A Tool to Chart a New Direction

The Hartman Value Profile as a tool to navigate change.

The first two times I took the HVP, I found it most helpful as a tool to see myself more accurately. Next, I experienced it as a tool to navigate change in my life.

At the beginning of last year, I was on the edge of entering my 30’s and I finally had my dream job. It was an ideal opportunity that eventually unfolded into everything I wanted in a career. I was told to write my own job description with specific instructions to “make it a list of only the things you wake up every day excited to do.”

This was a big, fat win after 18 years of work that I largely hadn’t loved. I found my “career” and now I could finally relax and put my energy into work that really mattered. 

But less than a month into the new dream title, I realized there simply wasn’t time for relaxing, and I barely had much energy. Like an old iPhone, my battery drained quickly and I lived on 10 percent. I was behind a computer—what felt like—all the time, and on track for a future of more time behind a computer.

Each time I finished a project, the main thing I experienced was a sense of relief that it was over and I could now start the next. I’d also failed to notice that after years of considering after-dark hours the best time to do focused work, I was starting to prefer being asleep at 1 am, not sitting at my computer getting a head start on the next project.

I was running on grit and grind. My work wasn’t sustainable, and neither was my life.

When I first realized this, I sensed it was my first glimpse of a long path that could end in a crash and cause a lot of burns. I closed my computer for an hour that afternoon and went for a walk on the mile-long trail that looped through the woods behind my house. 

I walked a few loops and wondered, What would it be like to enjoy the process, not simply wishing for it to be over already?

I made the loop daily. I started asking questions like, Could I create a more regenerative way of living my daily life, so that I am re-energized through the same things I pour effort and energy into?

A month of this and my questions led to something like, Can I find a way to live and work that builds my resilience in each season, rather than leaving me short, on edge, and depleted?

The ideas and questions were both rattling and exciting, but not enough to move me to do anything about it. Friends asked if this was really still the dream, but I couldn’t imagine anything better. From my perspective, I finally could give a nice answer to people who asked what I did for work. I found my place in the world, I belonged to the world of work-that-matters, and I wasn’t about to let that feeling go.

The real rub happened when I noticed that, despite telling myself I was keeping this pace to be helpful to others, I was more a burden than a gift when running on fumes. My preaching wasn’t lining up with my path. A few months of walking laps with this reality was uncomfortable, and finally I quit my job.

I didn’t have much of a plan. It was something like this:

1. Find a reason or purpose for lasting well through hard things and hard seasons. 

2. Create a more regenerative way of living my everyday life. 

3. Figure out a new process that would help me become more resilient through life, rather than more depleted.

To figure out what is worth lasting well through hard things, I started doing hard things. I got ready to hike up and down a section of the Appalachian Trail and then to ride a hundred miles on a bicycle in an event called Hotter N Hell.

I decided to plant some herbs in my backyard, get a few laying hens, and learn how to grow things in a “regenerative” way. I figured if I learned to work with nature the way it was designed to work, I could take those same principles and live my life in a more natural way.

For the resilient part, I started the only place I knew to start. I upped the temperature in my sauna and added a few more ice bath sessions to the schedule.

(I also added in a quick parasite-virus-chemical-fungal cleanse that I thought would take 12 weeks and ended up taking 13 months, but, frankly, that’s not a story I want to tell on the internet.)

All to say, a few months later when I took the HVP for the third time, I was somewhere in the middle of icing my toes that went numb while hiking, cleaning chicken poop off the deck, recruiting my sister to help dig garden plots in the backyard, and trying to drink enough electrolytes while I cycled through Mississippi summer afternoons.

The action I took to create more balance in my life resulted in a more balanced sense of self-perspective. The score measuring self-esteem, which was sliding off the deep end last time, was now in the balanced range.  

*Whuuut?* (That’s the sound of my gears turning in my mind while dots connect and neurons fire.)

Other scores indicated that while I’d been chasing chickens in the backyard, crying up and over mountains somewhere in a national park, and wondering if I was becoming a loser, things were actually shifting and changing under the surface. Like roots going down deeper in the dark.

I was also given a second report called the Resilience Assets Inventory™. It was a deep dive into mental resilience, measuring an individual's capability and capacity for 20 different qualities that resilient people can cash in on during challenging situations.

