I’m Geri Peak, founder of Two Gems Consulting Services. I believe we must transform ourselves continually in order to contribute successfully to the advancement of society. The Virtues Project expanded my capacity to communicate ideas about the people and programs I support. Now I regularly promote virtues as descriptors and metrics and integrate the Five Strategies of the Virtues Project™ seamlessly into an approach I call Virtues Evaluation.
Virtues that Measure Up expands this 100 virtues list with additional principles gleaned from universal divine and spiritual attributes. Recently, emphasizing critical qualities like equitable and liberatory helps me optimize the repair of harms and center justice for people facing systemic oppression, while advancing excellence in evaluation practice.
And virtues also help us measure us! Virtues strengthen our perceptiveness and receptivity, providing benchmarks to strive towards and measure against and open dignified pathways away from narrow thinking inspired by falsehoods and omissions from our collective story towards acceptance and restoration of hard truths.
Anchoring practice in spirit honors traditional wisdom and restores balance, harmonizing revelation with investigation across centuries and millennia: e.g. the oneness of humanity appears worldwide in creation stories as humans being molded from the same dust or clay, a sign of our materiality. These diverse, yet unified elements highlight our fundamental unity and tie the recognition of oneness to global peace. These simple clues to our unity predate the false doctrine of race, yet have only recently been confirmed. As Manulani Aluli Meyer asserts: we are remembering what we already (k)new. (Image: Mate Masie, the Adinkra symbol for wisdom and perceptiveness).
Virtues help reform dominant culture biases and superiority sickness that hinder honest assessment and encourage diminishing hierarchies through openness, so that all may contribute to knowledge generation and advance understanding. When you transform, you cannot go back to what you were before.
Hot Tips:
- Virtues picks can help you know your virtues landscape — try adding them to your reflection routine to consider what qualities they affirm in you and/or invite you to develop to hone your capacity to see more clearly and deeply.
- A Virtues Five Card Spread identifies five virtues to reflect upon a question, problem or situation and hold for reflection over a period of time.
Cool Tricks:
- Feeling stuck, mad, annoyed, disappointed? Find a virtue that is needed to push through. How does centering that virtue build capacity, resilience, endurance? Define what it looks like to practice it with integrity and use it as a boundary to keep you safe.
- Pick a virtue with your team, collaborators or clients to center your meetings or find closure.
Rad Resources:
Visit virtuesproject.com for more free resources or try the mobile card deck app.
The American Evaluation Association is hosting Connecting the Intra/Inter/Structural Week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from authors who are exploring intuition and the thread that connects the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and the structural in evaluation.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.
A wonderful summary of important reminders and resources that we all can use! thanks!
Your post today reminded me of the recitation of the twelve laws of scouting at most every meeting. There is a lot of overlap between your virtue list and the 12 laws. Living the values and having them as measured outcomes makes a lot of sense. Thanks.
This is beautiful and rings true in many ways. By “remembering what we already (k)new, we have an opportunity to re frame ideas and conversations from an indigenous cultural point of view and thus changes the perspective. Transformation is not only the key, it is the purpose to which we engage in such meaningful reflections to begin with. Thank you for sharing.