Valugration

No, it’s not a real word. Ursula and I made it up last fall when we were sitting in a restaurant in Washington, DC. I said to her, “I feel like I have values that are in conflict with each other. I want them both, but in the case of some values, it’s just too darn challenging to hold them at the same time.”

My example was my value of HUMILITY and my value of BIGNESS. I both want to be part of everything — not special — and take my rightful BIG place in the world. My brain was telling me, “Well that’s nice, but you have to pick one. They negate each other.”

Damn.

I hate that.

As we relaxed and ate our salads, we talked about why this happens, and it occurred to us that it wasn’t the values that were in conflict, per se, it was the two hemispheres of the brain. In the case of my value of humility, my right hemisphere wanted connection and oneness, not to be distinct and different from everyone else (for more on this aspect of the right hemisphere, see Jill Bolte-Taylor’s powerful TED talk). My left hemisphere, on the other hand, wanted the separateness and distinction of bigness. And they both wanted what they wanted.

As we talked more about this, we started to see that when values are difficult to reconcile, typically there is a perceived conflict between the two hemispheres of the brain. We want structure (left) and freedom (right). We want to relax and we want to be productive. We want to play and we want to accomplish things. It’s enough to drive a person mad.

Suddenly, the words of an old Huey Lewis and the News song came to me. He sang, “I want a new drug,” and I thought “Well, I want  new word! I don’t want to choose.” I wanted a word that would capture both hemispheres, one that would help me integrate these desires, these seemingly opposing forces in my life. And thus, the game of Valugration was born. It stands for Values+Integration. And the rules are simple. You take your opposing values and combine them into a brand-new word that can hold both. In this instance, mine was HUMILiGNESS. Humility+Bigness.

Finding the right word take a little finesse. Here are a few pointers from our experience doing this in our classes and presentations:

• Be sure you are integrating a right hemisphere value and a left hemisphere value. The hemispheres are not typically in conflict within themselves.
• The new word needs to inspire you and not have a connotation that takes you away from the experience.
• Because the right hemisphere holds the whole, while the left is focused on parts, we find that the brain tends to like the right hemisphere word to come first, but this isn’t a hard and fast rule.
• It is best if it really is a brand new word, one that you don’t already know. This will make you think about it newly, see it with fresh eyes, and approach living into it with curiosity.
• Write it down so you don’t forget it.

That’s it — pretty simple, actually. Oh, but I almost forgot the second part of the game. The second part is to try it on and ultimately live your new word. You play that part of the game the rest of your life.

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