About a year ago, I read a book called Smart Couples Finish Rich, and while it wasn’t amazing, it did have a few good takeaways that made it worth reading. I have long forgotten most of the specifics, but it was essentially about making financial plans as a team and understanding why you were doing the things you are doing and what you are trying to achieve by doing them.
The reason I bring this book up now is that it had an exercise called Value Circles that is meant to help you come up with purpose-focused plans and goals for the next 12 months, which we did. Now it’s been about a year, so I thought it would be a good time to review how that’s going.
The basics of the exercise are:
- Come up with a list of the 5 core values that are most important to you. (Some examples would be security, freedom, happiness, peace of mind, fun, excitement, power, family, friends, making a difference, spirituality, independence, growth, creativity, adventure, fulfillment, confidence, balance, love, health…)
- Use those values to help determine what you want to spend your time and energy on for the next 12 months.
For my Value Circle, I chose Freedom, Creativity, Fun, Health and Community. Being in the midst of a global pandemic at the time of doing this exercise, I chose not to come up with very specific goals and plans. Instead, I jotted down some points about what those things meant to me and what I was doing to focus more time and energy on them.
Freedom
- Finish house deficiencies
- Create a bug-out house
- 4 day work week
To me, freedom means I have enough time available to pursue my own interests and not feel like there are other things I should be doing instead.
The house deficiency list is essentially complete now. Of course, there will always be new things to fix or update, which I am fine with, and theoretically we will take care of them as they come up in our Bug-Out House schedule.
If you don’t know what a Bug-Out House is, I think it’s because I made that term up myself. The goal is to regularly go through every room in our house and assess the stuff we own, getting rid of anything we don’t use or need, and doing any minor repairs and things that need doing. Theoretically, this makes it easy for us to spontaneously decide to sell our house and live in the woods somewhere, or whatever. Not really planning to do that, but I like to have the option anyway.
My 4 day work week is probably the greatest decision I ever made in my life and I will never go back to working 5 days, if I haven’t mentioned that lately.
Creativity
- Pottery class
- Time for writing & making art projects
- Garage into studio
This goes hand- in-hand with freedom because having the time available to focus on pursuing creative interests is so important. Any time I’ve felt stuck and frustrated about how my time didn’t feel like my own, it was because what I really wanted to be doing was working on personal projects.
I am no longer taking a pottery class, but I have been doing a sketchbook exploration course that I am really enjoying, and I am consciously devoting more time to making art than I have in the last, say, 15 or 20 years.
Turning our garage into a studio space is a further extension of this because it gives me a dedicated space to focus on these pursuits. We made a good start on this project last year and intend to do a lot more on it this year. We might even finish it, but I’m not making any promises.
Fun
- Having ample time to use for my own interests and activities
- Not spending on ‘stuff’ so that I have money for experiences
I think the next time I do a Value Circle, I might not include this one because it is pretty well encompassed by Creativity and Freedom already.
That being said, I do think having fun is very important and this is the value that most relates to going dancing and enjoying experiences like live music, which are some of my favourite things. I think they could probably just as easily fit in under other categories though.
Health
- Habit stacking for yoga, walking and future HIIT circuit
- Get back to Eat To Live diet
I want to lead a healthy lifestyle and be in good shape to be able to enjoy all the things I want to do. This includes feeling mentally healthy and also making choices that are good for the environment as well as for me as an individual.
As for the specifics on this list, I haven’t done very well. This pandemic has definitely had a negative effect on my physical activity because I mostly stay home and my main form of exercise (social dancing) is not happening.
We did recently get back on the Nutritionarian Diet though, to try to clean up our act after a year (or two) of too many snacks and treats. So for the next few weeks or months, we are eating a ton of veggies mostly, and cutting out all animal products and processed foods. I do not intend to live the rest of my life without pastries, but going forward, I’ll be aiming for overall healthier eating to balance out the indulgences.
Community
- Swing dancing and Secret Balboa Club
- Involvement in jazz & New West
This pandemic has definitely made a lot of us think about how important the community part of our dance scene is, and while not much is happening event-wise, there have been a lot of conversations about what we want to see in the future.
During a brief window of optimism about the pandemic ending (this was last summer, so we all know how that turned out) I met up with some of my dance friends to brainstorm about what kind of community we wanted to be a part of. This led to applying for a grant with the City of New West to hold some events that would involve live jazz, local and emerging musicians, and dancing. We were approved for funding for 4 events, whenever dancing is allowed again. There are still a lot of unknowns, but it feels good to know that I am going to be contributing to a community-building project sometime in the future, and I’m excited to get started on it.
Overall, I enjoyed doing this exercise and I would recommend giving it a try. I think it’s a good assessment tool to evaluate if the life you’re living aligns with what’s important to you, and useful for providing direction if you find out that you’re all out whack.
Dancing In Irreverence 