Let’s Talk About Values. Again.

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to speak about Mindful Leadership at The Power of SHE, an event of the Puerto Rico Hotel & Tourism Association. Mindful leadership is such a broad topic that there was no way I could cover it in thirty minutes, so I decided to focus on three things that, in my opinion, are essential for anyone who wants to lead with greater awareness: having clear values, developing self-awareness, and learning how to reset our mindset when our thoughts, assumptions or emotions start taking us in a direction that is not helping us.

None of these concepts are particularly new. In fact, I am sure that most of the women in that audience had heard about values, self-awareness, and mindset many times throughout their professional lives. But that is exactly why I want to continue talking about them. Sometimes the most fundamental things become so familiar that we stop paying attention to them.

We attend conferences and educational activities looking for something new: a new tool, a new framework, a new model, a different way to think about leadership. I understand that completely because I do the same. I love learning, and in recent years I have incorporated into my own thinking ideas from The 5 Second Rule, Think Again, Let Them, and many other books and approaches that have helped me see the world and my own behavior in a different way.

What I have also learned, after many years of being in a constant process of learning and evolution, is that for those ideas to really work for me, I eventually have to bring them back to something much more basic: who I am, what matters to me, and the kind of person I want to be. And one of the easiest ways I have found to reconnect with that essence is through my values.

Why Revisit Something We Already Know?

Not long ago, I participated in a workshop with a more spiritual and somewhat esoteric approach, and once again I found myself doing a values exercise. I have done many of these exercises throughout my career, both personally and professionally, but this time I approached it differently.

Instead of forcing myself to identify only three or five core values, I expanded the exercise and ended up with eighteen. I grouped them into values that I feel reflect my essence, others that expand me, and others that help bring balance into my life.

What was interesting to me was not simply the final list. It was noticing how much it had changed from lists I had made at other moments in my life. Of course, some things were still there, because there are parts of us that remain fairly consistent over time. But there were also values that I had never considered before, and that made me think about how much we evolve as people and as leaders.

Our experiences change us. The people we meet change us. Success, disappointment, loss, travel, education, relationships, and difficult decisions all shape what becomes important to us. Because of that, I now think that returning to our values, clarifying them, and reprioritizing them every few years may be one of the most useful self-reflection exercises we can do.

When Someone Else Names a Value for You

One of the values that surprised me the most was wisdom.

Wisdom had never been on my radar as a personal value. I think I had always seen the idea of considering oneself wise as somewhat arrogant, because wisdom feels like something impossible to fully achieve, especially for someone as profoundly human as I am, meaning imperfect, limited, and very aware of how much there is still to learn.

Then something happened that made me look at it differently. My sister was recommending to someone close to both of us that she come to me for advice, and she said, “Talk to Annie-Mariel. She is very wise.”

That comment stayed with me because it came from my sister, one of the people who knows me best. She has seen my good qualities, certainly, but she has also seen my defects very closely and without any of the filters we sometimes manage to maintain with people outside our families. For her to use the word wise to describe me made me wonder what exactly she was seeing.

After thinking about it for a while, I realized that what she may experience as wisdom has much less to do with me believing I have the right answers and much more to do with how much I value learning. I have spent years reading, studying, observing, asking questions, changing my mind, and trying to understand why people and organizations behave the way they do. Over time, that constant learning has helped me develop the ability to look at situations from different angles and consider possibilities that may not be immediately obvious.

That becomes especially useful when someone is going through a difficult situation, is caught in conflict, is facing uncertainty, or simply cannot see a way forward. When we are in the middle of something emotionally complicated, our perspective can become very narrow. Sometimes what another person can offer is not an answer, but the ability to help us see other interpretations and other options.

The fact that something I had always seen simply as a thinking skill could be perceived by someone else as wisdom made me reconsider whether wisdom should, in fact, be one of the values that expand me.

Not because I want to pursue the identity of “being wise.” That still feels uncomfortable to me. But I do want to continue pursuing experiences, learning, and conversations that help me make more thoughtful sense of complex situations and, hopefully, help others do the same.

That experience also reminded me that sometimes other people can see our values before we have given them a name.

What Others See in Us

The same thing happens in organizations and in leadership. Over the years, we evolve, we are exposed to new challenges, and we develop ways of behaving that reflect what we value, even when we have never consciously identified those things as values.

I see this often in leaders I admire. I see leaders who clearly value positive relationships, human connection, excellence, professional integrity, learning, generosity, or respect for differences. You can see it in the way they make decisions and in the way they treat people. Yet if you ask them directly what their values are, they may not necessarily include those words in the list.

This is one of the reasons I think it is so valuable to periodically ask people we trust how they experience us. Not in the sense of asking whether they like us, but asking what they consistently see in us. What do they think matters to us? What do they see us defending? When have they seen us at our best? What qualities or principles seem to guide the way we make decisions?

Sometimes those answers tell us things about ourselves that we have not been able to articulate on our own.

That type of feedback is also directly connected to self-awareness, which was the second pillar I discussed in the Mindful Leadership conference. Self-awareness is not only about knowing what we think about ourselves. It is also about understanding the experience other people have of us, and being willing to compare that experience with the person and leader we believe ourselves to be.

Values Become Real in Difficult Moments

Of course, identifying our values is only the beginning. Values are not particularly useful if they live only on a piece of paper, on a company wall, or in a beautifully designed presentation. They become useful when they help us make decisions, especially difficult decisions, and when they influence the way we behave when no one is reminding us what those values are supposed to be.

Even then, we will not always behave according to them. That is also part of being human.

A leader may sincerely value respect and still use a harsh or dismissive tone with an employee, supplier or client in a moment of frustration. A leader may value honesty but ask the team not to disclose uncomfortable information because “dirty laundry stays at home.” A leader may genuinely believe in development and growth but continually deny people learning opportunities because the operation is too busy to let them go. A leader may proudly repeat “work hard, play hard” as a personal mantra, while creating an environment in which everyone else is expected only to work hard.

Those contradictions are uncomfortable, but they are also useful. They show us the distance that can sometimes exist between the leader we intend to be and the leader who actually shows up under pressure, stress, fear, or fatigue.

That is where values become very practical, because they give us a reference point. They allow us to stop and ask whether the way we are behaving is consistent with who we say we want to be.

Leadership Formation Never Really Ends

I do not think leadership development ever really ends. We sometimes talk about it as if it were something we complete through a series of programs, certifications, or years of experience. After ten, twenty or thirty years of leading, we should presumably have figured ourselves out.

My experience has been quite the opposite. The more experience we accumulate, the more life gives us new situations in which to test what we thought we already knew about ourselves.

For me, that is one of the most interesting parts of leading consciously. It is not about reaching a point where we are always perfectly aligned with our values. I am not sure that is even possible. It is about becoming better at noticing when we are not, understanding what moved us away from them, and being able to reset and choose again.

So yes, I think we should talk about values. Again.

Not because the concept is new, but because we are not the same people we were the last time we defined them.

Maybe it is time to pull out that old values exercise and look at it again. See what is still there, what no longer feels as central, and what may have emerged in the years since. And perhaps, this time, do not do it entirely alone. Ask a few people who know you well what they see in you.

You may discover a value you have been living for years without ever knowing what to call it.