These qualities range from the capacity to deal with change, frustration, and difficult people, to the ability to learn and adapt, to be creative with resources, and to hold hope for a vision.

It includes measurements like:

The capability and capacity to "internalize the values of hard work, thrift, honesty, patience, and tenacity."

The capability and capacity for openness and tolerance toward that which is new and "different" in comparison to past, known precedents.

I was mildly obsessed with this report. It gave me a framework to better understand resilience, and a tool to identify gaps and weak links in my own thinking when the going got tough.

In this report, the measurements around resilience are divided into four parts. The first is all about the qualities that create a stronger capacity for resilience. The second is about qualities that inhibit resilience and limit an individual's bandwidth to navigate unexpected stress. The next two parts are about leadership qualities—of others and self—under difficult circumstances.  

In my report, the results of the second area–inhibitors of resilience–caught my attention. The scores indicating stress and mental clutter or overwhelm were lit up like a car dashboard with every single warning light on.

It made sense that living in perpetual stress made it difficult to navigate more stress. Clearing up mental clutter and whatever was bogging me down seemed like a good first step.

I started with a spreadsheet. I made a list of every stress, project, overhanging task or problem I could identify on a Google sheet. A list of stresses that I created, a list of situations that others created. Things that needed to be done to finish my never-ending home remodel. There were several pages, multiple categories, and a list of 94 tasks.

I took some of my list to therapy. I made some of it into goals, and other parts of it into a giant todo list that worked like my own twelve-step program. A step at a time, a little each day. 

While I worked my way through this spreadsheet list, life kept happening. We also purchased two houses to renovate. I alternated between painting, sanding, and staining, and then chiseling down my list of outstanding projects.

In the meantime, my career work situation was unclear, and the pressure to figure it out was building. It’s hard to pivot when you don’t know where in the world you’re pivoting toward. I wondered if I was crazy. Others did, too, and they told me so.

I wasn’t living a lone wolf tale—by any stretch of the imagination. I was encouraged and supported and championed. At the same time, in the moments I was the most unsure about what I was doing and where I was going, I really wanted to grovel in self-doubt around my choices. I wanted the people closest to me to assure me that I was amazing and everything would be okay.

If they reallyyyyyy loved me, you know, they would give me their complete and total undying support. I wanted a few extra heaps of encouragement with the validation, too, please.

Well, I could dream on but that wasn’t happening. My process was grating against their process and where I demanded support and encouragement, there were mostly sparks (and opinions) flying.

On the subject of life and growth, Dr. David Schnarch said something to the effect that we think the people closest to us should never pressure us into anything uncomfortable, especially if they really care. Yet, the reality of life is that it is the pressure from the people closest to us that often push us to get clear about who we really are, to stand up when the stakes are highest, and to fight for what we value most. 

The pressure from the people closest creates that differentiation process I was learning about. The pressure built, and then pushed me to stop demanding the validation of others, especially the people who were most important to me. It taught me to not react, to take care of my own emotions and not offload them to others, and to hold myself up rather than looking to others to prop me up, under the name of love or support.

Around the time I could have sworn the pressure would eventually cause me to implode, I took the profile again.

In the same way that new information can create a shift in perspective and change everything, my report didn’t change the pressure I was experiencing, but it made it all tolerable. Weirdly exciting, even.

The practice of taking steps forward in the midst of uncertainty had been working on that resilience, which I’d originally wanted to develop. The pressure I fought to avoid became the process that made me a little more resilient, and taught me to stay calm and focused in the face of the unknown.

*Whuuut?*

My report reflected the changes that, once again, I hadn’t seen happening while I was caught up in my giant spreadsheet list and the direction of my career. 

The profile didn’t create transformation, and neither did I. The profile is a tool that helped me see some uncomfortable truths about myself. Based on what I saw, I made different choices and took some action. The results unraveled and exposed bigger problems in my life, which were more complicated than what I was capable of figuring out. Yet, Something far bigger seemed to take all of this raw material and use it for the intricate and complex work of doing transformation to me.

I don’t really understand it. I can see that it happened, I got to participate, and I like it.

How freaking elegant.