A note before we begin: this piece is different from the others in this series.
There is no assessment you can go take.
No four-letter type or numbered result to walk away with.
What I’m describing here is something harder to package and more difficult to replicate – a collaborative excavation process that changed the direction of everything.
I’m including it in this series because it belongs here. Because some of the most important work doesn’t come with a report.
How It Started
It was November 6, 2020. I had connected with Alice Karolina through the What Works Network – a community for small business owners doing intentional work. Alice was a brand specialist and strategic communicator whose approach was built around discovery over figuring out, stories over formulas, meaning over more. She was also an artist. She made her own visual work, digital pieces on her iPad that were unmistakably hers, and that combination of rigor and creativity was part of what drew me to her.
I went through her full suite of offerings: a Brand Purpose Session, followed by three Brand Immersion Sessions, followed by a sixteen-session Brand Calibration. I signed a creative contract. This was real work, taken seriously, deliberately invested in.
What I didn’t know at the start was that I was about to experience, for the first time, what I would eventually come to call excavation, and it would become a practice and key piece to my future work in The Valued Experience®.
The Values Thread
Alice wasn’t specifically a values practitioner when we began working together. She was a brand specialist.
But as we moved through the sessions, something kept surfacing in what I was sharing – a thread that neither of us had set out to pull, but that kept appearing.
I noticed it. She noticed it. And we started pulling.
Soon, Notion boards filled with notes, words, and audio transcripts yielded key values that surfaced for me and my world: Authenticity, Balance, Connection, and Empathy. We didn’t magically arrive at these words. They weren’t culled after checking value words on a list, the way other values work in therapy looked like. They arrived through stories of experiences and their impact on me.
Alice’s method was to let me talk. To share examples of why certain things mattered to me. To follow the thread of a memory or an experience until what was underneath it became visible. And somewhere in that process, the real values started to emerge – not the words I thought I should value, but the ones that had been organizing my life all along without my full awareness.
I had come into the Brand Purpose Session with my own value words. The golden rule. Honesty. Gratitude. Giving.
And Alice, listening to me explain them through a story, gently challenged one: giving
Giving – she said – wasn’t quite a value in this context. Why? Because I had to manage it.
Giving, for me, was a knee-jerk response, as I’ve shared before, and because of that, I have to work to avoid being depleted by it. I have to put a bumper up, a boundary, a container around it. And a true value, as she understood it, isn’t something you have to manage. It’s something that, when you’re living it fully, feels like alignment rather than effort.
She wasn’t wrong.
The giving is part of my DNA. But the giving without a container burns. And the word that actually captured what I wanted – what I was reaching for underneath the giving – was connection.
Being present.
Being fully there with my people.
Giving in a way that connects rather than depletes.
That distinction, between a word I’d chosen and a value I actually lived, was the first time I understood that values work, done properly, can produce a full, internal alignment to self. It was the beginning of my own framework, and birthed my excavation method inside The Garden of System & Self™ (within The Valued Experience®).
The Post-it Exercise
Somewhere between the immersion sessions and the calibration work, I developed my own parallel process.
I put Post-its on my desk. Every time something happened in my work – a moment that triggered something, a conversation that resonated, an experience that felt either deeply right or deeply wrong – I wrote down the word that named the feeling. Not the experience. The word underneath it.
Over time, the Post-its started clustering. Words in the same family grouping together without my directing them. And those clusters became the full context of each of my value words: specific, contextual meaning of each word as it showed up in my actual life.
That’s how Authenticity, as a core value, housed a context that included words like Transparency, Honesty, Resilience, and Being Without Performance.
That’s how Balance as a core value housed a context that included Reciprocity, Fairness, Equality (between Positive and Negative), and Cohesion.
That’s how Connection, as a core value, housed a context that included Presence, Generosity, and Depth.
Alice named the umbrella words. I filled in what lived underneath them through lived experience and Post-its on a desk.
