My Fit Experience: Values

I’ve been very excited for André Martin’s new book, Wrong Fit, Right Fit, because not too long ago I was examining what really mattered to me at work. This was at my previous job, where I bounced between customer service and marketing before I took the plunge and went back to school to get a business degree. I was at a crossroads. I liked many things about my then-job, but there were also points of friction. If I’d had André’s book back then, it would have made my decision much easier.

Wrong Fit, Right Fit doesn’t stop at simply telling you what contributes to fit at a job. André has included eight carefully crafted exercises (he calls them “excursions”) that are designed to guide you through a process of self-discovery. And he wastes no time getting to the heart of things in Excursion #1:

“Clarifying what we value can help us more consciously do things that are good for us versus things that we simply desire. Values are a rudder to life well lived. They allow us to live in alignment, find meaning, stay on course, make difficult decisions, and ultimately live free of regret.”

Who doesn’t want to live free of regret?

As I went through this excursion, I began to see some reasons my previous job was not a good fit. André explains that there are a lot of values we claim to have, and many we aspire to have, but they don’t always line up with the values we actually live by. For instance, we may all attempt to live by the adage “never judge a book by its cover,” but are we really able to fight our first impressions? Not always, and possibly less than we think.

This excursion guides you to pit values against each other and tease out what really, truly matters to you. Once you know that, you can begin to gauge how your values align with your employers—both the values they claim and the ones they live by.

I realized through this exercise that one issue I had at my old job came down to a misalignment of values. On paper, we matched up very well. And it wasn’t that they were a bad company made of bad people. But when a choice had to be made, they went left when I would have gone right. We simply had different priorities. If I’d realized that earlier, when I first had misgivings at my old job, I might have saved myself a lot of years of frustration.

I’ll be going through a couple more of the excursions from André’s book, so join me next time as I untangle my own experiences with wrong (or right) fit!

- About The Authors

Lucy Softich

Lucy is the Marketing & Social Media Coordinator at IT Revolution. She has a background in writing, marketing, and business.