Uncovering Your Values

Your values are important because they drive your behaviour, they underpin your life decisions, they allow you to make choices that you deem are important, worthy, or desirable of your time. Your values influence what you focus on and how you perceive reality. 

Knowing what your values are means you can start to shape your life with values-led decisions, ultimately creating a way of life that fits for you. Your values also compel and motivate you to make change; they are what keep driving you forward especially if you hit obstacles or encounter challenges. 

Here are a few key facts about values:

• A value is something that is important to an individual.
• Values may change depending on the situation/context. 
• Values tend to sit in a hierarchy of importance. 
• Values are a key foundation to a person's personality and behaviour. 

Here's how to uncover your values:

Step 1: Ask yourself, "What is important to me about my life?"
Write down everything you can possibly think of, even if it seems silly, and keep going until you can't think of anything more. Keep asking yourself, "What else is important to me about my life?", "What else?", "What else?"
This is your list of values. 

Step 2: Now you're going to prioritise your top 5 values in order of importance. 
Ask yourself, "Of the above values, which is the most important to me?"
Followed by, "Assuming I have {enter your most important value here}, what would be the next most important?" Keep asking this question until you have your top 5 values. 

Step 3: For each of your top 5 values, you can now explore how you'd like these values to be expressed in your life by asking yourself the following questions:

• What does {insert value} mean to me?
• What is important to me about {insert value}?
• How do I know when I have/am {insert value}?
• What has to happen for me to feel I am/I have {value}?

Step 4: How aligned is your life with your values?
Give each value a score between 1-5 (5 meaning your life is perfectly aligned with this value).
There's no wrong answer here. Answer in terms of what is true for you. 
For any that you have scored lower than a 5, ask yourself, "What's missing that would make a difference here?"

If you'd like to share what has come up for you, I'd love to hear from you. Email me on [email protected]