Values ABOVE all else
Values help us make decisions. Values are our emotional shorthand to minimise inconsistency and navigate choices. In traditional branding, your ideal customer is the who behind your why. In personal branding, your ideal customer is you yesterday. Or as Stevie Wonder would say—Yester-You.
So, who were you then? And what decisions did you make to get here? Let's find out by using the ABOVE method. No cookie cutter buzzwords. No vanilla understanding. No pretend personalities. Just data-driven authenticity. Let's get started.
Values ABOVE Everything
By the end of the exercise, you should aim for a longlist of 6-8 values and a final shortlist of 3-5. For this exercise to work, be honest. Brand values are rooted in intention and often emerge from five categories:
Attention
Behaviour
Opportunity
Valuables
Energy
Now, let’s grab a pen and paper and begin time-stamping your values.
1. Attention
Eyeballs are expensive. Dopamine is cheap.
What do you pay attention to?
Start with your internet history, look at who you follow, and end with your watch later playlists. (And everything in-between).
If you’re six Tony Robbins seminars deep, perhaps you value leadership.
If you have a folder full of software tutorials, you might care about competency.
If you’re subscribed to three newsletters about productivity, do you value focus?
2. Behaviour
How you behave is reinforced by your wants, needs and desires.
How do you turn up online and IRL?
Who are you in the comment section?
The contrarian or the optimist?
The soothsayer or the troll?
If you’re active in a niche Discord group, do you value community?
If you break down complex ideas into digestible chunks for your audience, maybe you value accessibility and education.
If you write deep dives about modern society, perhaps you value respect, dignity or sovereignty.
If you post every day at the same time, no matter what, you might value discipline or integrity.
3. Opportunity
Perception is everything.
What do you perceive as an opportunity? And how do you respond?
When it rains, do you stockpile umbrellas or mix a Piña Colada?
If Bitcoin tanks 30%, are you buying at a bullish discount? If so, maybe you value autonomy or decentralised power.
If you invest in businesses that are building in public, you might value transparency or accountability.
Is global warming an opportunity to value innovation or sustainability? Is a recession an opportunity for generosity or stability?
Is an audience an opportunity for courage, power or originality?
4. Valuables
The information business is very different to the diamond business. But scarcity will always be valuable.
What’s your intellectual property?
What’s in the vault?
What scarce resource do you covet?
What’s in the shoebox under your bed?
What’s in the notes folder of your iPhone?
If you build systems to help digital nomads quit the 9-5, it’s possible you value freedom.
If you build novel office furniture for large corporations, perhaps you value relationships.
If you build templates to save time, maybe you value simplicity or productivity.
5. Energy
Energy is finite. How do you deploy your creative kilojoules?
If you sweat the details and there’s an elegance to your work, perhaps you value excellence or mastery.
If you’re all about iteration and tinkering with a MVP, maybe you value ambition, persistence or teamwork.
If you work all the time because you love it, maybe you value service, responsibility or persistence.
If you’ve built a business that only requires four hours of work a week, perhaps you value family, joy or common sense.
Useful?
Hopefully by now you have, at the very least, a general direction of your specific values to prioritise.
Remember, aim for 3-5. Be ruthless.
Defining your brand values is by no means an exact science. Humans are emotional, inconsistent and exist in an ever-changing environment that requires constant adaptation.
However, by understanding how we operate both individually, and together, we can begin to calibrate our focus, and communicate what matters, when it matters.
Ultimately prioritising our values ABOVE everything.
