Why are values important?
This is such a huge question but one perhaps we don’t often ask ourselves or each other. What does it actually mean? Let’s start with the concept of values, what are they? Values are basic and fundamental beliefs that guide or motivate attitudes or actions. They help us to determine what is important to us. Values in a narrow sense are things which we consider to be good, desirable, or worthwhile. Values are the motive behind purposeful action. They are the ends we act to achieve and they come in many forms.
Each of us have our own personality traits, some of us are introverted, some extrovert, some agreeable and so on (We will explore personality traits in a future blog). We also have our own personal culture, this is made up of beliefs, geographic location, gender, sexual orientation, race, politics, work, personal tastes, clothing, this list is potentially very long. Imagine all the things that go in to making you - you. So when we step back to look at values in particular the variety of what we value can be as varied as our own personal cultures and personalities.
Sometimes we can find ourselves feeling almost adrift from a sense of who we really are, who we want to be, or who we believe we should be. A way to pressure test this is to check in with yourself and audit your values.
How can we do that? There are several ways to approach it, you could explore it with a friend or a therapist in dialogue, start a mind map or a list that you write and re-arrange in order of importance or use an App to help you boil down the things that are most important to you. The longer you take on creating your list and the more open minded you are in approach, the more authentically accurate your list of values will be.
One App to help you do this is https://pages.flycricket.io/valuescardsort/ if you choose to use this App screenshot the last page that lists your top 5 values as it does not save them.
So once you have your top 5, what then? To illustrate the usefulness of this exercise lets imagine a person who has come up with the following 5 values:
Relationships
Fun
Adventure
Creativity
Financial security
They might be a fun loving extrovert who also values a sense of security and having resources in their lives. Imagine they have a successful career and they are in a positive relationship but the past year they have struggled to see their family and friends much and they have not managed to go on holiday. Work has become stressful. If they explore each bullet point of what they value they can start to measure how closely they are living these values or adrift from them. For example they may not be able to identify any moments of adventure, they may feel they are adrift from having fun. However they might feel that they are meeting their inner need to be creative as perhaps they started to do more photography during the last year. In conclusion this example of a person auditing their values could conclude in a plan to ensure their behaviours and choices are lining up with their values.
When making a plan like this it can be useful to make it SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time based.
So they might decide to go for a drink with friends once a week to meet the desire to value relationships. Or think “Well I cannot get to my usual holiday scuba diving in the Caribbean but I can change my run route to see new parts of the local area. I will start that this weekend!” Small reachable goals can help us get more in tune with all the different parts that make up who we are.
So why not think through what you value and see how closely you are hitting your mark!