Know What You Stand For
Professional Self-Coaching for Aligning Your Work with What You Value Most
Discover Why the Success That Feels Quietly Incomplete May Be Your Values Speaking — and How to Listen, Name What Matters and Align Your Work with It
Some of the clearest guidance in a working life arrives so quietly that it passes for tiredness.
The work goes well. The figures hold, the deadline is met, the praise arrives, and you are glad of it. Then, somewhere between the congratulations and the journey home, a small flatness settles — nothing you would call dissatisfaction, only a sense that the achievement has landed a little to one side of where you hoped. You put it down to a long quarter. To the time of year. To the ordinary cost of doing demanding work well.
And on some unremarkable weekday, something else catches you. A conversation that runs on past its allotted time. A problem you would happily have worked on for nothing. A moment of feeling entirely awake in the middle of a week that was otherwise routine. You file that too — under interest, under favour, under a pleasant distraction from your real responsibilities.
Both are information. The flatness and the energy are your working life telling you, in the only language it has, what you stand for. A busy, capable person rarely stops to listen.
For Dayo, the signals had been arriving for years. In his mid-forties he was Head of Financial Control at a well-regarded retail group — trusted by his Finance Director, relied upon by the external auditors, and known across the business for a precision that meant nothing he signed off ever came back to him. He had built that reputation one reconciled ledger at a time, and he was rightly proud of it. Then, in the week after the cleanest year-end audit the group had ever had, a neighbour's son asked him to look over a car finance agreement before he signed it. Dayo spent an afternoon translating the small print into plain English. He walked home lighter than he had felt after the sign-off, and he did not know what to make of that.
He did what an exacting person does with an unexplained difference: he did not adjust it away. He set out to understand it.
What Dayo found, over the months that followed, changed how he understood his own working life. The flatness and the energy pointed at the same things: a handful of values he had always held and never once put into his own words. Some of them his work honoured every day. Others had been waiting, without complaint, for somewhere to go. And the exactness he had begun to wonder whether he should soften turned out to be no obstacle to any of them. It was what he would bring to all of them. When Dayo eventually directed that same rigour towards community investment and financial literacy, he was not leaving his expertise behind. The exactness had never been the difficulty. It had been waiting for a purpose he could name.
This resource follows Dayo's journey from explaining his signals away, to listening to them, to putting his values into his own words, to testing them against his working life, and to letting them guide where his expertise goes.
As Dayo learns to treat his flatness and his energy as information, you will learn to treat yours the same way.
As he puts words to what he values, you will put words to what you value.
And as he lets those values guide where his expertise goes, you will be able to do the same with your own.
Know What You Stand For distils more than twenty years of professional coaching, writing and practice into a structured self-coaching resource. It gathers the thinking, the sequence, the questions and the practical guidance a coach would bring to helping someone recognise what they value and align their work with it, and places it in your hands to work through in your own space and time.
Who This Is For
Anyone whose work is going well and who senses that something in it is asking for attention.
Perhaps the achievements keep arriving and the satisfaction lags a step behind. Perhaps a certain kind of conversation, project or problem holds you in a way your usual responsibilities do not. Perhaps you have wondered whether the answer is a different role, a different sector or a different attitude, and have not been able to tell which. Perhaps you are comfortable in your role and curious about what, precisely, you are building it for.
Whatever your role, sector or stage, this resource helps you listen to what your working life has been telling you, put your values into your own words, and align your work with them at a pace that suits you.
Everything is designed to be completed by you, in your own space and time. All you need is somewhere to write — paper or screen, whichever suits you.
What You'll Learn
- How to read the quiet signals of flatness and energy in your work as information about what you value.
- How to look across your whole working life, rather than a single difficult week, for what lifts you and what draws little from you.
- How to put your values into your own words, so that each one carries a meaning that belongs to you.
- How to distinguish the values you hold firmly from those you hold more lightly, and what you will not trade.
- How to see where your existing expertise can serve what you value, without treating your career so far as a detour.
- How to speak about your values with the people your decisions touch, and take steps you can test before you commit.
- How to keep your values current as you and your work change.
How This Professional Self-Coaching Resource Works
Know What You Stand For is built in three parts, nine steps.
Part One — Recognise What Your Work Has Been Telling You
- Step 1 — The Signals You've Been Explaining Away
- Step 2 — Reading the Pattern Across Your Working Life
- Step 3 — Putting Your Values into Your Own Words
Part Two — Test What You've Named Against Your Working Life
- Step 4 — Where Your Work Already Honours What You Value
- Step 5 — Knowing What You Will Not Trade
- Step 6 — Seeing What Your Expertise Can Serve
Part Three — Align Your Work with What You Value
- Step 7 — Saying It Aloud to the People It Touches
- Step 8 — Testing Before You Commit
- Step 9 — Keeping Your Values True as You Change
Each step poses the questions that bring clarity and closes with time to write. That is what self-coaching means here: you find your own answers, read your own patterns and build your own understanding. By the final page, you will know what you stand for in words that are yours, see where your work already honours it, and have a way to align the rest.
Throughout the resource, you will follow Dayo, a corporate accountant whose work was going superbly and who came to see that his flatness and his energy were pointing at the same set of values. At each step, you'll see how Dayo worked through it before working through it yourself.
About Professional Self-Coaching
Self-coaching is the ability to guide yourself through every part of your WorkLife journey — through stable times and times of change and uncertainty. It is asking yourself the questions that bring clarity, finding your own answers, and acting on what you learn.
Each Professional Self-Coaching resource is created for one important professional moment. One purpose. One challenge. One outcome. The thinking, frameworks and practical guidance within each resource are distilled from the School of WorkLife programmes — a body of work developed through twenty years of practice — and focused entirely on helping you prepare for the moment in front of you. Every resource strengthens the three abilities at the heart of School of WorkLife: self-coaching, self-directing and self-leadership.
Know What You Stand For is drawn from Values Alignment: Career Transition Guide — the complete programme exploring how understanding our core values can guide WorkLife decisions and help us align our expertise with what matters to us.
About School of WorkLife
School of WorkLife creates story-based learning resources that help people think more clearly about the challenges, conversations and decisions that shape a working life.
Each story is drawn from real WorkLife situations and developed into practical learning experiences that combine narrative, reflection and structured application.
Author's Note
The stories I write are based on real WorkLife challenges, obstacles and successes. Persons and companies portrayed in the stories are not based on real people or entities.
Carmel O' Reilly www.schoolofworklife.com