Ultimately, living by your list of personal values should not be an inflexible rulebook but a guide to help you make conscious choices and decisions. Exceptions can be made, but they should always be evaluated in the context of their potential impact on yourself and others. Taking the time to make a values list can be one of the best investments you make in your life, helping you to stay true to yourself and work towards your goals. By understanding your values and why they’re important, you can ensure that every decision is aligned with them and that you’re taking steps in the right direction.

When we align our values with our career or personal life, it can bring about positive changes in both areas. Ultimately, personal values help shape who we are as individuals. Personal values are deeply held principles and convictions that guide your behaviour, decisions, and interactions with others. Jim Collins, the renowned author of Good to Great, was one of the first to investigate personal core values in depth. He found that organizations that lived by their values had significantly better business results than those that didn’t.

Why are core personal values important in life?

Being honest requires bravery, and it should be done with empathy and tact. Valuing independence means you love being self-sufficient. While it’s no big deal to ask for help or company, you prefer doing things on your what are your values own. When you experience long-term distress, your well-being suffers. Being generous doesn’t always have to be about money.

What is personality, and can you change yours?

This will lead to a more meaningful and authentic life experience. Knowing the answer to the question, “What are values? ” and being able to define your own personal set of rules is essential to building healthy, long-term relationships.

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This process will help you uncover the principles that define your identity and guide your actions. Begin by clearly identifying your core personal values. These are principles that guide your actions, decisions, and interactions with others. For example, honesty, empathy, and resilience might be values you prioritize.

1. Our personal core values act as a compass, helping us navigate through life’s challenges and choices.
2. You can shout from the rooftop until your voice goes hoarse that you value family and relationships above all else.
3. Ultimately, it’s the intention that matters most in deciding which way the scale falls.
4. How do you want to show up during an upcoming family event?
5. A set of values helps facilitate trust between coworkers, encourages collaboration and open communication, and allows workers to focus on their roles and responsibilities.
6. Money is a bad value because you can’t always control it.

1. As a result, we tend to focus our efforts and energies on tasks that don’t truly align with what we want out of life.
2. Or if you want to be more positive, make it a point to start every morning with positive affirmations.
3. It helps ensure that you live a life aligned with what matters most.
4. So, instead, we sit at home with our new girlfriend, a.k.a., a bag of Oreos.
5. You can take this multiple times to explore different lenses.

Rather than mindlessly trying to live up to other people’s standards, values work asks us to take responsibility for our own life journey. When we choose what’s important in life, we create a deeply personal metric for success. There is also an opportunity for you to write in values that we may not have included.

Note down which values words stand out to you, selecting as many as you want. Once you’ve reviewed them all, go through the list that you made and narrow it down to the top 3-5 values that are most important to you. Core values tend to emerge in many different areas of your life, such as work, relationships, and family life. They also tend to be relatively stable over time, though there may be times when they evolve or become secondary to other more important values. Core values are principles or standards that are deeply important to you.

The following types of values are based on the nature of motivation behind them, as defined by self-determination theory. ³ This approach can help you to see the bigger picture of your value system and understand what drives you at a deeper level. Our core values are the beliefs, ethics, and principles that guide us toward our ideal decisions, relationships, and behaviors.

We might focus on what we “should” be doing, going from chore to chore, making us feel like we’re trapped in an endlessly-looping hamster wheel. Once you’ve narrowed your list down to only a few values, you’ve identified your core values! One thing that’s important to note is that some things might be important to you, but not necessarily a core value. Many people care about things like authenticity, but those things might not emerge as core values. It could be that authenticity is subsumed by another value (e.g., connection) or that other values just feel more important.

Any change in self is a change in the configuration of our values. When something tragic happens, it devastates us because not only do we feel sadness, but because we lose something we value. And when we lose enough of what we value, we begin to question the value of life itself. It calls into question who we are, our value as a human, and what we know about the world.

It also helps you become more open-minded when faced with difficult decisions or conflicts. By being flexible, you’re more likely to be able to come up with creative solutions that can help you resolve problems in beneficial ways. What are personal values if not a source of guidance throughout our lives? Our values shape us – they make us who we are – and there’s nothing wrong with that. They are a set of rules that dictate how we interact with and judge other people.