More of This, Please

Hi friend,

This weekend I celebrated my birthday in my absolute preferred manner – at home with my husband and absolutely no plans or fitted clothes.  

When it came time to blow out my candles, after hours of dancing and cooking in the kitchen in pajamas (my favorite way to commemorate any special occasion – or run of the mill Friday or Saturday, if I’m being honest), the only wish I could think of was, “More of this, please.”  

Because even though there are many “wants” that I pursue, and even sometimes chase, on a daily basis, in moments of true presence and clarity I can feel on a palpable level that my heart is full and that I have everything I really need.

But it wasn’t always like this.

Indeed, I vividly recall just how achingly I longed for this feeling on my birthday nine years ago, after yet another year of feeling empty, painfully isolated, and petrified that that would always be the case.

At that point, I would’ve appeared to an outside observer as being a successful law student with an impressive runway of post-grad professional positions and a world of opportunity ahead of me.  But on the inside, I felt like a scared hamster in a pressure cooker, destined to spend my days chasing things I wasn’t sure I even wanted, while feeling like I might imminently explode (from anxiety if not fatal loneliness).

Fortunately, those feelings led me to see a therapist who gave me an assignment that totally changed my life.

She asked me to survey a list of values, identify the ones that were most important to me, and then reflect on the extent to which what I was doing with my time and my life was honoring those values.

While it sounds pretty simple, this experience was transformative for me for two reasons.

The first is that it caused me to acknowledge for the very first time that I was spending inordinate amounts of time and energy on work that was not only not furthering, but was actually completely contrary to my core values of love, connection, and authenticity.

But even more alarming, it made me realize that I had literally not once until that point ever paused to consider what my core values WERE – much less to direct my professional efforts in order to further or at the very least accommodate them.  Instead, for basically my entire life, it had always been about what I thought I SHOULD be doing because it was prestigious or seemingly valued by others.

In that moment, driven by either determination or cognitive dissonance, I resolved to take the courageous (and completely terrifying) step of at least striving to live a life that was guided by my values rather than my fear.  

And since then, I have made a million changes and decisions – some mini and some rather massive – that have brought me to where I am today, which is a place that I feel deeply lucky and grateful to be.

Do I ever falter and let my fear lure me toward that pressure cooker? 

Absolutely. 

But I am now armed with a compass and toolkit of strategies that help me find my way home.  

And I have learned that while the outside noise will probably always suggest otherwise, at the end of the day, it is honoring my values – nothing more and nothing less – that leaves me feeling whole.

So in the spirit of birthdays, this week, I’d like to give you the gift of helping you identify and more fully honor your core values through a Values Discovery Guide I developed to walk you through this process.

I hope that you find it as life-changing, or really life-making, as I did, or that it at the very least inspires you to take even a tiny step that helps you feel more whole.

And, as always, if this resonates with you, or if there’s any way I can support you in this effort, please don’t hesitate to reach out to let me know. Until then, I am rooting for you.

With love,

Jordana