me and I didn’t fully grasp the importance of it when uncovering who we are beneath what we do day-to-day and how it can play a pivotal role in guiding us towards our goals.

It wasn’t until I did some additional training with a fantastic organisation called Contextual Consulting, that my eyes were really opened to the potential of being aligned to your values, as well as how to explore them in a meaningful way to uncover what’s really important to you, how you choose to lead your life and how you want to show up in the world. I began to realise that this really could be a useful tool for me to use with my clients who knew they wanted to change, but didn’t know where to begin. What I didn’t do is fully give myself the experience of exploring values for myself, which I now regret as I was denying myself a valuable tool in discovering my place in the world.

More recently, I came back to values because I was feeling directionless. I wasn’t sure why I was coaching, who it was for, what my motivation even was and why anyone should even care! I wanted to understand all of that and use it as my fuel to regain motivation and direction. I wanted to start coaching with a sort of intentionality, using my values a guide.

So I did the work…I REALLY did the work and discovered it was kinda fun, liberating and empowering. I went through this whole process and uncovered LOTS of values, but eventually honed it down to the five or six that felt most important to me. Two of those that showed up for me today, were play and adventure.

Once I had connected these dots, I started to realise that wow, these really were important to me and once I realised that, I started to look at my life a little differently, seeing how these values showed up moment to moment.

Let’s look at an example. I travel full-time and in order to make this a reality, I had to give up lots of security and safety (another of my values). So why did I want to take this risk?

ADVENTURE

One of the many adventures vanlife has brought me

At the time I made that decision, adventure felt far more important to me that safety. It felt like a need, not just a want. I hadn’t done the work on values yet, but still managed to make it happen, so it really must have been important! There were plenty of other values at play, but it’s interesting to see how these values fit when we look back retrospectively. Adventure now feels like an ever-present in my life as I basically find new places to explore almost every day! Inadvertently I had made space for other core values such as freedom, play and creativity.

But I wasn’t being entirely intentional about it all when I first set out on my travels. I wasn’t being led by these values, they were just vaguely present in my subconcious and so when I look at my life, I think creativity and play could feature even more strongly that they do just now. Realising that I want to give these core values more presence in my life, I’ve started to notice where the opportunities are for play, freedom and creativity. But back to today and to PLAY.

My playground!

When travelling there is always the possibility of seeing something new, something exciting, and to interact with the new environment with curiosity and with a playful spirit. So I’ve been on a walk this morning, along a trail that we explored yesterday briefly. I had no plans other than to get some fresh air and movement into my limbs. Along the way I spotted this HUGE boulder, just sat in the middle of some scrubland, just off the hiking trail. I had this sense, this instinctive desire that said to just go and explore it - climb to the top and see what I could see.

It’s no coincidence that this idea brought out my inner child - as a child I loved to play, I literally didn’t need to be doing anything else! I was lucky enough to be brought up surrounded by nature and so play and interacting with the natural environment around me was completely, well, natural to me. A mound of dirt, a muddy bank, a pebble beach, a scattering of fallen leaves were all I need to entertain myself. One way to connect with our values is to let our inner child make the decisions and take the lead! We rarely do this as adults. Once the idea of climbing the boulder came to me, I could easily have brushed it off by letting my thinking, logical brain do the decision making - “it’s childish”, “maybe it’s not safe”, “what would other hikers think?” “maybe it’s not allowed” - and just carry on walking on the trail. But knowing play is important to how I show up in the world, I was able to put these more logical thoughts to one side, and act intentionally, taking values based action. Up I went. And in this small act, I fulfilled a little part of my inner child and lived out one of my core values of PLAY.

If this post got you curious about your values and how to enact them in your life, leave a comment letting me know what came up for you, book a free insight chat to discover more about the coaching process or if you really want to get stuck in and say YES to exploring your values, hit the button below to book a one off values discovery session to get clear on your values and how to make them active in your everyday life.