Looking at it now, I can see that I was already doing core work from The Valued Experience®. Before I had a name for it. Before I had a framework. I was excavating my own system of self in real time, with both chisels in hand.
Both Chisels In Hand
This is what I want to say clearly about what made working with Alice different: I realized that the best excavation work is collaborative. Not delivered.
Alice asked the questions. I brought the stories.
She named patterns I couldn’t see from inside them. I made things tangible when they started feeling too abstract.
She had the visual language and the framework. I had the Post-its and the compulsion to make everything workable.
We were both with chisels in hand. Digging together.
It was a beautiful process. A collaborative process.
Most coaches don’t work that way. Most therapists don’t either.
The norm is that one person holds the tool, does the digging, while the other watches… and in theory, yes, that part of the process is important. But, there comes a time when the right questions support the digging – it is an act within the excavation. And the TYPE of questions shows if you’re digging with a chisel or a plastic spoon. You know what I mean?
I have encountered way more experiences where someone who claimed to be supporting me during moments of excavation weren’t using chisels with me… they were plastic spoons, appearing to be in the process, appearing to be “digging”, but their questions were always ones that were constantly asked: that were “tried and true” and once shared sounded like I was in an echo chamber.
Trust me – when you are challenged with the right questions? The ones that act like chisels? That pushes you and supports your digging?
The difference is palpable and, while jarring at times, unmistakably effective.
What Alice and I did was something different, and experiencing it from the inside is a significant part of why The Valued Experience® is built the way it is. Not delivered to you. Done with you.
The Settling
I remember being told once, either by Alice or during the focusing work I was doing around the same time with another practitioner, Shuli, that excavation is like taking a bottle full of sediment and shaking it hard.
When you put the bottle down, everything is floating. The sediment that was settled at the bottom is now dispersed throughout the whole liquid. And where each piece settles when it finally comes to rest will be different from where it started.
The settling takes time.
Some answers come within the hour.
Some come in weeks.
Some take months.
Some, it turns out, take years.
I remember feeling a sense of relief when I heard that. A kind of permission to not have it all sorted immediately. To trust that the shaking was doing something, even when the floating felt chaotic.
What I couldn’t have known then was how long the settling would actually take for me personally. The work with Alice happened in 2020 and 2021. The ecosystem I’ve built now through The Valued Experience, The Valued Workforce®, Experience & Impact™, this series, the book, is all that sediment, finally settled, finally clear.
Five years. And before that, there was a five-year period prior specifically where The Valued Workforce® work was also floating, also settling.
Ten years.
Ten years of doing work I was meant to do while simultaneously not quite being ready to fully inhabit it.
I want to let myself off the hook about that, and for the most part, I can. There was more settling that had to happen. More experiences to have, more clients to work with, more seasons to move through before the path became this clear. I know that. I believe it, and now fully understand and appreciate the phrase “trust the process”.
But I also want to be honest that there are moments when the timeline sits heavily. When I look at those Notion boards from 2021 and see the ecosystem already mapped, I feel the weight of all the time between then and now.
And then I come back to this: I’m finally here.
The path is clear. The fear is still present – fear that it’s too late, that the market won’t get it, that no one will come – but underneath the fear is something that feels, for the first time in a long time, like solid ground.
What This Piece Is Really About
I’ve been calling this the Assessment Series. But this piece isn’t about an assessment. It’s about something harder to name – the first time I experienced excavation as a methodology rather than a concept. The first time someone helped me see that values aren’t words you choose from a list. They’re patterns you find by looking honestly at the life you’ve actually lived.
Alice Karolina no longer does this specific type of work. Her path has evolved – she’s a strategic communicator and creative partner now, doing work that is still deeply hers. If you want to find her, she’s at alicekarolina.com.
But what she helped me find in those sessions is still here. All of it. The values, the language, the conviction that business is personal. The blueprint for everything I’ve been building since.
The sediment has settled, and the evolution continues.
