Use These Strategies to Build a Life That Matches Your Values

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Discover practical strategies to align your life with your values. Stop comparing, find purpose and live meaningfully on your own terms. | SUCCESS

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Recently, I confessed to my therapist that I was being haunted by the “Chicken-Finger Billionaire.” Todd Graves built his Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers empire working seven days a week from opening at 8 a.m. through closing at 3:30 a.m. the next day, seeing his children only when his wife brought them to the restaurant for dinner. His story kept appearing at the top of my newsfeed in some mysterious algorithm-glitch representing everything I wasn’t and somehow encapsulating all my failures as an entrepreneur, mother, wife, artist and human.

My therapist, Katie Day, LMFT was puzzled, as I’d never expressed interest in becoming one of America’s wealthiest before, and instead I prioritized a healthy work-life-family balance. Day asked me, “Do you want that kind of hour-a-day relationship with your daughter? Do you want to create a global chicken-finger food chain?”

When I admitted I didn’t (I was actually a vegetarian for 30 years, but that wasn’t the point!), she gently suggested I do a values exercise to help realign with my own values and stop comparing my life to that of a Chicken-Finger Billionaire.

Choosing our own path

In his letter entitled “My Parting Prescription for America,” former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy urged Americans to “rethink how we’re living our lives.” Murthy wrote that our current path, which prioritizes “fame, wealth and power” over “relationships, service and purpose… (is) harming our physical and mental health, robbing us of our optimism and contributing to division and polarization.”

That path is exactly where I found myself at a crossroads five years ago. Unsure why my life as a New York City artist and chess teacher (both of which I loved) was leaving me so empty, I repressed the voice inside me saying I needed to slow down and look inward. Instead I took on an additional teaching job and an apartment I couldn’t afford.

If you’d have brought up values then, I’d have thought you were joking, Pollyanna-ish or proselytizing. Yes, it was important to volunteer and try to be a “good human,” but my focus was on success—a word I believed was defined only by achievements.

I started my professional acting career when I was 3, and my chess prodigy-journey by age 5. At 13, I’d become New York City’s first solo-teenage chess teacher in schools. I’d been pushing for as long as I could remember, addicted to winning results. I started many volunteer programs and worked with terminally-ill children in hospitals while teaching at special-needs schools years before my own neurodiverse diagnosis. To all outside appearances, I was doing great. But my insides didn’t match those outsides. The achievement-focused life I was living no longer fit (if it ever had) or satisfied my needs. I had a breakdown.

Day advises, “The values we choose to live by will show us when we are pursuing behaviors and/or a lifestyle that conflicts with our core self; many times showing up as increasing anxiety, confusion and discontentedness.”

I was a thousand miles away and years from discovering mine.

Values, from love and freedom to family and financial security, are what we find deeply important in life. “They are guideposts for how we choose to live and… make important life decisions,” explains Day, noting that following them reduces anxiety and stress.

Trauma therapist Lisa Fliegel, who’s worked with survivors from the Boston Marathon bombing and from the recent attacks in Israel, sees values as essential scaffolding for both personal and societal health. At their core, she points to the biblical wisdom “love your neighbor as yourself,” the foundation of compassion. “Values are what we build enterprises, relationships and public policy around,” she explains. Without this foundation of shared values and compassion, she warns, “people feel entitled to act harmfully,” whether in personal relationships or larger conflicts. Her trauma-informed approach emphasizes that values must include empathic-attunement to ourselves and others.

Fliegel explains that a crisis can be “a moment of opportunity for positive change,” making people willing to try things they normally wouldn’t, but emphasizes that transformation doesn’t require trauma. Whether through major life shifts or quiet reflection, what matters is recognizing we have a choice about how we live.

Day recommends starting with a simple exercise to help identify personal values using Brene Brown’s values list:

“These (five) are what matter deeply to us,” Day explains, “and when used as a lens, will change how we interact with ourselves and our surroundings.”

For Fliegel, success comes from thoughtful response over reaction. Her clinical supervisor advised, “hurry up and slow it down,” meaning understand the need that’s being communicated to you rather than just reacting to what’s happening around you. Remember that people’s sometimes maladaptive actions are their way of “trying to find a solution to a problem.”

In my case, leaving New York City for the South, then living without a home for more than two years while immersed in 12-step recovery, therapy and eventually landing an artist residency where my responsibilities included socializing donkeys, all helped me break away from my deeply entrenched patterns of living. I finally asked myself: Was I truly a workaholic obsessed with success? Or was that a myth I’d been telling myself since childhood? For the first time I considered who I wanted to be, not what I wanted to do.

According to former U.S. Surgeon General Murthy: “A majority of young adults say they have little or no sense of purpose or meaning in life.” Fliegel explains that values help us find connection and agency as well as purpose–“the No. 1 predictor for resilience as we age.” Values also help us find community, which is built around having shared principles.

Day adds that values are critical for boundaries, offering valuable clues about our lives. Paying close attention to how we feel mentally and physically while making decisions or having certain experiences can help us determine if we’re acting in or out of alignment with our values.

Values help identify our gut reactions. I’d spent so many years like the proverbial circle trying to fit into a square, rather than understanding those situations weren’t right for me. But when I fell in love while living on a rural donkey farm, I told the man who is now my husband on our first drive, “My insides always feel like they match my outsides when I’m with you.” He replied, “That’s because you’re not pretending to be someone you’re not, and neither am I.”

My husband is my polar opposite: He’s a self-declared half-Cherokee hillbilly with a past like a Hollywood wild west movie. Bar fights were the norm where he grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. Despite pistol checks at the door, shoot-outs were common, and youth rode cars wildly in areas designated by law-enforcement for races. But as the world changed its rules around him, it took him fifty years to adapt, and his life ranged from the extremes of prison and homelessness to saving multiple children from drowning in a raging Tennessee River. I’m a relatively-quiet New York City artist and chess player by comparison. When we met, he was working in the rural town’s alcohol and drug clinic trying to help others find new lives too. Seeing the world very differently, together, is enlightening and can sometimes be challenging. But when it comes to getting a second chance on life, we’re aligned on forging our path together through shared values.

Initially, discussing values with my husband before we got married built intimacy. As our friendship deepened, we discovered our shared desire to build a life around our values. This system became especially important as life expanded into marriage and parenthood. Today before making decisions, we ask whether they fit our personal and family values.

It’s one thing to circle words on a list, but how do they go from being abstract to lived? For Fliegel, this can be as simple as recycling or taking a walk. “There’s always something [you] can do to give your life more meaning and intentionality.”

“It’s in our nature to forget,” Day adds. She advises having conversations around values with friends and family to “deepen relationships and open opportunities for accountability.”

Interestingly, the Chicken-Finger Billionaire told Trading Secrets that he “now preaches the value of not rushing into opportunities or growing too quickly at his brand’s expense.” As our values guide us through life, we, and they, may evolve, which is why we revisit them. Ignoring our needs to chase someone else’s definition of success only leads to heartache.

There’s no one-size-fits-all life. We must each identify and follow our own truths to live meaningfully. Values act as our north star, guiding us to success however we choose to define it. And we could all stand to cultivate a little of Fliegel’s compassion.

Photo by Ground Picture/Shutterstock

Sari Caine is a New York City scholastic champion turned chess teacher living off-grid with her family in rural Tennessee where they enjoy building giant bird houses and growing vegetables and native flowers.

5473 Blair Road, Suite 100
PMB 30053
Dallas, TX 75231

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