Can you name your top 5 values? Without speculating, choosing what is really important to you, and not what society considers it to be. Most likely, a few minutes will not be enough for this. At the same time, realizing and accepting your values, you can radically change your life.
Why do we need to know our values?
We may accept it or not, but everyone has values. And life will be much easier if we are aware of them and will be guided when we make plans or make decisions.
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Values determine our priorities and help us understand when life takes a wrong turn. If actions and behavior are consistent with values, we are satisfied and happy. When everything is wrong, chances are something goes against the things that are important to us.
Will a person who prefers cooperation and support, but works in a highly competitive environment, be happy? If my values are slow life, simplicity and minimalism, and the pictures on Instagram have parties, brands and a complex face, will I be satisfied? If your values are family and relationships, and you work 12-hour days a week, how long can you last?
You need to know your priorities in order to choose the right education, work, partner, hobby, direction in life. In order not to focus on the values that are imposed by society, stereotypes and social networks. So that in 10 years, having become professionals or having accumulated cars of property, not to realize that all this time we have been living someone else's life.
How to define your values
Core values change throughout life. At the beginning of a career, they will be determined by money and status, but over time, family and the balance between work and leisure can outweigh. Therefore, values must be constantly reviewed, especially in difficult moments when a way out of the crisis needs to be found.
To determine your values, try thoughtfully answering the following questions:
- When was I absolutely happy?
- When did I get overwhelmed with pride?
- What were the 2-3 most important achievements in my life?
- When did I feel unhappy? Because of which? What did I miss?
- When was I completely satisfied with the state of affairs?
- Were there other people by my side during those moments? Who was that? What they were doing?
In the answers you will find what is important to you and what is missing. Make a complete list of values. Take your time, it can take from several days to several weeks.
Highlight the fundamental, main and additional values. You may, like me, want to define your imaginary values - those that only seem important, but in reality slow us down.
Fundamental values
If we consider the categories of values as a house, then the fundamental ones are the foundation, that on which everything rests. A bad foundation means the house may collapse. If something goes wrong, you can return to these values to find out the reason and fix it.
To identify fundamental values, take your list, look at the first two items, and ask yourself: if you had to choose one of the two, what would it be? Work through all the points in this way until there are 3-5 most important things in your life left. I got it like this:
- Relations
- Health
- Creation
- Self-development
core values
The main values are the walls, the roof, the windows. Without them, a house would not be a home. These are our principles. Ideally, we should understand what these things mean to us, because people perceive the same concepts in different ways.
- CARING FOR YOURSELF. On all planes, there is a clear instruction: put on an oxygen mask yourself before helping someone else. When there is not enough energy, but we continue to share it with others, we use up a resource that is not there and borrow from ourselves from the future. To share energy, it must be enough. To do this, you need to take care of yourself and replenish the supply.
- FREEDOM. It’s often hard to believe, but the world won’t collapse if you retire from social media and don’t bother with stats and marketing, say no, let go of toxic relationships, defend psychological boundaries, express feelings that others may not like, break other people’s patterns, not to do it just because it is customary, not to achieve career heights, not to follow traditions, not to build an empire, not to be efficient, productive and motivated, not to depend and not make anyone dependent on oneself, make mistakes, choose.
- COMMUNICATION. Communicate at the level of feelings. Listen to hear, not to respond. Build respect for other points of view and go beyond your own beliefs. Exclude any communication based on projections, passive aggression and manipulation.
- STABILITY. In order to conquer the world every day, you need to understand that there are indestructible things. I don’t adapt well and don’t like change, but I often create conditions in which I have to change or change something in order not to get stuck. At the same time, it is important for me to understand that there are unshakable things that will always be. The comfort zone is what you need to create before leaving it.
- GRATITUDE. Happiness is not about constantly wanting more, happiness is about learning to notice and appreciate what you already have.
- PERSONAL BORDERS. I have nothing to hide, but I don't need to show everything either. People have the right to their opinion, I have the right not to know it.
- QUALITY. By working on the quality of each individual area, thing or value, improve the quality of life.
- PRIVACY. A quiet evening at home instead of a noisy party, a walk in nature instead of discovering another trendy place, a favorite hobby instead of a video, a book instead of Instagram, small towns instead of megacities, eco-friendly local brands instead of a mass market, the sound of rain instead of music, wildflowers instead of a million scarlet roses.
- HAPPINESS. This is not something huge that constantly flickers somewhere far away, but something small that is already here. It's not about a degree or a well-paid job, it's not about being like others. This is about hope, discoveries, about how to listen to your heart, no matter what it chooses, about how to be kinder to yourself. It is to understand that happiness is not about others, happiness is always about me.
- MEANING. If life is a road, then the meaning of life is one of the turns, and happiness is one of the ways to travel.
- AWARENESS. The ability to track your emotions and thoughts from moment to moment is the key to understanding yourself, to living in peace with yourself, to the thoughtful management of thoughts, emotions and behavior. It is constantly focusing on your feelings, comparing your behavior with internal standards and values.
- LIFE IN THE MOMENT. Happiness comes when you stop waiting and embrace the best of the moment.
Additional value
If the fundamental values are the foundation of the house, and the main ones are the walls and the roof, then the additional values are furniture and decor. You can live without them, but it is much more convenient and interesting with them. These are tools, entertainment, hobbies, style, knowledge.
Our values make us who we are, but many people don't know how to define or explain the meanings of values. Your values determine how you will act and react to situations, and how you allocate your time and energy in life.
