Values: How do you find yours?
Values: How do you find yours?
Who cares?
I’ve seen endless lists of personal and organizational values. They seem generally unimportant and token rather than animated and descriptive of a lived-out reality. So do they really matter? Defining and understanding your personal values can be one of the most freeing and purposeful things you achieve. They will empower your decisions. They will bring clarity, faster. They will free up energy for you to focus on other pressing things. This simple investment will pay back dividends over your life. They really matter.
Through this series of posts, I hope to help you identify your own values and then move towards helping others find their values. After that, I would love a conversation around how you make values stick.
Values tell us how to interact in the world
Values guide us and help us determine the reason we do things a certain way. Values in a personal context become the compass for making decisions. Values in a team context become our rules of engagement with team members. Values in an organization help determine how the organization goes about fulfilling its mission. They matter and are important, but often stated and not lived.
Values can be aspirational
Sometimes in your list of “ways of being” you may find 1-2 values that you love and wish were part of your repertoire, but you just don’t express them in your life yet. That’s completely fine! Identifying aspirational values can help define the target for your personal goals and development. It’s important to identify and understand why these values matter to start moving your life towards living them out.
How do you find your values?
If you work through the 5 steps below you’ll have a pretty good idea of your personal values. It’s a simple exercise, but it’s not easy, so give yourself a couple of hours or even a day to work through each of these steps thoroughly.
1. Start by working through these simple questions:
What do you love?
What do you spend money on?
What do you hate?
What do you think about at night before falling asleep or in the morning before you get going?
What ticks you off?
What brings you joy?
How do you test our decisions?
Who do you look up to or respect and why?
2. Now take your list and put one word to each of your answers that best defines each answer.
3. See what words or patterns stand out, put them into categories and write them down. Try to get the list down to between 5-8 categories.
4. Now for each word write down why it matters. This may be the most important step to help you implement and live out your values.
5. Bounce your list of value off others who know you and see if your list makes sense to them and represents you well and then refine.
That’s it! Well done :)
Let me know how it goes.
Coaching for Values:
I’ve helped many work through the process of defining and implementing their values through coaching. Perhaps you know that you’re not the type of person to be able to work through the steps above by yourself and that you would do better talking through them instead. Coaching can help. Just click “Work Together” to schedule a time for an complimentary session.