Your most important values will have great impact on all your decisions no matter if you know your values or not. So how do you think? What is important to you? It is often not so visible from your current job or living what your values are. A persons entire job or housing carrier tells a lot but a quicker way to find out is to check holiday preferences. Your holidays reflect your current values well so let us start there. How do you spend your holidays or would like to spend your holidays?
I have many friends who spend most of their holidays at the same place. They know that the climate is good, the people are nice, the food is good, the hotel/house/flat is great, the water is clean or the nature is fantastic. So why not go back? Why look for new places that might be worse or just as good when you already know a great place?
Others always go for the best hotels, the most convenient ways of travelling, the best restaurants and don’t care about the cost. So if they can only afford a holiday every 5 years they do it anyway. And why not have a luxurious holiday? Why do the things you normally do? Shouldn’t a holiday be something extra? If I can’t afford it I’d rather stay at home!
And then there are people like me who love the unplanned, local, adventurous even if it mostly is much less convenient. They often prefer to share a meal with a Sri Lankan family on a local train, third class, before a luxury dinner since the feeling, the memory and the story with the locals stay so much longer in their harts and minds. And why not? Why pay for luxury when people and experiences are what matters?
Is one way of spending holidays better than the other? Absolutely not! As a friend of mine said “how do you dare to travel like you do - I would like to but do not dare to”. If you think about values like “security”, “status”, “challenge”, “money”, “freedom”, “harmony” - in which group above do you find them? Tell me how you would like to spend your holiday and I will tell you what you value the most! Then you might realize that those values also steer the other areas of your life.
You might not want to admit that holiday habits is a choice and argue that you make your decisions based on time, money and health! Don’t! Those are just excuses even if they are good excuses. Read more about excuses in my book “Ledarskap & Klokskap” (it will soon be available in English) or contact me to learn more about excuses.