Reading time ~ 4 minutes
Sometimes people in your life have a hard time understanding choices you make.
There is a woman I knew, we’ll call her Jill, who was frustrated with a friend of hers, who wasn’t available as often as Jill expected her to be. The friend was happy to hang out with Jill during the day, but every time Jill invited her to dinner or an evening meeting or event, she was turned down. The friend’s explanation was that she wanted to spend time with her family. This made no sense to Jill, who couldn’t understand why her friend didn’t want to escape the confines of home like she did. What Jill however didn’t understand were her friend’s values. As outsiders we can likely read this story and reason that it’s not that Jill’s friend didn’t value their friendship, it’s just that she didn’t value it as much as she valued her relationship with her family. From this perspective, we can see that neither party here was in the wrong. These woman just valued different things. Jill valued the companionship of friends in the evenings and her friend chose to value her family relationships in the evenings.
As we simplify our lives we’re regularly faced with value propositions. For instance, do we value holding onto Grandma’s china cabinet more than we value open space in our home? Of course, what we choose to value may differ significantly from what others might choose.
As we began our process of minimizing plenty of people agreed with our decision to move closer to the city. These were likely people who valued time as much as we do, and they were envious when my husband talked about shortening his commute from forty minutes to eight minutes.
Fewer people understood our decision to move from a beautiful large house in a safe suburb to a much smaller house in a less safe urban setting. While we value safety as much as the next person, we’re ok with being more vigilant in exchange for the walkability and amazing park access our new neighborhood provides. We’re avid walkers and not many people we know value neighborhood walkability as much as we do. The much smaller house is in alignment with our desire for less stuff and a smaller carbon footprint.
Far fewer people yet have understood my latest move to bring more simplicity to my life. That move is ditching the dye bottle after ten years of coloring my hair and letting my hair transition to its natural color, which is turning out to be a funky hodgepodge of salt and pepper dark brown, gray and silver.
I’m not taking some kind of unique stand here, many women let their hair go gray, just not many 51-year-old women I know. While I have supportive friends and family, I’m surprised by how many women have taken issue with my making this choice. For example, my previous stylist of ten years was not supportive of my decision, insisting throughout the year I contemplated this change that I wouldn’t like the results. I ended up changing stylists. One somewhat rude acquaintance flat out told me I was making a bad decision and it would look awful. Other acquaintances just stare and I’m guessing wonder what’s getting in the way of my addressing the skunk stripe gone wild that has spread across the top of my head. This decision though, like other decisions we’ve made to simplify is deeply grounded in my values, in this case my values of Time, Financial Security and Authenticity. Therefore, it’s the right decision for me, no matter what these other women think.
Some insight into how this decision relates to my values:
• TIME: If you color extra-stubborn gray hair like mine, you know it’s a time consuming process. Each coloring appointment, including drive time, cost me about three hours of my life per month or approximately 36 hours per year. In contrast, a haircut costs me about 1.5 hours of time every eight weeks or so, for a total of 9 hours per year. I can think of many more enjoyable ways to spend those 27 hours than sitting in a salon with unpleasant smelling chemicals on my head.
• FINANCIAL SECURITY: All of those trips to the salon while I was coloring also added up in dollars spent – about $1200 dollars per year. Tack on another $100 or so for expensive color extending shampoos and products like ColorMark, and I was looking at an expenditure of over $1300 per year to maintain my chestnut colored locks. Now that I’m no longer coloring I spend about 25% of what I spent on haircare just a year ago.
• AUTHENTICITY: The changes in our lives since we started our minimizing journey have been grounded in our need to be our authentic selves. My authentic self is a woman who has plenty of gray hair and I am ready to embrace that person and share her with the world.
Is my goal here to get you to stop coloring your hair? Of course not. My goal is to encourage you to consider your own values as you minimize your life, as opposed to someone else’s values. You’re the one you need to wake up with every morning, hang out with every day, and go to bed with every night. Building awareness of your values and how they relate to your own life goals will support you in more ways than you can imagine, but here are three to get you started:
1) Being aware of your values can make the processes of prioritization and decision-making easier.
2) Knowing your values and working to live in harmony with them can support you in making better, more thoughtful decisions.
3) Living in concert with your core values can give you the feeling you are living in integrity and moving towards being the individual you most want to be.
As always, thanks for reading and I’d love to hear your thoughts. How do you envision your values impacting choices you’ll make during the minimizing process? If you’ve already minimized, how did your knowledge of your values factor into your decision making?
~ Andrea
p.s. If you’ve not given much thought to exactly what your values are I’m happy to forward you an exercise I use with coaching clients to help them get clearer on what they value in life. Just use the comment section below to let me know you’d like me to email it to you – don’t worry, your comment will remain private, as all comments are reviewed by me before they are posted on this site.
p.p.s. I’m eight months into the graying process and have grown out about five inches of my color, which makes for an interesting ombré look given the lower two thirds of my hair is a faded-out chestnut brown. My husband thinks its kinda cool. I love it because it’s the authentic me.