An AVAIL Conversation: Coach and author Valorie Burton on choosing the meaningful over the urgent

AVAIL Media Host Virgil Sierra recently sat down with Valorie Burton for the AVAIL Podcast. The author of 13 books on personal development, Valorie is founder of the Coaching and Positive Psychology (CaPP) Institute, which has trained coaches from every state and 26 countries around the world. An international speaker, Valorie has appeared regularly on the TODAY Show, CNN, Dr. Oz and in Essence, and has spoken for hundreds of organizations around the globe. She was named one of the top 60 motivational speakers in America and one of the Top 100 Thought Leaders in the field of personal development. Her new book is It’s About Time: Learning the Art of Choosing the Meaningful Over the Urgent. To listen to the entire conversation—and others like it—subscribe to the AVAIL Podcast.

AVAIL: Can you share a little bit about your story?

Valorie Burton: I started out in my work journey in communication and PR with my own public relations firm. I began wondering what I was here for and praying about it. It took a couple of years, but I know it was the Holy Spirit one day many years ago—I don’t know if I should tell you how many—when I heard, “You are supposed to inspire others to live more fulfilling lives. You’ll do it through writing and speaking.” I started writing almost immediately, like within a few weeks. The words were flowing from the tip of my pen. With that first book, I published it myself with the goal of getting a big publisher. Sure enough, I feel like God just delivered the publisher to me. About seven months later I got a book deal with Random House. That was 2000, and I’ve been writing ever since. God has just shown me a lot of grace to apply what I do, which is using coaching and positive psychology research to help people be happier, healthier and more resilient. I particularly love applying it to leadership. I think there’s an extra measure of responsibility that we have as leaders because of the impact that we make and the way that people are looking at us to reflect how to show up in the world.

AVAIL: How did you discover coaching?

Valorie: I realized it was the one-on-one of what I was writing and speaking about—the coaching—that was really helping people move from where they are to where they really want to be and to navigate the challenges and the opportunities that appear along the way. So, it’s very distinct from counseling or therapy, which often are looking back, trying to help you heal from the past so that you can move forward. It was powerful in my own life, and it is such a powerful tool to help people stop and reflect and to not see problems as just obstacles, but to actually see them as an opportunity to grow. That’s how I stumbled into coaching. And as I saw it not only working in my own life, but working in the lives of people I was working with, my belief grew in how much of a tool it is. I think everyone can use a coach, as long as they’re mentally healthy.

AVAIL: Now the Lord put in your heart to start the CaPP [Coaching and Positive Psychology] Institute. Can you just unpack a little bit the the term “positive psychology”?

Valorie: I started coaching, and my foundation was always faith-based as I was writing my books. It was the early 2000s, but coaching was still at that point only about a decade old. I thought, Is there any research to back up what we’re talking about here? So, I discovered positive psychology. Traditional psychology tends to focus on fixing problems—that’s important, fixing what’s wrong, but positive psychology is the study of what happens when things go right with us. I thought, This is what I’m interested in. I’m not called to just being mired in problems. I wanted to understand the research behind it, the study of things like happiness, what enables it, what happens when you tap into your strengths, what causes us to be more resilient. I went back to grad school to study it at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the things I was probably the most excited about is that, as I was learning from the best researchers around the world, I would look at a piece of research and go, “Well, I know the scripture that backs that up.” Of course, the research proves out what we know from the ancient wisdom in Scripture. What I wanted was coaching to have an academic foundation. The CaPP Institute was a part of my vision to train coaches, and for those coaches to have this understanding of the research that really helps people to be able to thrive.

AVAIL: I want to talk about your book, It’s About Time: The Art of Choosing the Meaningful Over the Urgent. This is huge in life—especially for leaders.

Valorie: Leaders in particular tend to find themselves in a quandary: The more you lead, the more opportunities come your way. Time can start to feel like it’s slipping away. I was running my business and speaking all over the place. I was in something called “time poverty,” and I didn’t even know it. What I discovered was that a lot of us are using our time for what I call false urgencies—things that feel urgent because they’re designed to feel urgent, and we end up missing out on what is meaningful. We have to be intentional about eliminating the distractions and the false urgencies that threaten to steal our time. We can coach ourselves with this question when making decisions about our time: “Looking back 10 years from now, what will you wish you had done?” We use the benefit of hindsight by stepping into our future self and asking, “What will I wish I had done with my kids, my spouse or family members, my career, my health or my money?” Whatever your answer to that question is, that’s what you should be doing—the things that are timeless, meaning it doesn’t just matter right now in this moment, but it matters a week from now, a year from now, 20 years down the road. And that takes pausing and being intentional because the world we’re living in right now is bombarding us with a lot of false urgencies that generally are meaningless and not meaningful.

AVAIL: How have you seen, in your experience in coaching and with leaders, people being negatively affected by not choosing the urgent over the meaningful?

Valorie: Inattention. Marriages falling apart. Kids not getting the attention they need and deserve from their parents. Being in the wrong career. Not slowing down to say, “God’s leading me to do something else.” How often do we pause and say, “Is this really the priority?” or, “Do I have to squeeze one more thing in here in between all the other stuff I have to do?” If we think back on some of the decisions that we’ve made over time, decisions that maybe later we would regret, a lot of them have to do with whether we asked ourselves the question, “Is this meaningful, or is this just a false urgency?” The text in the middle of an important conversation, and you decided to pick up your phone because it buzzed. But the person in front of you is more important. Maybe it was just playing with your kids. There are so many demands, and we weren’t really created for the amount of demands that we have today. We have to be vigilant and prayerful on an everyday basis. “God, show me what the priorities really are. Show me what’s meaningful, show me what I need to be doing, what I need to say no to so that I can say yes to the things that really, really matter.”

AVAIL: What are some tips to get better at this art of choosing the meaningful over the urgent?

Valorie: Experiment with doing something in a different way, something that feels like you can’t say no to. Yes, you can. How about give up that particular responsibility this week and give it to somebody else and see how that goes. When you get to the end of that period of experimenting, look back and go, “What worked? What didn’t work? What do I want to keep? What could I tweak? What could I experiment with next?” Also, coach yourself with the question, “Is it meaningful, or is it urgent?” Sometimes there are things that feel cumbersome. It could be a party that you don’t feel like going to, but it’s somebody you’ve known for years, and it’s a milestone for them. If you ask, “Is this meaningful, or is it urgent?” That actually is meaningful. What might you need to shift around so that you have the energy to show up in the way you want to show up in your relationships. If we don’t stop and check in with ourselves and ask, we won’t actually get to the right answer. You don’t have to respond to requests right away. The people who care about you will understand. What’s more important is that you’re doing what you’re feeling led by God to do. Sometimes, in order to do that, you’ve got to say no to other people in order to say yes to God.