Writing a Ho‘ohana Draft part 2: Enjoy the How-To of your Values.

Welcome back!

Did you complete last Tuesday’s exercise?

If not, or if you are newly joining us, I encourage you to start there, and then come back for this next part. This entire program is self-paced, and this article will be up for a week before the next one. Go to: Writing a Ho‘ohana Draft part 1: Your Intention and Your Personal Values.

If so, terrific! Let’s move on. We’re going to tackle your Ho‘ohana draft part 2 with the very specific strategy to have you enjoy the value alignment we are designing for you.

This is what we have accomplished with last Tuesday’s Coaching:

You have defined your predominant values, so you will always have them top of mind as your ethical-for-me filters. When you have a Language of Intention with how you articulate your values, you “walk your talk” and your personal belief system very naturally matches up to your talk. (You have value-alignment.)

Now what shall you apply this newly designed value-alignment to?

We will start with two areas that likely affect you pervasively; if you invest in these exercises and work on them you can achieve pretty dramatic short-term results. They are your responsibilities (Kuleana) and your self-care (Mālama). To start, we’ll set the stage with what I promised you last time; joy.

Where do you find JOY in the work you do right now?

I think that joy and happiness are vastly underrated and underestimated in their importance in our lives. We spend so much time “earning the right” whether in someone else’s eyes or our own, that we don’t get to enjoy the fruits of our labors nearly soon enough. And sadly, for some people, that tomorrow we were working so hard to arrive at never comes. I slugged it out through a good portion of my own life, and if I could do it again I wouldn’t; I’d be a lot more selfish about being joyful, realizing that the happy person is someone everyone else prefers to be associate themselves with too!

So here’s what I want you to do:
With a fresh sheet of paper in front of you and pen in hand, take a moment for this quick mind-sweep: Answer these questions one at a time, writing down your answers.

1. What are the things in life which bring you the most joy?
2. When do you find yourself smiling and laughing the most?
3. Who are the people you are happiest being with?
4. Pull out the values you identified last Tuesday: What values do your “happy people” seem to share with you? Do they invoke their values or their happiness and contentment any differently than you do?
5. During which times do you feel completely stress and worry free?
6. Are there actions you can readily think of to take, so that the stress-free times you just wrote down will happen more often for you?
7. What kind of freedoms do you need? Try to answer the question before you click if you decide to take this next link...
   (Extra-credit reading: In Search of the Ultimate Freedom.)
8. Conversely (to no. 7) what kind of connections or constancy do you need to maintain?

Reckoning with Responsibility

At this point, you may be thinking, “Okay Rosa, that was interesting (maybe even fun), but let’s get real; this is the equivalent of weekend and vacation stuff; this is not the every day for me.”

You know what I think holds us back from giving in to our complete desire for happiness? Our sense of responsibility. There is so much we don’t “get to” do, because we feel we “have to” do something else first or instead. In the interest of “being a bigger person” (instead perhaps, of being a better person) we do what we feel we must – we work on a collection of jobs that are in that “have to” category, instead of the work that we’d list in our “get to” category.

Yeah, it sucks.

It’s unrealistic for me to tell you to go easy on yourself and the responsibilities you have accepted ownership of. You won’t. So, we have to reckon with them. The best way we can reckon with our responsibilities, is to write them down and deal with them. This is how:

• In the Ho‘ohana way of working, we are going to deal with the most important ones first: The ones that are in direct alignment with our values. Those will be our priorities.

• In the Ho‘ohana way of working, any responsibilities we cannot shed (either giving them to someone else or renegotiating our agreements with them), will be worked on within the filter of our values. In other words, we will shift our default how-to approach, whatever it might be, using value-alignment.

Creating an Action Plan; no Action, no Ho‘ohana

I so love the word Ho‘ohana, for it infers energy and action: To ho‘o is to make something happen. Whenever I say Ho‘ohana out loud it gets me to move in some way. So let’s do that.

Pull your notebook out again, with another clean sheet in front of you. Pick up your pen.

1. List all your responsibilities, but without describing them; just list them using as few words as possible (you’ll know your own shorthand).
2. Next I want you to pull out those 5 values that you chose as your Ho‘ohana focus values last week. After each responsibility, write down the value that you feel aligns closest to your intention with fulfilling that responsibility.
3. Now come your descriptions. Now is the time to describe how you will meet your responsibilities, however you are going to do some work here, for you are going to describe the actions you wish to take with the value language you have learned so far from Managing with Aloha.

