It only means something if this happens

One of the biggest things about what I see on social media is that people love to crow about their “values”.

It’s all words until you act on them, and principles pave the way towards showing those around you that you really are what you say you are. Personification of those very things is the only way to demonstrate that you both “say what you mean” and “mean what you say.”

If you really are about the things you say you’re about, then having others say that you are will define your legacy.

Pics, or it didn’t happen

Pull out your phone and open up the gallery or Google Photos.

Hand it to someone you trust and ask them what they see.

If they don’t hand it back and immediately run away or call the police, then I’ve got some really good news for ya: You’re on the right track already.

What you capture in your life tells a lot about what you really value more than anything else. It’s because the phone is such a powerful tool these days that we can capture anything and everything. Not only that, but our browser history is also our digital footprint, and that is why I make a distinction between the digital heirloom and this.

A digital footprint is the trail that we leave on the internet.

A digital heirloom is the monument we build on it for others.

Values are presented in your actions. When I scroll through my gallery, they’re filled with largely three categories:

• my vlogs

• my family

• moments that capture my interest

My principles are brought in to reality and recorded in these. My life can be traced back to the first photos I started taking about eleven years ago with the first fully functional smartphone. If you look in my Facebook tagging history, you’ll see moments that others took of me that go all the way back to the beginnings of the social media platform because my school was among the first to get it.

At this point, half of my life is on the internet, and I can see how my values evolved based on the actions, the principles, that were captured from year to year, moment to moment, piece by piece.

Take stock (pun intended) of yours.

Values to principles parity

Your actions are captured by others and define who you are.

If you have a yearly performance review with your boss, then this also is a great way to see if what you claim you are truly translates well. Usually you get three phases in the process:

• the self-assessment - how you think you’re doing

• the peer assessment - how your team thinks you’re doing

• the performance review - how your management thinks you’re doing

How you act on your principles, how they are mapped to your values, is directly shown through all three levels.

For example, you put on your self-assessment that you value timeliness and respect, but you’re an ass to your peers and are regularly missing deadlines to your boss. Your teammates will definitely push back when they see that, and your boss will laugh in your face at the bold-faced lie.

At least that’s what they do if you work in a place where your performance matters.

Kidding aside, your values-to-principles parity is something that is very powerful. The more closely aligned you are in this respect, the more powerful your personal brand truly is. What you offer as a person, an employee, a parent, as any role in life will be defined by your actions. Nobody is perfect, but this is something to aspire to on a consistent basis.

Who you are shines through what you do.

Do you really?

You need to “talk the talk” as well as “walk the walk”.

I say this a lot in my writing. Is it any wonder? You can tract this idea all the way back to my first few issues when I was still fumbling my way through the meaning of it all and why the heck I wanted to start this newsletter in the first place. If you state that sharing your beliefs is something important to you and that you value self-improvement and illuminating the dark recesses of your mind, then do it!

That’s where my handle “mind miner” comes from.

The truth is that defining values through principles is a positive feedback loop. Even if it’s not true at first, if you state that you value something and then follow through and show that it’s true, it reinforces this in your mind. It becomes a “behavioral guardrail” that grows into a framework.

My high school built these black iron grids throughout the campus. As the inaugural (first) class, we laughed about how ugly those things seem to be considered it’s a school for the arts. We were just kids, and we didn’t think too hard about what purpose they’d serve for the school at the time.

The place is magnificent now.

The gardeners had specifically built those frames so that over the years, the plants would use them as templates to grow on them to become arches and walls of flowers. We didn’t see it at the time, but they did. It took months, years, decades for it to gradually become what they envisioned.

Your values are the same.

Reflect on the values that you claim to have and what actions reinforce them. What do you think your friends and family would say? Would they agree? Are your values reflected beyond them to your community and your career?

We’ll dig into that last one in the next issue.