What are Your Values?
The things you care most about in this world, usually because they help you live a more fulfilled life.
Getting clearer on your values helps you make sure you are living a conscious life as opposed to one prescribed to you. They help you make difficult decisions and direct your energy in a way that is going to help you lead a more fulfilled and happy life. Without defining your values you can quite quickly get swept up in a chaotic world, finding it hard to make decisions or worse still make decisions that actually aren’t serving you.
The different type of values
Values can be grouped into many categories but the ones talked about most are ‘Life’, ‘Work’ and ‘Partnership’ as these usually are where we invest most of our time. For this exercise we are going to start with identifying your life values.
Why should we identify our values?
Because our mind is trying to choose all the time, often between two things we care about, often at times when we are influenced by others and under emotional strain. Proactively choosing your values can help make sure your decision making stays on track with what you want as opposed to what others want of you.
How do you find out what your values really are?
Your values are a collection of beliefs that you hold about yourself, others and the world around you. Our beliefs come from our unique life experiences to date i.e how we learnt to survive, live, relate, succeed and ‘be’ in life.
They can sit consciously (and therefore easy to articulate) or sub consciously and harder to articulate.
We can uncover our more sub conscious values by getting curious with our emotions. Usually if we are triggered emotionally then someone or something is stepping on one of our key values (ie the external event is threatening us because it is threatening what we care about).
Be careful not to confuse life values with people characteristics. Values are heartfelt and what we care about into the future, where we want to spend our time. Characteristics are things we have or exhibit in our character now, which we could highly value into the future but not necessarily.
When people say ‘Key Values’, unless they specify otherwise, then they are talking about your top 5 life values. I.e if you were on your death bed and had to tell your grand daughter or god daughter what were the most important things to value in life what would you tell her?
It is likely you would start by identifying many values, much more than 5. However if it is to be a useful exercise then there is power in the prioritising. Picking the top 5, that ones that override others, right now, in this chapter of your life.
Picking your top 5
The best way to start is by answering the question above.
“If you were on your death bed and had to tell your grand daughter or god daughter what were the most important things to value in life what would you tell her?”
Write out a list of words and phrases, a picture may also help, and then try and group it into 5 core categories.
Some people like to use a list of words to help guide them (you can find many on the internet if this helps you), however it can get easy to copy the values of someone else, so my advice is to try to initially pick out words that resonate with you and then try to order them. You can then revisit this list multiple times over the course of a year to see whether these words still resonate as your top 5.
Here are my top 5 life values to help you get started:
Health- this is about my connection to myself- because without it everything else fails. It includes eating well, sleeping well, exercising, managing my mind, taking moments to enjoy and be present. It is about my life force and how I lean into every other element of life.
Connections- this is about my connection to people and planet because it is our relationships with others and nature that help us thrive. Sometimes it is about putting aside your wants to be there for someone else, sometimes it is about sharing and experiencing things together. Ideally it is about sharing nature and life with someone else. I believe that life expands as it is shared and I believe that a good life is one where deliberate time is spent on nurturing and growing our relationships.
Contribution- I value contributing to this world. This is about my sense of purpose but also about giving back. I want to know when I get to the end of life that I gave more than I took and helped make the world a more thriving, better place. This helps my sense of meaning and fulfilment. You may contribute through work, through raising a child, through volunteering. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as it feels meaningful and gives back.
Growth- This is about always growing and striving to be the best I can be. I therefore like to spend time on activities and things that expand my consciousness and aliven my senses. I want to reach the end of life as say I made the most of this body suit and all the experiences open to me.
Security- probably the most un-interesting one to talk about but security is essential for survival and therefore I value it, however I don’t let it get ahead of itself. Security to me is an energy bank, doing things now that may not bring you joy or fulfilment but they give you an energy store or currency to use in the future when you need it. Securing my future allows me to do all the above activities. I separate out security from contribution. Sometimes by contributing you earn money, and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it is about building the shed, fixing the dripping tap, keeping the wheels in motion. Sometime you may feel that your work is abut securing your future and other times you may feel it is about contribution to the present and making the world a better place. I believe we are likely to experience work across both of these categories at different times in life. One is about the here and now ‘contribution’ and the other one is about doing things now that secure your future.
Identifying your core values isn’t an easy task. If you want more help in identifying yours then please reach out and ask for a 1:1 workshop session, complete the exercise and bring along what you find and we can explore this together.
For those who feel clear on their values and want to start questioning how aligned you are living according to your values then I recommend completing the “Wheel of Alignment” which can be downloaded from the App Store. You can input your values, time track against them and start to become more conscious on where you spend your time and energy.
Wishing you well on your values journey!