There is a 4th step I recommend in this process when I work with people directly, for coaching can help (especially with any “yeah but” hedging and in creating more positive expectancy). It takes more time, becoming a continual work in progress in the form of a 4th step to flesh out step 3 with some concrete action plans. For our purposes this month I will just share the strategy with you, for let’s face it, there is only so much we can do in a self-paced, self-coaching plan here on MWAC.

The strategy is this: Define your constants versus your desired change with each responsibility.

• GOAL: Begin with the end in mind, i.e. imagine the responsibility is now fulfilled.

• CONSTANTS: What stayed the same because you have worked on maintaining them well? Those are your desired constants.

• CHANGE: What changed, because it had to change in order for things to improve?

Those two things, your constants and your change, combine into your Action Plan.

The nourishing Joy of Self-Care

I’d wager that virtually all those responsibilities you reckoned with had to do with obligations you feel you have to other people, didn’t they. Easy bet for me; that’s normal.

The job I am accepting responsibility with here however, is getting you back to the JOY part, even if in baby steps. This is how we’re going to do it: With the Hawaiian value of Mālama.

The more you take care of yourself, the more capacity you have to care for others while fulfilling your Ho‘ohana.

Here is a very simple visual for you: Think of yourself as a watering can, and think of those affected by your responsibilities as flowers in a garden. If you have no water to give them, they will not bloom well, if at all.

How you can keep yourself filled with cool, refreshing, life-giving water?

What follows is the beginning of a Mālama Affirmation Statement; I’d like you to finish it with a listing of daily or weekly actions that will make it a true statement for you. I have given you a few examples in the parentheses below – these are examples, and not suggestions. Replace them with your own self-care wants.

I am equally committed to my own Mālama, for I understand that I must be healthy before I can affect those I lead in a positive way. As I ‘Imi ola, and seek my best possible life, these are the commitments I make to myself: They are sources of well-being which complete me, fulfill my needs, and contribute positively to my Ho‘ohana. 

I will… (call everyone in my family living away from me over the weekend; I know I need that connection)
I will… (exercise for at least 30 minutes per day; I know it gives me more energy)
I will… (stop skipping lunch and/or eating it at my desk- I know I need to take the break to be more effective as the day continues)
I will… (read more books and less newspapers; I miss my learning and want more positive messages seeping into my psyche)
I will… (begin my sleep an hour earlier than I have been every other night from now on)
I will… (get out in my garden and plant something; that has always given me a great deal of satisfaction)
I will… (do this about once a month! I have a long list and can rotate some of these things! Why settle for just a few of them?)

Between today and next Tuesday when we wrap up, do those things you have listed as often as you possibly can. (A tip: Write them so they ARE realistic and possible— set yourself up for success.)

By the way… remember our new Language of Intention? What you have listed can all be thought of as ‘tasks’ or ‘jobs,’ and your achieving them is part of the ‘work’ of your Ho‘ohana.

Next Tuesday is our last one for September, and we will wrap this up by putting all the different exercise pieces together as your Ho‘ohana statement of new possibility!

We Ho‘ohana together, Kākou.

~Rosa

Related Reading: We have done an entire month’s study here on both Kuleana and Mālama; to learn more about these values, see these Day One Essays.

• Kuleana, the Value of Personal Responsibility
• Mellow Maintenance Mālama

Photo Credits, both on Flickr: White Watering Can by Joe Edwards, and Watering Our Plants... by chichacha.

David Masters (of our Ho‘ohana Community, and a Flickr buddy of mine) has started a Flickr Group for watering can photos that gives me such a good feeling every time I scroll through it: I am seeking out watering cans with my own camera now so that I can contribute one day soon! The photo to the left is from David: Click through and say Aloha!

Comments

[Rosa Say]

Just read an article called, *Live Deliberately: 15 Ways to Stop Life Simply Happening to You* and I think this bit, included as #2, makes a great case for why most of us have to spend more time thinking about our own Mālama and self-care:

“2. Stop Hanging out.
‘Free Time’ is a wonderful thing. The only problem is that it is not actually free. One way or another, we had to earn it. So to let this finite recourse just slip away is a terrible thing. I think it is essential for all of us to have down time. Even time where we are just watching the clouds go by. I would just like to encourage you to make sure that the results of this time spent are positive. Make sure that you are truly benefiting from it. Because if you find that you are just wasting your time or ‘killing time’, then you seriously need to re-think the way you relax.”

If you would like to read the entire article, you will find it here, written by Eric Hamm at PickTheBrain:
http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/live-deliberately/

LIVE DELIBERATELY is a great mantra within a Language of Intention!