Decisions you can stand on

You filled out the exercise on the Values Finder and emailed the PDF to yourself. It is in your inbox, unopened.

Then a decision arrives towards the end of a working day, with a deadline of the end of the week, and you make it the same way you always have. Reactive, from the gut, with the reasoning made after the event.

Your values list did not even come into it. It never had the chance.

Decide once, not every time

Your values pay off when they are turned forward into standing decisions. Rules you have already made, so that the under-pressure version of you is not working through the same conflict with every decision.

If family is top of your list, it might mean Friday evenings are not negotiable. This is a standing decision and it removes a whole category of choices about overtime, travel and late meetings in advance.

Clients I have worked with on values have found these forward decisions the hardest part to build. The ones who do the work and then report back after three or six months tell me two things have changed.

Their decisions have become more consistent, and what they spend their time on now matches what they had said mattered.

The list is the start of the work

The exercise usually ends at the list. Every values workshop I have sat in has ended at the list.

The list is the start of the work, and most people leave the room before the rest of it.

Doing the forward step alone is hard for a specific reason. You need somebody to hold the list up against what you are about to do and say, that is not what you told me.

Nobody does that to themselves.

I wrote about this a few weeks ago in Nothing happens at your desk. A real move needs another person, a date and a real chance of being told no.

The same is true of a standing decision.

Bring the report

Matt Rutherford Coaching is open. Our first conversation is on me, it lasts half an hour, and the thing to bring to it is your report from the Values Finder. We walk through it and decide what to work on first.

The last four weeks have gone recognise, define, rank, build. The first three you can do on your own, in twenty minutes on the site. The fourth is the one that works better with somebody else in the room.

The honest line I wrote a while ago still stands: read five questions to ask before hiring a career coach first, including if the answer is me.

Before any of that, make one standing decision this week from your own list. One sentence, one category of choices gone. Then tell the person it affects.

The last four weeks were the free version of this conversation. So is the next one. Thirty minutes, whenever suits.