Humble, wise, and woke

Over the years I’ve been through a variety of “find your values” kinds of workshops, and I’ve recently been revisiting all of those notes to try to consolidate things and narrow down my core values.

I’ve always struggled a bit with these kinds of exercises, because every value seems like one worth reaching for. If you have a list of potential values that starts with acceptance, accomplishment, accountability, achievement, ambition, balance, boldness, etc, it’s difficult to take any off the list! Still, most exercises do a good job of forcing you to narrow things down and I’ve worked to get mine down to three.

Well, essentially three. I heard someone sharing theirs that said “after family and faith, my values are…” so I like that frame to start things. With that in mind, the three I’ve settled on for now (which are all very much works in progress) are:

Humble

Attempting to be humble carries a lot of potential definitions, but my main angle is the willingness to know that I might be wrong. Pride has many issues, the chief among them is that you’re more likely to be wrong on many issues and simply be unaware of it.

Humbleness carries the risk of being too meek (which I often am) and also to be wimpy rather than tentative when speaking. As I shared in my notes from Crucial Conversations:

Tentative, not wimpy. Some people are so worried about being too forceful or pushy that they err in the other direction. They wimp out by making still another…