The next important thing I did on the journey to recovery was to name and claim my values. I named them and stopped apologising for them. In 2020, at the bottom of a depressive episode, I was scrolling and came across a post by a woman named MaryBeth Hyland.I do not remember most of what it said. What I remember is how it ended. She gave her readers permission to be human, and then she offered a free day of values sessions to anyone who wanted one.I said yes. I do not know exactly why I said yes, except that I was in a place where the idea of permission to be human landed on me like water.I should say plainly that I do not share her new age spiritual beliefs. I am a Christian, and that has become central to me since then. But I will always hold that she was the instrument God used to throw me a lifeline in that season, and that she gave me something I did not have language for at the time, which was permission to name my own preferred way of being.I did the first session that year. Some time later I was invited to a two-week programme, also free. I did that one online in February of 2023, from a studio apartment in Dubai, in the middle of a year that was supposed to be about career acceleration and turned out to be about everything else.That programme is where the work in this post comes from.<h2 id="2e6d46e0-0056-4fcd-9170-b3318175c6ca" data-toc-id="2e6d46e0-0056-4fcd-9170-b3318175c6ca" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Why Values Are Not a Soft Concern</h2>In an earlier post I wrote about psychometric assessments and what they revealed about my natural way of operating. Those tools tell you how you work. Your values tell you what you are for.You need both, and most of us have neither named. We move through our careers and relationships with an unexamined value system running underneath every decision, and then we cannot understand why certain situations leave us hollow while others that look identical on paper feel fine.If you have been in burnout, this is not optional reading. A great deal of burnout is not overwork. It is the accumulated cost of working in sustained violation of things you care about and have never named.<h2 id="c808e28f-38bf-4191-9de5-168a6f62ce02" data-toc-id="c808e28f-38bf-4191-9de5-168a6f62ce02" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Drains and Fills</h2>The exercise that broke it open for me is embarrassingly simple.Two columns. On one side, everything that drained your emotional energy over the past year. On the other, everything that filled it. Not what should have drained or filled you. What actually did.You write until you run out. Then you look at the pattern.My drains included expecting things from people. Worrying about the future. Explaining myself to a particular person and expecting understanding, support, kindness and respect in return, and being repeatedly disappointed. Expecting things from God by a certain time. Stressing about whether I was getting the manifesting and abundance material right, in case my own failure to apply it properly was delaying everything.My fills included listening to my intuition. Following my freedom. Starting Today's Kind Reminder. Doing the data science and machine learning course. Creating the calendars. Joining the hackathons and working through the algorithms. Duolingo practice. Dance lessons. Talking to my parents. Living on my own in a studio apartment. Allowing myself to imagine the possibility of starting a fund, and then actually beginning to discuss it out loud.And quitting the job.When I laid the two columns beside each other, the pattern was almost comically clear. Nearly every drain was an expectation I had placed on somebody else's behaviour. Nearly every fill was something I had chosen and done myself.I did not need a framework to interpret that. I needed to stop looking away from it.<h2 id="5aae45f4-be6f-4f36-a317-11f1ef2d5271" data-toc-id="5aae45f4-be6f-4f36-a317-11f1ef2d5271" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">The Three That Emerged</h2>The formal exercise produces a long list first. Mine ran to twenty six values in the top tier, which is far too many to actually live by. Authenticity, connection, curiosity, empathy, empowerment, freedom, growth, health, honesty, humility, independence, inner harmony, integrity, kindness, learning, purpose, justice, reflection, responsibility, self care, self respect, spiritual life, true friendship, trust, wisdom.The real work is in grouping them, because most of those are not separate values. They are members of families. And when I grouped mine, three cores emerged.Inner Harmony is the anchor that holds the rest. Spirituality and justice sit inside it. When any other value of mine is violated, I lose inner harmony, and when they are honoured, it is restored. It is being at peace with God, with myself and with the world, from living in alignment with what is right and true according to God's wisdom and my own experience.True Connection holds authenticity, kindness, empathy, respect for boundaries and true friendship. It is the freedom to be my whole authentic self, in a way that is wholesome both to me and to the people around me.Sense of Abundance holds generosity and wealth. It is the audacity to believe, expect, receive, give and create abundantly of life's wonders, ideas, value, wealth, attention, health and goodness. Audacity is the right word for it, because for a long time I genuinely believed abundance was not available to someone like me.Those three now function as a diagnostic. When something feels wrong and I cannot name why, one of them has been transgressed. It is almost always that simple.