Last week I listened to the audibook of Dare to Lead by Brené Brown. The second part of the book is called Living Into Our Values and it changed my attitude about values.

I love values. I have journaled extensively about my values. I’ve talked about values with my therapist many times. I’ve probably blogged about my values here (but I don’t have the time to dig through old posts now) (please god, will distance learning ever end?) After several months of work, I identified my list of twenty-ish values. Hooray! I knew all a person could possibly know about her values.

Brown lists over one hundred possible values that a person might hold and then leaves blanks for the reader to fill in if their values are not listed. Ooh, I though, while walking to Starbucks. Maybe I can pick up some new values for my list! But there was a catch. According to Brown:

The task is to pick the two [values] that you hold most important. I know this is tough, because almost everyone we’ve done this work with (including me) wants to pick somewhere between ten and fifteen. I can soften the blow by suggesting that you start by circling those fifteen. But you can’t stop until you’re down to two core values.

Dare to Lead, pg. 187.

What the eff? Two core values? Preposterous! Maybe that works for Brown, but I have way more than two core values. But I kept listening:

[T]he research participants who demonstrated the most willingness to rumble with vulnerability and practice courage tethered their behavior to one or two values, not ten. This makes sense for a couple of reasons. First, I see it the same way that I see Jim Collins’s mandate ‘If you have more than three priorities, you have no priorities.’ At some point, if everything on the list is important, than nothing is truly a driver for you. It’s just a gauzy list of feel-good words.

Second, I’ve taken more than ten thousand people through this work, and when people are willing to stay with the process long enough to whittle their big list down to two, they always come to the same conclusion that I did with my own values process: My two core values are where all of the ‘second tier’ circles values are tested.

Id. at 187-89.

Oh. That actually makes a lot of sense. I kept listening and thinking and started to see that having twenty values is counterproductive. If I’m having a tough conversation or dealing with a tricky issue, it’s hard to think through twenty-ish values. I’m bound to forget something and will abandon the process before I’m even halfway done. I did all this work to identify my twenty-ish values … and now I hardly ever think about them because twenty-ish is just too overwhelming.

I decided to do the work and whittle my big list down to two. I’ll write more about that tomorrow. Right now, I have to go chop some veggies for the chicken curry I’m making for dinner!