My Values

Love
Health
Acceptance
Kindness
Appreciation
Gratitude
Joy
Trust in life
Openness
Authenticity

I remember my old life coach and me working on these together back in 2014. At the time she said to me “I want you to immerse yourself in these new values so that you become passionate about them and so that they become the blueprint of how you live. They will be your grail and will guide your decisions”. 

At work a year or so later I instigated a “team charter” for our team, based on a training course I went on. In it, as a team, we all wrote our values which we decided upon together (we used Answergarden to write them). Sections of the charter  were: Description of the programme we work on, Mission Statement, Goals and Objectives, Team Ethos (i.e. our Values), Team Meetings (when/what/how often), Communication (tools we use), Leave, out of office, working from home and appointments (our rules for this), Travel (our rules for this), Mindfulness (we used AnswerGarden to all write our qualities here), then we all signed it. The beauty was that we all sat down and wrote it together as a team. At each of our quarterly team meetings we looked over the document, and updated it, and we lived it each day in our work.

I later read a book called “Legacy” by James Kerr about the values underpinning the New Zealand All Black’s rugby team. I thought it was incredible how values were the backdrop for their performance on the pitch.

At work I went to an amazing talk by a teacher friend in March 2017, about how he and his team in school had put in place values in school, to encourage these traits in pupils. They would have a value they focused on each month. They had a bookmark of their values, and I still have it at home.

I put together a PowerPoint about what the New Zealand All Black’s values were for my team at work, to show how the values shaped them as a team. In it I also told them about the teacher’s talk I had attended. Based on what the teacher had done at school, I suggested that each month two members of the team choose one of our values, and present back to the rest of us a way we could really live it in our team that month. This is why I have written these values here which will underpin the nature of our blog.