What are my values?
What do I stand for? What matters most to me? How do I know my actions and decisions reflect my values? If you have ever wondered about these sorts of questions, I’d invite you to explore the process of identifying and naming your own core values.
What really matters to us can be described as our core values. Our values are the underlying principles that we hold as most important. Values are developed over lived experiences and through a synthesis of family experiences, culture, role models, and life experiences. A renowned Career Theorist named Mark Savickas (Savickas, 2011) developed a set of questions as reflection points to consider meaning and value as it relates to career.
1. Who did you admire when you were growing up?
2. Who would you like to pattern your life after?
3. List three heroes/role models.
a. What do you admire about each of these role models?
b. How are you like each of these persons?
c. How are you different from them?
Why should I consider my core values?
According to Lisa Congdon and Andreea Niculescu, research tells us that when we live a life that is guided by an awareness of what matters most to us, we exhibit lower stress, more confident decision making and problem-solving skills, better attention to our health, and more willpower and grit to persist when things get tough.
Knowing our values affords us the ability to act more assertively, communicate with greater compassion, and make wiser career and work choices. This leads to a stronger sense of confidence and enhanced relationship intimacy.
One way to identify your own core values is to conduct a values card sort.
Click here to complete an interactive Values Card Sort
Once you’ve completed a values cord sort and arrived at your top ten core values you can use them to address different domains in life. For example:
Relationships:
How do my core values align with my relationships?
Where is there conflict or tension, and how might that be a result of different values?
Work:
How do my core values align with the work I’m doing? If you don’t work currently, how do your core values impact how you show up in the world in your varied roles.
Body/mind health:
How do my core values support my mental and physical health? When does tension arise?
