What are Values
Values are your guiding principles and they influence how you live out your life. They represent what is most important and meaningful to you. When you are clear on your values, you are clear in what you want out of life and you will make better decisions that are in alignment with who you are at your very core.
Identify Your Values
What values do you hold most sacred?
Values vary greatly from person to person. What matters to one may mean little to another person. Values can also change over time or throughout different seasons of life.
You can’t live out a value that you can’t name. You must prioritize what matters most in your life and allow those values to guide you through life. Narrowing your values down can be difficult, but if everything on the list is important, then nothing is truly a driver for you.
Read through the values list (attached at the bottom of this blog post) and choose three to five values that fill you with a sense of purpose. Remember: values are who you are, not who you want to be or who you think you should be. As you read through the list, ask yourself:
Which of these values are most important to me?
Which words resonate most with me?
What is not negotiable?
Living by Your Values
It’s good to understand your values, but they mean nothing without action. Perhaps you can articulate your most important values, but aren’t investing any time living them out. Take your top values, identified above, and ask yourself:
Are my top values in alignment with how I spend the majority of my time?
If that value was missing, how much would that matter?
How fundamental is the value to my happiness and fulfillment?
Evaluate how your top values match up with how you spend your time. If your top value is Family, but you give all your time and energy to work, this will be a source of stress in your life.
And it goes both directions...if a low value requires a lot of your time and energy – this can result in stress as well. If you work in a highly competitive sales environment, but you don’t value competition, it’s likely this would be a high-stress role for you.
Values in Your Career
Your values act as a compass to help you determine a best-fit career path. An important component of the True Compass Career Assessment is to identify career roles that will allow you to live out your values. When your work is aligned with your values, you will experience higher levels of happiness, purpose and satisfaction. And if you know what you value, you will know what will motivate you to perform your best work. If your career is not serving your values, you will likely feel a lack of purpose and meaning.
Challenge yourself to get clear on which values are most important to you and then be intentional about living out those values every day.
Having strong, well-defined core values can help you live a more authentic, meaningful and fulfilling life.
“The secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for.” -Fyodor Dostoyevsky
