Know your value(s)
When her house of cards came crumbling down, mindset expert Sonia Jhas built a new foundation made of her authentic core values. She had to dig deep to find her highest self, but it made her new place stronger than ever.
BY JULIE LAWRENCE
“Wouldn’t it be great if I didn’t have to burn my life to the ground in order to learn this lesson?” Sonia Jhas asked me with a smile, her huge eyes burning into my soul through the Zoom screen
I think she means it rhetorically, but it actually brings a prick of tears to my eyes because it is the exact same question that I have asked myself countless times in the last few years. Before I could discover what I needed, why did I first have to throw away everything I already had?
For some of us, the only way to start over is to burn it all down.
This is just one of the many “ah-ha” moments I had while reading Jhas’ new book, I’ll Start Again Tomorrow and Other Lies I’ve told myself. Part memoir and part self-help, the book tells the story of her evolution and the lessons she learned (often the hard way).
Her story is born of achievement. As South Asian immigrants, her parents moved to Canada separately to complete master’s degrees. They met and married in Toronto. They both became corporate executives, and these overachieving parents proudly paved the way for their children to follow in their footsteps. No pressure, right?
“I find it so hard to map back and pinpoint when the mess started because it’s so insidious and I think it really depends on the type of person you are,” explains Jhas. “I’ve always been hyper-vigilant about sussing out people’s needs and wanting to meet expectations. It’s hard to say how much of that was the authoritarian, patriarchal vibe of my household or because I’m an empath. But either way, I’ve definitely got historical, multi-generational trauma woven through my genes.”
One thing was made clear very early: success was the finish line, and the race was on. But success was a shapeshifter. While her drive for academic and professional success was fueled by cultural expectations, so too was her idea of her role as a woman. She had to be smart, but nurturing. Thin, but not starving. Curvy, but not fat. Brown, but not dark. Available, but not easy.
“It was so confusing because there was this weird nuclear dynamic inside the household that I had to conform to, but then I’m trying to be cool and fit in outside the home. I was performing inside and outside of my house, trying to fit in in both worlds. But the piece inside the home felt scarier, like the stakes were higher.”
That feeling of being a square peg in a round hole was a constant for Jhas, and to make matters worse, her brother slid into the gifted child role perfectly; “a good, clean, well-mannered Indian boy” who also just happened to be a gifted genius. “We get it!”
Knowing that she had a criteria to fulfill, Jhas began to accumulate her list of “ticky marks” to prove that she was doing all the things she was supposed to. Academics? Ticky mark. Corporate job in Finance? Ticky mark. Older, Indian fiancée? Ticky mark.
Jhas asks “where do the happy people live” in her TedX Talk in January, 2021.
Here’s the problem though: the more she ticked off her list, the farther away she felt from success. If success was the destination, why didn’t she feel like she was getting any closer? Why did she feel further and further disconnected from herself? Something had to give. Maybe she didn’t know it then, but the spark was being lit that would become the fire that would burn it all down. And what a blaze it would be!
“I just kept thinking that if I just keep my mouth shut and get there, then I could breathe. But that never came. What I learned at 25 years old was that if you build a house of cards on that foundation, it’s going to come crashing down on you. You can suppress and push and override with all of your effort, but eventually it will hunt you down and murder you if you don’t find a way to hard pivot.”
What came next seems too monumental to be called a pivot; it was more of a tectonic shift. She started by calling off the wedding, a move that admittedly broke her parent’s hearts. She followed that up with quitting her job, and she completed her transformation by cutting her hair (“the Indian equivalent of a neck tattoo”). She was embarking on a journey into the unknown: herself.
“The first piece of it is really taking an honest look at your actual life and seeing what this house of cards is that you build. How are you spending your days? Who are you spending your time with? How do you feel when you wake up in the morning? What actions make you feel like you are living your highest self? What do you feel is missing? It’s developing an understanding of the gap between your real evaluation criteria and this version that is dictating and driving so much of your beliefs and behaviours.”
She calls this process determining your core values and she gives a framework for how to do it in her book. She challenges us to think of a time when we felt we were right in our sweet spot, completely aligned and in the moment, no matter how brief. Finding the time in our lives where we felt unbridled joy: that’s the place where we can start to delineate themes that will form the framework for our values. From there, it’s about being bold enough to put words to those feelings.
“If I don’t know what my evaluation criteria is, how do I have any chance in hell of knowing if I am doing well or moving closer to satisfying whatever the objective is? I have no sense of it other than relying on my own narrative, which is like 98% negative all the time.”
Just imagine measuring your success against your own value system rather than Instagram. It makes perfect sense: only you can know if you’re measuring up to…you. And it sure beats throwing yourself at a multitude of band-aid solutions (losing ten pounds, finding a hot partner or landing that cool job) and hoping that one of them will fill the missing piece within you.
These values form what Jhas calls a “mindset manifesto”; a contract with yourself on how you want to live that can be your touchpoint as you move through life. You can use it as a tool to keep out the noise that is constantly trying to derail our thoughts and actions.
“It’s the articulation of my highest self to myself, only for myself. I’m not waxing poetic on Instagram, reading off my mindset manifesto. It’s just something for me that is an articulation of what I envision my life to feel like.”
“My mindset manifesto and doing the un-layering and getting into the values, it was important for me to be able to decide: do I want my old life of regiment and structure and discipline, or do I want intuition, flexibility and fun?”
When you look at it that way, I think the answer becomes fairly clear.
With this book, as with all her work, Jhas is hoping that by sharing her experience of doing it the hard way, she can help people make that connection, identify where their values are misaligned, and correct their course sooner than she did.
“Maybe if I’m really honest in sharing my learnings, people won’t have to blow up their lives in order to make the changes they need to live more fully themselves.”
But, if it has to go down that way, do what you gotta do. Burn, baby burn! DEFY
Julie Lawrence
Julie Lawrence is a journalist and communications specialist from the east coast of Canada. She is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of DEFY Magazine.