What are values and why are they important?
Our values are an essential component of our psychological make-up and identity. They are our moral compass for life based on our standards of behaviour and our philosophies, impacting our motivation and the way we lead our lives and work through our words, actions, and decisions. Values are intrinsic, some of which may have been inherited from our parents whilst others evolve and change through our life experiences and socialisation. Different people have different values, and this generally determines the things they end up doing in life.
If misaligned, these values can lead us to feel a negative imbalance, such as feeling unhappy or unsettled and, ultimately, making mistakes or bad choices. However, if we live in line with our values, this can have an extremely positive impact on how we feel about ourselves, allowing us to live the best life we can.
A good example of a natural change is when someone is at the start of an exciting career where money and status feature as high values. They may then meet a partner, get married, have children, buy a house, and now find that what’s important to them has changed with their work-life balance becoming the priority value.
Defining Your Values
Lists of values can be rather long but, to give you an idea and a good starting point in eliciting your values, the following are some examples of values people may have:
Adventurousness, Belonging, Calmness, Discipline, Empathy, Fitness, Generosity, Happiness, Intelligence, Joy, Love, Obedience, Perfection, Quality-orientated, Security, Tolerance, Understanding and vision.
Your own definition of success may change over time, which means your values will also change. If you find yourself feeling slightly down or confused about your life, it could be that your values are misaligned, and you need to reassess them.
By taking the time to define your own values, you will discover what is truly important, drives you and makes you feel happy and fulfilled.
One way to start is to cast your mind back to a time when you felt really fulfilled and satisfied with what you were doing. What were you doing? What need or desire did you meet in this situation? Identifying and understanding your own true values is a valuable exercise to carry out. This can help raise your awareness of the reasons behind your decisions to access whether they are really fulfilling your own set of values. They are your moral compass and may need reassessing/reinforcing from time to time.
We can help you identify and understand your true values, and set, and achieve goal(s) in alignment with them…..let’s chat 😊
Further Reading: A list of core values commonly used – read examples here