Session 6, The Sovereign Mind: What Do You Stand For? (When the Ego Isn't Looking)
The dictator pokes us with a fear story or pulls us with a pleasure goal and we react.
This is the most important question a sovereign mind must answer: What do I stand for? The answer lies in the domain of one’s values. Our ego’s narrative keeps us in a reactive state, avoiding uncomfortable feelings and chasing good ones. Harris helps us unhook from the ego’s narrative and move toward a meaningful life driven by values.
As we look for our true values, the ego will step in to divert our attention to goals and rules. Harris teaches basic ACT principles to differentiate among values, goals, and rules.
Remember that our inner dictator is an obsessive central planner; it uses goals to maintain control. Goals are binary: you either achieve them or fail. This keeps our ego’s narrative in a constant state of “not enough.” If we haven’t reached the goal, we are a failure. If we have reached it, the dictator immediately sets a new one, ensuring the “Happiness Trap”—the belief that “I will be happy when...”—remains intact.
Of course, Harris does not encourage us to sit around aimlessly. To clarify the difference between goals and values, he gives this example: “So if you want to have a great job, that’s a goal; but if you want to be responsible and reliable, those are values.”
Our values help us remember what holds the highest place in our hearts. They turn us away from what is the easiest course of action in the moment.
While values support goals, they are personal qualities that guide our behavior on an ongoing basis, regardless of our goals. Harris explains, “A value is a quality we desire to bring to our behavior; a quality that guides the words we use and how we say them, and the actions we take and how we do them. In contrast, a goal describes what we want to have, get, achieve, or complete.”
In my book The Inner-Work of Leadership, I tell the story of Dennis Gioia, a professor of organizational behavior at Pennsylvania State University.
During the 1970s, before Gioia became a professor, he was the vehicle recall coordinator for Ford Motor Company during the production of the infamous Pinto. The improperly designed Pinto fuel tank tended to burst into flames in low-speed, rear-end collisions. Gioia found himself in the thick of perhaps the most famous case of corporate irresponsibility in history.