Chad Silverstein explains how personal principles and core values guide your actions and decisions. He draws on insights from working with clients and colleagues to show why having clear principles matters.
Chapters
I was just practicing this morning with one of my clients about their principles, and I'm going through a rinse of mine right now. And yesterday I was with Chet at Ohio State. We were coaching some of the teams and talking about principles, and Chet gave his example, and he does it in the book. And I've heard him say it for over a decade now about his top three. But I heard something yesterday. It was a little bit of a nuance that I thought was really cool. He said when he wakes up in the morning, before his feet even hit the ground, he throws up a prayer. And. And he asked for help. He asked God for help. For him to be able to model the way and show people how to get the job done and model what he's coaching others to do, to embrace pain and suffering no matter how hard things get. And then truth and love, to be able to tell people the truth without having any fear. And he feels it as an obligation and a responsibility that he has as a builder, and he lives it, and I love that. And what I really like about this, the nuance of it, is that everything in the build you'd core essentials here is tied together. And this is his process. This is something that he does that's unique to him, that is his reminder. He does it every day. And I was with a very close friend of mine not so long ago, Brett Kaufman, who's a Buildily client, and he reads his worldview every single day. And I remember he said it, and I was like, really? You really do that? He's like, yeah. So I don't know. You have to have a process. You have to have it. So we'll get the process eventually. But I think it was just nice to see it and see them model the way as they were telling me about it, and then showing me how they get the job done. Because you don't just write this stuff down and then forget about it. Your principles, they define how you want to live. They're your most important core values. They're the things that, you know, what you're willing to run through walls for, that you're willing to walk away from, you're willing to get fired for. You know, it could be ethically, it could be at home. These are things that you, you know, you bolt these down in your core. And we start this off by just rinsing a long list of principles, things that mean something to us that's really important. These are just think of them like core values, right? So you can think of things like honesty and Integrity, all these good things. And these things are values themselves. They don't go away, you know, if you lie, you lie. If you, you know. But you have to decide what the most in principles are for you so that you can live them. And then what we do is we go through this process of rinsing them down. Sometimes people put a sentence or a paragraph and they throw up all their thoughts behind the principle. And eventually you start to see a couple will pop out at you and you think like, these are mine. These are the ones that I really want to hold on to dearly. And it's not that, you know, someone like Chet doesn't have a whole long list of principles that he lives, but he's got those three that are his bolted down principles. And you're aiming at that. You're aiming to get a handful of these that you can feel like they guide you, they're your compass. And, you know, you can pretty much kind of filter through how you show up in the world and how you act based on being either aligned or having a collision with your principal. So you'll see some other examples in the community. A couple of mine. One of mine is a good eye. A good eye meaning not to judge people and to try to see the best in people. I have once the golden rule, which is treat people the way I want to be treated. And so I kind of put like words around mine that are, that are, you know, make it really distinctly mine. I like to feel really connected to everything that's in my documents and all my work that I'm doing. But there's nothing wrong with the core values that you would just, you know, see a list of these and just pick the ones that mean the most to you, as long as they're meaningful to you. So start by just rinsing out a long list of all the values that you feel are important. Start to narrow that down over time. Start to put some words around it, describe them, know why, and revisit and just keep, you know, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat until you have that list so super clear, laser focused, and you can almost just like rattle it off. And you do that because it's genuine and it means something to you. You know, again, you're not just writing words on paper and you're not doing this for anyone other than yourself. But when you combine this with some of the other things that we're going to be doing, it starts to really show some strength and who you are and you'll start to kind of get that feedback from people, but you won't need to talk about it, which is really the cool thing. So get clear on what your principles are. Think of them like core values. What are the most important core values in your life that you would prioritize more important than other ones? Make a long list of these and share them if you want some feedback. And make sure you look at some of the examples and rinse and repeat.
