If you’ve asked yourself “what do I value,” you’ve come to the right place. But if you’ve landed here because you’ve been told it’s good to know your values, I suggest you first read about what personal core values are.
If you’re already clear on this, continue reading. We’ll see why knowing your personal values is useful. Then I’ll explain the process to discover your values and align your life with them to increase your life satisfaction. Did you know that identifying your personal values has important benefits for your life?
Why are your personal values important?
Your personal values are like a compass that shows you the path to follow. When you live in accordance with your values, you feel more satisfied, motivated, and at peace. Additionally, knowing your personal values helps you:
1. Improve your well-being
Living in alignment with your personal values reduces chronic stress and the likelihood of suffering from burnout syndrome or boreout syndrome. This improves your physical and mental health.
2. Make Better Decisions
When you know what truly matters to you, it’s easier to choose the right path. Your personal values guide you when making decisions. They also form the basis for determining your priorities. Then it is easier for you to set your goals. From there, you’ll be better able to choose the important actions that contribute to your values, priorities, and goals.
3. Achieve Your Goals
Your personal values give you the motivation and clarity you need to achieve what you set out to do. Have you ever pursued a goal that eluded you? Chances are, it wasn’t aligned with one of your personal values.
4. Build Meaningful Relationships
If you don’t live in alignment with your values, you feel dissatisfied, moody, and irritable. Knowing your values and living by them improves your relationships because you feel more comfortable in your own skin.
Sharing values with others also strengthens bonds and improves communication. You may have noticed that you feel more affinity with certain people. Once you answer the question “what do I value,” you’ll realise which ones you share with those people.
The Steps to Discover Your Personal Values
Now that you know how important it is to know your personal values, let’s look at the complete process for identifying and honouring them in your life.
1. Ask yourself, “What do I value?”
Although you can find lists of values online, keep in mind that these are concepts chosen by a person based on what matters to them.
Therefore, it’s best to follow these steps to discover your personal values:
Identify the values that are most important to you today. To do this, think about what matters most to you and what you enjoy most. What concepts do these things have in common?
Things that bother you can also give you important clues. Does it annoy you when someone is late? Then punctuality is important to you.
2. What are my 5 most important personal values?
Once you have your initial list, narrow it down to the 5 most important values. There may be words that you can unify into one concept. For example, punctuality, for me, falls under the value of Respect.
This process aims to help you establish the pillars for your life that serve as your compass. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t other values that are important to you and present in your life. It’s about choosing the 5 values that are most important to you at this point in your life. Because that will help you increase your level of satisfaction and happiness.
3. Order your values by importance
Once you have your 5 personal values, it’s time to put them in order. But why is this important? Perhaps we know our personal values, but still struggle with certain decisions. If so, it’s likely you haven’t considered which of your values is more important in case of doubt or conflict.
Let’s say you’ve chosen the values of family and friends. If you had to choose between a plan with your family or with your friends, would you choose your family? Then family is more important to you.
Knowing not only your 5 personal values but also the order which each one occupies is essential for your life compass to work and guide you.
4. Give Meaning to Your Personal Values
When I tried to explore my personal values years ago, I made the mistake of using a simple list. Furthermore, I skipped this step because no one told me how important it was.
As I mentioned in the article about what personal core values are, here’s the crux of the matter. More important than choosing a concept you identify with is defining what it really means to you.
Even if you share certain values with other people, your definitions may differ completely. And that can lead to misunderstandings and stress if you aren’t aware of what I just explained.
So, take a moment to write down your personal definition for each of your 5 personal values.
5. Rate Your Personal Values
The next step in good values work is to reflect on how satisfied you are with each of your 5 personal values. How present are they in your life? To what extent do you honour them?
Your level of satisfaction with a value may be low either because it’s not present enough or because it’s too present. Let’s go back to the example of family being important to you. You may feel like you spend little quality time with them. Or maybe your life revolves so much around them that you don’t find time for yourself, leading you to neglect your values of well-being and health or personal development, for example.
So, rate your current level of satisfaction with each of your five personal values from 1 to 10.
6. Choose the personal value with the lowest score
Once you’ve scored your personal values, choose the value you’re least satisfied with. Decide what level of satisfaction you want to achieve in the next three months.
7. Create an action plan
Now think of at least three actions that will help you increase your level of satisfaction. Whenever possible, choose actions that depend primarily on you. Try to define your actions very specifically and set a date or schedule for them.
8. Follow up
Finally, establish a follow-up routine for your plan. Set aside a little time each week to review your progress. During this review, decide if you want to continue with the same actions, make adjustments, or add new ones. Or perhaps you’re satisfied with the progress you’ve made and want to set actions for another personal value. This will help you live more and more aligned with your values.
9. Review your personal values periodically
People evolve. As teenagers, we care about and aspire to certain things. As our professional careers progress, our aspirations evolve. Likewise, when we start a family, our priorities change. That’s why I suggest you periodically review whether you still identify with your list of 5 personal values or with their order of priority.
How to speed up the process of discovering your personal values
A fun and agile tool for figuring out your personal values is the game The Value of ValuesⓇ. It was born from extensive international research by Simon L. Dolan, PhD in occupational psychology. Starting from a list of 260 values, he selected 51 universal values in the game. With my coaching or mentoring clients, we use either the card game or the online version of the tool.
That way you don’t need to rack your brain to come up with your values or start from a list of dubious origins. With the help of this tool, you select the values that resonate most with you until you’re left with your 5 most important personal values.
I’ll guide you through the process I explained above. We’ll also draw up your triaxial values model. You’ll learn about the 3 types of values, where yours fall, and what effects this has on you and your life. In the action plan step, we’ll discuss whether you benefit more from working on one value or setting actions to honour a different personal value each day.
Finally, I’ll help you increase your accountability with follow-up. That is, increase your chances of success with your goals and actions by holding account not only to others but also acquiring the habit of being accountable to yourself.
Ready to discover your personal values?
Now you know how to answer the question “what do I value?”. If you want to discover your personal values and increase your level of life satisfaction more quickly, don’t hesitate to contact me here or directly book a free, non-binding interview to learn more.
