Discovering your values

I’m so excited to write and share what I’ve learned about values. Not only because it’s helped me understand, accept and love myself but also because it’s helped me connect and at time disconnect with others. What I mean by the last part of that is there are sometimes people we hold onto throughout life because we have history with them, but as we learn, grow and experience life our values can change. And that can mean that sometimes we need to change the status of them in our lives.

Over the years I’ve found a couple of different ways to learn my values, that I’d love to share with you

Things to bear in mind

Values can shift throughout your life with experience and changes in your circumstances and environments.

Try to hold your Values lightly instead of tightly. (I learned this in an amazing Anxiety and Depression group with two wonderful women named Heather and Petreena.) What this means is that at different times or situations in your life you may live more in line with your values than other times. For example, if “Honesty” is a value in your relationships you may at time be more honest than others. It might be important to share with your partner your unfiltered thoughts and feelings, but this may not be appropriate in a client meeting. The core value is still the same, it can just be shown differently in different situations. To hold it lightly means you can let it go and accept that you experience this value differently at various times.

Values in things you love doing

My friend Eve McKenzie taught me this and I’ve done it with a few friends and children over the years.

You draw a table on a piece of paper, five columns wide and 6 columns high. In the top row write an activity or something you love to do.

In the column under each activity write the words that comes to your mind when you think about what you love about doing that thing.

When you fill the whole thing out look for the words or groups of words that come up and refine it down into your top 3-5 words. This will help you see your common values. It’s a super simple easy task to do that yields interesting results.

Finding your values, with some help!

I did a twelve week anxiety and depression group through our local Health Board (following a pretty major burnout) and they taught this awesome way to discover your values, and how they can change in the different areas of your life. Bear with me.

List of Values

Go through the values and write or note each of them on a scale of 1-5 - 1 being VERY important, 5 being not very important. Or grab a piece of paper and right down your 1s and 2s.

Once you’ve done that look at your highest scoring values and try to whittle them down to the top 10-12 values. From there complete the image below and list the top five values for each area of your life.

Living your values

You can then mark on the circle how closely you are living those values. The closer to the centre = you are living these values. Closer to the outside = you’re not living these values.

From there you can do a couple of things;

  1. Look at the things you’re doing well and where you’re living your values. Practice some gratitude.

  2. Look at the area you could be living your values more in and think through one action you can take. It’s one step at a time. And you don’t have to start with the area you’re living your values least in. Start building momentum by taking one achievable action.

Tips and Tricks

  • If you’re really stuck ask some people close to you to write down a few words that they feel represent you. This is likely your values shining through.

  • Review them over a few days, weeks or months. There is no particular rush, and no such thing as perfect.

  • There aren’t good and bad values, they just are! Like I said above, honesty is often great, but at times can be hurtful or create shame.

  • Think about the people close to you and see if you can identify the values they may hold. I suggest you just keep this to yourself, they may not appreciate you labelling them. But this can be helpful so that you can identify differences, accept them and let them be.

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