Teaching from Your Values

What are your top ten values? What about your top three? Are your values as a teacher the same as the values in other parts of your life? Living in your values and teaching from your values is essential to living a balanced, healthy, happy life.

In this episode, I talk about my values and how my life changed when I started being true to them and give you the tools you need to discover your true values.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to the Art Class Curator podcast. I am Cindy Ingram, your host and the founder of Art Class Curator and the Curated Connections library. We’re here to talk about teaching art with purpose and inspiration from the daily delight to creativity, to the messy mishaps that come with being a teacher, whether you’re driving home from school or cleaning up your classroom for the 15th time today. Take a second, take a deep breath, relax those shoulders and let’s get started.

Hello everybody. It’s Cindy Ingram, back for another episode of the Art Class Curator podcast. Now last week on the podcast we had Joan Marie and she to me is such an amazing example of living from your values and working from your values and I love that she talked about that, kind of near the end of that podcast episode where she spent her whole life sort of floundering, trying to figure out exactly where she stood. It wasn’t until she realized what her values are and started doing her art and doing her teaching from the place of those values that she really began to get into that flow.

What Are Values?

And what are values? So values are basically the things you believe, they are your fundamental beliefs and they guide your decision making. So through the lens of your values, you’ve made all sorts of decisions in your life. Whether or not you’re actively aware that those values were helping you with those decisions. They’re the sort of top priorities in your life. They’re the non-negotiables. They’re the things that when you’re in integrity with your values, you’re in a state of peace. You’re in a state of flow and ease.

I’ve been in several programs over the last few years and many of them have done this in many different ways, helping you discover what your values are.

Discovering Your Values

One of them is, Brené Brown has a list of values on the web. You can look at a list of values, and then you can narrow it down to your top three to five and just look through the list, highlight all the ones that you think could be contenders.

Another exercise that you can try and I love this one—Lisa Carpenter shared this one with me—you can think about a dinner party that you are going to hold and you want to think about what are the top three or five people that you would automatically want to invite to your dinner party.

And then you think of three to five people that you would not want at your dinner party. You are dis-inviting them to your dinner party. And then you go through and think about, well what makes those people who they are? Why do you want them to come to your party versus why do you not want them to come to your party?

Another values exercise that I heard about through Jim Fortin gives you scenarios like, okay, I’m going to give you the cure to world peace, but you have to give up one of your values to do it. Which one would you choose? So he gives a bunch of scenarios for that and then it helps you really narrow down.

Personal Reflection

To give you some examples of this, I will share what my values are and give you some examples of where I was out of integrity with those values and how knowing them allows me to really understand situations that I have been put in.

My top four values are connection, wellbeing, authenticity, and experience. I recently had an experience a couple of weeks ago where I did some travel and I met with a group of amazing people. It was highly connected, very authentic, my values were very much firmly in this space. However, one of my values is wellbeing and what I didn’t do in this situation is build in enough time to focus on my wellbeing.

Closing Thoughts

My challenge to you is to think about what your values are. For example, Joan’s values were creativity. And so when her teacher told her that she wasn’t creative, it really hurt her in a deep way because it was something really important to her and that she found her creativity through teaching. I want you to think about what are those things that are your values, how are you using them in your life? How are you using them in your teaching life and are you in integrity with your values?

Thank you so much for listening to the Art Class Curator podcast. Next week on the podcast we have an awesome guest named Dan Hill who does facial coding to study emotions. I can’t wait to share that with you. Have a wonderful day.