What are values and how do I know what mine are?
In my last post, I shared with you my vision of fulfillment: a joyful and intentional life at the intersection of individual thriving and the collective good. That's all fine and good, you might have thought, but how the heck do I get into that virtuous cycle?
There's no silver bullet, but if you've spent 5 minutes with me, you probably know how strongly I feel that connecting with and living through your values is a powerful start. That's the reason it's the foundation for all of the work I do with my coaching clients. I could talk about values all day (and I guess I do), but before I get into why they’re such a powerful tool, I’ll start with what values are and how to identify yours.
What are values?
When I talk about values, I simply mean what's most important to you in life. Not the things that you think you should care about, or the things society says you should care about, but the things you really do care about.
If you want to get a little more specific, I like this definition from the American Psychological Association (APA) because it captures how rich and varied values can be:
You likely have values that relate to your morals, but not all values are in the realm of right and wrong. For instance, I have a value around fairness, but I also have values around learning & growth and joyful fun.
How do you know what your values are?
I’m sure you have a sense in your gut of what your values are, but when it comes to living from your values, specificity matters. I'll share with you the method I most commonly see recommended online for determining your values and introduce you to the process I use instead:
Values shopping
If you do some googling about identifying your values, you'll inevitably come across the guidance to pick them from a provided list. At the Co-Active Training Institute, they call this "values shopping" (not to be confused with shopping for a good deal!)
While you'll get more benefit out of this approach than doing nothing at all, there are a few drawbacks to picking your values off a list:
You're likely to choose values that sound good or that you think you should have (and on the flip side, avoid choosing values you might hold that may not seem as desirable.)
You may not connect as deeply with the values and what they mean to you since the process is relatively passive.
When you're picking off a list, the language is generic and not your own and thus can't capture your individual nuance or flavor.
What's another way?
When I work with clients, we uncover values from conversations about what's most important.
Through a series of visualizations and powerful questions, they have the opportunity to spend some time in reflection. Then they tell me, in their own words, what came up for them. Through the conversation, we pick out the values that are being expressed and get curious about them so that we can see clearly what they mean. This deep conversation about each value helps us to produce the values strings, which use multiple words to capture someone's unique take on a given value.
By the end of the process, we have a great list of values that can be added to over time, and the person has spent an hour connecting with what's most important to them. The feeling they walk away with (and the long-term benefit) is much different than simply circling values on a list.
Questions I get asked about values
I hear a lot of the same questions when I talk to people about values for the first time. Here are a few:
Do values change over time? I've found that values stay fairly consistent over time, but certain values might come to the forefront as being especially important based on what's happening in your life. Personally, I find that as I continue to take notice of what's important to me in life, the words I use to describe a value might change a bit to reflect my learning. And sometimes I realize I have a value that I never thought to write down.
How many values should I have? There's no magic number, but you probably have more values than you think. As you might expect, though, they don't all carry the same weight. When I ask people about their values, they often only list 2-3 off the top of their head, but once we go through the values identification process they often have a list of 10 or more (that they then continue to add to.) You care about a lot of things, but not all things equally.
Do they have to be one word? Nope! In fact, I prefer using values strings. A values string helps us get really clear on what we mean by a value. You and I may both have a value we call "learning and growth" but a values string helps us each understand what we mean by that.
Do I have work values and personal values? My perspective is that they're one in the same. Who you are and what's important to you doesn't magically change when you step into the office (virtual or otherwise).
Now that you know what values are and how we identify them, in my next post we’ll look into why they’re so beneficial in living a life in which you thrive personally and contribute to the collective good.
