What are Personal Values?
This framework was adapted from our sibling company, The Musing Mind
You’ve probably heard of personal or core values before. Maybe you’ve even picked a few out of a list before. But do you know what values actually are, and how to apply them to your life, and work, too?
What are values?
When life feels chaotic or stressful, it’s easy to lose sight of the qualities of life that make us feel most at-ease and fulfilled. Stress pushes us to make quick choices, or operate on autopilot – like saying yes to things that don’t energize us or even actively drain us, remaining in situations that only elevate our stress or anxiety levels, or following a path that was chosen for us by someone else. Over time, saying yes to everything can leave us exhausted, frustrated, and purposeless.
That’s where core human values come in.
At their simplest, human values are the qualities of life that are most important to you. When the values most important to us (core values) are embodied, or present in our lives, we are living in alignment with our core values, and we feel good and want to keep living as we presently are. When the opposite is true, we feel don’t feel great, and long for the course of our lives to change.
For example: if a value of yours is growth, then regular change and opportunities that put your outside of your comfort zone may make you feel energized, while repetitive work may leave you drained. If a value of yours is stability, then experiencing regular change and uncertainty in your day-to-day may make you feel stressed, and you may look for ways to regain structure and control in your life.
To put it another way, values are connected to the “nerves” of the mind. The mind may not “feel” physical pain or pleasure like the body does, but all of us do feel mental or emotional sensations, based on what we do in life, and how we feel about the course of our lives. If the circumstances of our life are energizing, comfortable, and fulfilling, it means we are living in accordance with our values, and we receive this as a pleasure signal through our mental nerves that make us feel happy or fulfilled. On the other side, if the qualities that are important to us are not embodied in our lives and our outlook on life is bleak, stressful, or draining, then just like physical nerves, our mental nerves start sending pain signals to us, trying to get us to move and change our behavior. Also similar to pain and physical nerves, if we ignore the mental pain for long enough, we can become injured mentally, which can show up in problems like intense anxiety, burnout, and depression.
How do you identify your own values?
The most common method (and also the most ineffective) is to simply pick your values out of a list of values. There are hundreds or thousands of words that could describe life qualities, and values options certainly differ based on culture; yet across humanity, there are also a smaller handful of values which commonly repeat across the set that are important to humans. And while they are not a sufficient, all-inclusive list, the 16 values from the image above do show up in many value lists that you may find.
While simply selecting your values from a list is easy to do, this can also introduce your own biases or filters into the process, pushing you to select traits you think you should value, rather than those you actually do value. That’s because values often carry societal judgments of what a “good” and “bad” value to have is. Yet, values aren’t good or bad; they’re simply abstract qualities that are experienced during the course of life, and which we gravitate towards or away from, based on things like cultural norms, our personal experiences, and nurture and nature.
Other approaches include word association, peak experience visualizations, and scenario assessments. While these are more subjective and can take a little more time, by assessing what does and doesn’t come to mind in such an exercise they can often give you a more genuine understanding of what’s most important to you in life, in your own words.
To help you minimize the subjectivity bias a bit, we’ve developed a core human values framework and questionnaire, which can help you identify and rank your own core values.
In addition, this framework also provides you with some customized guidance per value that helps you to know how you can bring each value more into your life, as well as how to understand the shadow, or risky side of each value. Although it is generally important to have your values highly present in your life, too much of anything can bring diminishing or downright harmful side effects, and too much emphasis on one value can lead you to unsustainable behaviors or beliefs which can harm yourself, or others.
You can take the survey to identify your core values by clicking this link.