<h2 id="4fb100f2-8e9d-4a1c-9dfc-88920056a500" data-toc-id="4fb100f2-8e9d-4a1c-9dfc-88920056a500" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">What They Told Me to Suck Up</h2>Here is the reframe that made the whole thing worth it.The two week programme gave me a way to be peaceful, and more than that, it gave me a way to take the things I had been told to suck up about myself and see them as things I actually like about myself.I ask too many questions. That is curiosity, and it is a value.I take things too personally. That is integrity and self respect, and they are values.I am too intense about work that matters. That is purpose, and it is a value.I am too sensitive to how people are treated. That is empathy and justice, and they are values.Most of the traits you were told to file down are not character defects. They are your values showing up without discipline or without a suitable environment. The work is not to remove them. It is to give them somewhere appropriate to live.<h2 id="dc8403dc-998b-4522-a28f-fe47a9cdeddc" data-toc-id="dc8403dc-998b-4522-a28f-fe47a9cdeddc" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Do Not Discard Noble Values to Fit Into Places That Do Not Deserve Them</h2>This is the part I most want someone in a toxic environment to hear.When your values are transgressed constantly, over months and years, you start to draw the wrong conclusion. You start to think the values are the problem. That you are too kind, and kindness gets exploited, so you should become less kind. That you should stop expecting your boundaries to be respected, because nobody respects them anyway. That caring about meaningful work is naive and you should learn to just collect a salary like a sensible adult.That is backwards, and it is how good people get quietly deformed by bad places.Authentic connection, meaningful work, kindness, inner harmony, respect for boundaries and curiosity are noble values. They are not liabilities. If an environment makes them a liability, the environment is the problem, not the values.The answer is never to lower the value to fit the place. It is to change the place, or to change the rules of engagement while you are still inside it, and to plan your exit.<h2 id="65686279-f716-4522-b200-ec10e20d83e3" data-toc-id="65686279-f716-4522-b200-ec10e20d83e3" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Name It All, Without Fear and Without Shame</h2>So the instruction is this. Name what drains you and name what fills you. Name the people, including family, who are not actually on your side. Name the jobs. Name the environments. Name the situations.Without fear and without shame, because the naming is the first act of ownership. Giving it a voice and allowing yourself to recognise it is what converts you from someone things are happening to into someone making decisions.Then set your rules. More of what fills. Avoid or better manage what drains. Build the boundaries that protect the first list and contain the second.And accept, finally, that you do not have to be all things to all men. That belief will cost you more than almost any other.<h2 id="926f5e1a-a55b-45f6-a8a8-84caf29f9a8a" data-toc-id="926f5e1a-a55b-45f6-a8a8-84caf29f9a8a" style="text-align: left; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">The Tools That Stayed With Me</h2>A few practices survived the programme and are still with me.Grounding in my values before a decision, rather than after it has already gone wrong.Sacred pauses, which are boundaries I set with myself rather than with other people.Assessing and refining my intention. I rewrote mine after feedback, and the rewritten version reads: to be open and attentive while I continue the inner work of being honest with myself in uncovering my core values, so that I can understand what really matters to me, and channel that into authentic, impactful and rewarding work.The body scan, and listening to my body. This one surprised me most. I had lost my locs to tension alopecia two years earlier, and parts of my scalp were still sore. Every time I noticed the soreness, I met it with irritation and frustration that it had not healed yet. During a body scan I realised I could send warmth and patience to those parts of my head instead. Nothing about that is complicated, and it changed something.And an internal boundary against rumination. Rather than getting pulled into a spiral, I listen for long enough that the feeling is genuinely heard and I can inspect it. Then I ask two questions. What new choices can you make now? Will this serve you, or can you let it go?That is the whole practice. Name it, honour it, protect it, and stop apologising for it.Your values are not the reason your life has been hard. They are the reason you can thrive in life. Discover, claim, and align with them. It will reduce the friction and struggle that create future opportunities for burnout and depression.

A free session I said yes to, let to language for what really truly matters to me.

Doing the inner work - Name and Claim Your Values

Do Not Discard Noble Values to Fit Into Places That Do Not Deserve Them

Name It All, Without Fear and Without Shame

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Doing the inner work - Name and Claim Your Values

Doing the inner work - Name and Claim Your Values

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