🏔 Uncover Your Values to Guide Your Brand, Business, and Life
This is the first step toward authenticity
🥳 Hey, Kasey here! Welcome to this week’s 🏔High Growth Founders🏔 newsletter.
If you are a builder, creator, or project starter who embraces life’s challenges to extract the growth lessons within them, you are a High Growth Founder.
And this newsletter is for you.
I sometimes have affiliate links, but only for products I genuinely love and use myself. If you haven’t already, subscribe to get each issue delivered to your inbox.👇
In this Week’s Issue:
Social Writing Bootcamp: Check out my new cohort-based course with Erica Schneider
Growth Insight: Uncover your values to guide your brand, business, and life
High Growth Founders Episode: The Focus Formula to Kill Shiny Thing Syndrome and Get Sh*t Done
Growth Tool I Love: A/B test your Twitter profile
Social Writing Bootcamp:
Sign-up for my course with the brilliant Erica Schneider, a professional writer, editor, and digital writing trainer, has been live for less than 1 week and we already have 15 incredible students.
And we’d love you to join us.
We’ll go deep into:
How to uncover your WHY and craft a personal brand theme that grabs attention and feels good.
Building an innovative idea engine for your content
Write scroll-stopping hooks without the clickbait
Write a body where readers devour every word
Editing to turn good first drafts into masterpieces
We launch November 14th.
Learn more about the Social Writing Bootcamp
And let me know if cost is an issue. We have some options.
Growth Insight:
Uncover Your Values to Guide Your Brand, Business, and Life
For years, I thought I knew my values. People would ask and I’d spout off some random platitudes and ideas that sounded nice.
It was bullsh*t.
It wasn’t until my values — my real ones, not the surface-level nonsense I believed — were violated that I realized there might be more to this story.
And as I started to talk more about this realization, I began to understand how common it was to avoid authentically and meaningfully answering this question. But if you want to build a life and business you absolutely love, aligning it to your values is non-negotiable.
How do you define your values?
You cannot uncover your values by undergoing an intellectual exercise. By thinking about them in the abstract.
Instead, plum the depths of your past. Don’t choose your values. Find them.
First, write out your life story.
Carve out some time, sit down and write it all out. Not a list of events, but the inflection points throughout your life.
Chart the peaks and valleys.
Write out the stories of experiences that led to life-changing decisions. The moments where, looking back, you realized life took on new meaning or direction.
Go into detail. Remember how you felt during those experiences, how they changed you, what they meant for you.
Now, extract their meaning
Once you write these stories from your life, reflect on them, and begin to extract what they meant for you.
The lessons you learned
The changes you ultimately made
The values you gleaned
The immense value of this process is why I speak so often about harnessing the power of adversity. When we take the time to understand the impact of our life experiences, we can use those lessons to inform the rest of our lives.
We can take those values and transform them into the fuel that propels us forward in a more purpose-driven direction.
Next, distill them to their core
Most likely, you’ll uncover 12-15 values from the above exercise. Your first instinct may be to name all of them as your Values. But that’s too many.
We cannot be meaningfully driven by 15 distinct values.
Instead, start to group them into categories. You’ll realize many are rather similar to each other and it makes sense to unite them under a unifying umbrella.
Narrow down your list to 4-5 core values.
These are the values that have been with you in some form throughout your life. They are part of who you are, but perhaps you didn’t fully learn their lessons until later. These values are the beliefs and causes you would fight for.
They have the gravity and heft that grounds you in life — or at least they could if you let them.
Make these Values your North Star
Just knowing your values is not enough.
You must find ways to let them guide you.
Inform how you show up in the world
Consider them before you make important decisions
Use them to reinvent yourself without losing who you are
Let them to direct your business strategy and team culture
Find ways to embody them in your relationships and work
Help you direct your personal brand theme
Write them down.
Look at them often. Think about them. Write about how they affect your work, relationships, and life.
Make these values a core part of who you are and how you shape your future.
Does someone you know need to read this post?
Share it with them. Sharing is caring.
High Growth Founders Episode: The Focus Formula
We talked about this in last week’s HGF newsletter, but in this episode, I go deeper into explaining where this idea comes from and how to put it into action.
Remove the guesswork and emotion from decision making
Know what activities will maximize your impact
Stop the overwhelm of having too much on your plate
Listen Now. Website | Apple | Spotify
Growth Tool I Love: Birdy
This one is a new discover, and frankly, I freaking love it. You know my love of data, and this tool makes it easy to A/B test your Twitter profile!
Bio
Profile Pic
Banner
Name
Location
Website
You can get super data-driven to see what prompts people to click and follow.
Plus, with the free version you can test your bio, which gets you started!
This was a short one since my production team had an error and a new podcast episode did NOT go live. Dang it!
But I’ve been busy getting this new course going and talking to tons of people about it. Hope you’ll check it out and maybe even join us.
In love and growth,
Kasey