There's probably something in your life that used to energize you and doesn't anymore. You still do it. You haven't quit, and you're not planning to. It just isn't fun. Somewhere along the way it turned into a chore.
In the video at the top of this post, I tell the story of how the gym stopped working for me, and what I changed.
For me it was the gym.
I've been a gym guy my whole adult life. Five or six days a week, an hour or an hour and a half each time, and once you build in travel time, it's a solid two-hour commitment. I felt terrible on the days that I didn't go.
Then it stopped working.
I turned 60. I couldn't bench press as much weight as I used to, but I kept trying anyway, so I kept getting hurt. I'd injure myself, then recover, and I was grumpy the entire time I was recovering because I couldn't go to the gym while I was injured. Then I'd go back and injure myself again.
I didn't want to be there anymore. I was tempted to quit.
I finally figured it out in a session with my coach. For years I'd been telling everybody, and myself, that I went to the gym for the value of Health & Well-Being.
Sounded right. But it turned out to be the value of Social Standing. I wanted people to look at me and say, “Damn, you're in amazing shape.” I wanted to be the most buff guy in the room.
The gym gave me Social Standing for decades, reliably, week after week. What changed is that at 60, recovering from cancer, Social Standing stopped being available to me in that way. Biology gets a vote. I can't lift weights the same way I used to. I can't be the guy in there trying to get big anymore. Instead, I have to be the guy in there making sure the wheels don't fall off the plane.
I didn't need to quit. What I needed was to stop measuring this behavior by how well it aligned with the value of Social Standing, and instead notice other values.
I shifted and made going to the gym about the value of Health & Well-Being. I made it about another one of my important values: Friendships. Noticing those values gave me the permission (and awareness) I needed to change how I was working out and stop injuring myself over and over again.
Now going to the gym energizes me again, and I'm not reluctantly dragging myself there. I just had to change what I was going for.
So, how can you catch this in your life before it starts injuring you?
When you're aligned with your values, one way you can tell is by what's missing. When it's over you aren't relieved that you managed to push yourself through it. Instead, you're in the car wondering when you can do it again. It doesn't mean that it's always going to be easy, but it does mean that it feels worth it.
I hope I never stop going to the gym, but I just stopped doing it for a value that no longer served me in this circumstance and did it for other values instead.
So if something in your life has gone flat, ask which of your values it used to feed, and then ask which of your other values it still feeds.
You don't get to pick up new values. The ones you have are the ones you've had since you were young, and they aren't going to change.
What changes is which one you point a behavior at.
Everything gets easier when you know What Matters Most.
My new book walks you through all kinds of ways to identify (and use) your values, and it's available for pre-order now. It's called The Values Map, and I would be very grateful if you pre-ordered a copy. ❤️