For example, someone who places a high value on career success will be forced to work more hours, spend more time to achieve success at work, perhaps at the expense of family and friends. A person who attaches great importance to family may prefer to forego employment or career success, because he will devote a lot of time to the family. What you value dictates not only the course of everyday life, but also the future.
Do you know what you truly value in your life and in the world around you? If you haven't decided on this yet, then you may be a person who is unhappy in life or feels dissatisfied with your current state of life.
Everyone should know their values. Research shows that there are certain values that can make you happier and more satisfied with life in the long run. Conversely, there are values that, although they may seem good, ultimately lead to dissatisfaction with life.
Later in the article, we will look at how to determine which of these values are useful for long-term life satisfaction and which are not.
At 20 years of age, we may be motivated to graduate and achieve wealth and a comfortable life. Life circumstances and a series of important events for some of us bring their own adjustments to life and change our values, and we focus our time, energy and life goals on achieving these values. For example, after a divorce, the death of loved ones, the birth of children, etc. many are rethinking their values.
Satisfaction with life comes from what's inside of us
Some people struggle all their lives to find contentment and meaning in life, and it all comes down to choosing the values that give meaning to life.
Do your core values support long-term life satisfaction and meaning in life, or are they rooted in temporary happiness and material things?
A lot of research has been done on happiness, life satisfaction and values to evaluate what makes people happy in life.
The results show us that people who are in happy relationships have higher levels of life satisfaction. Studies also report that the desire to increase wealth and income will not increase life satisfaction in the long run.
In our 20s, we are more likely to form our values based on our life experiences, rather than consciously making a decision to determine our values. Therefore, it happens that we do not understand why we make the decisions we make. Research in the psychological sciences has shown that people who have identified their core values experience lower levels of stress.
These findings suggest that reflecting on personal values may keep neuroendocrine and psychological responses to stress low.
Knowing your values will help you increase life satisfaction and reduce life stress.
What life values and why are they needed? One of the laws of leadership in society is the awareness of one's life values, it is they that determine the adoption of certain decisions. If a person wants to lead the most complete and fulfilling life, then he needs to clarify for himself what constitutes his main life values, and every day to focus on them in his actions.
Psychologists say that the main human life values unconsciously formed until about the age of twelve. What we focus on in everyday life is formed under the influence of upbringing, the environment, and individual characteristics. From this follows the naturalness of the difference in values for different people. It is also worth noting that attitudes can change drastically with age, and life values young people often do not coincide with the opinion of older generations on this issue.
When a person is not aware of his values, he will certainly begin to experience quite serious difficulties. Often in such situations, people develop behavior patterns that are detrimental to themselves: I start smoking, using drugs and alcohol, and so on, which significantly affects health and quality of life. These actions manifest themselves when a person begins to experience disappointment in life, since he does not have a feeling of fullness and satisfaction, and tries to fill the void with what allows him to quickly and easily change his state of mind.
What is main life values? These are fundamental beliefs that are of great importance to a person, what is important to him. People who act according to their values experience a sense of living in harmony with themselves, use time much more efficiently. In addition, awareness of the importance of certain things contributes to the development of relationships between others and oneself, and also raises and enhances the feeling of adequate self-confidence.
Life values set the direction of our life, determine the choice in various situations and give a feeling of fulfillment. However, if we want to bring the quality of life to a new level, we will have to reconsider our value system and then align your decisions with new perspectives. Sometimes, in order to change life for the better, many of them will have to be abandoned.
We define life values
Let's try to use the brainstorming method. So, after analyzing what is of great importance to you in life, arrange all the points in ascending order - you have a hierarchy of life values. Now look at your list, and you can understand why in specific situations you did it and nothing else. Such work will help to comprehend what we want from life. Try to understand whether everything from the resulting list really matters to you? Perhaps something is worth deleting from the list, and something should be swapped.
Why change values
If you feel the need for change in your life, if you see that, or if you are moving towards them too slowly, then it will be useful to make a second list of life values. Think about what you want to get and what kind of life to live, answer yourself the question: what should be the values in order to? Also consider what is the optimal order of values in the new list. Use the new values as a compass in your life, be guided by them when making decisions, and life will begin to change.
Expanding and transforming your system life values, you can experience new feelings and life will sparkle with new colors, new horizons will open up before you, which you could not even think about before.
I often talk about values. We need to talk about them more often. Today's conversation about values in the Speakerclub-VIP for the thousandth time launched my thoughts in this direction and they resulted in the pages of the site.
You need to know your values in order to choose the right job, partner, direction in life, and then in 5-10 years, when you become a true professional or, together with your spouse, you acquire wagons of common property, do not realize that you no longer need all this and you all these years he lived a different life.
Today I will tell you about a new way to define your values. The method is as simple as it can be. I believe in simplicity because it makes us believe that there is no error in the method, and therefore helps us to move to action. Simple things, moreover, are more strongly remembered.
How to define your values
I will offer you a logical chain that will keep you believing that this method of determining your values is really simple and works without errors:
- Life is a large number of moments that follow one after another. So?
- Those moments that have touched us to the core are moments in which our values either worked 100% or were grossly violated. So?
- To find your values, you need to select the moments that touched the strings of feelings in us the most. So?
Difficulty: but we forget both good and bad, so the selection of moments from memory will give us 2 instead of 1000 moments, and any study based on 2 samples has a large error.
My way of defining my values is based precisely on thousands of “experimental moments”, it is accurate and the beauty of it is that you can do it right now.
Define Your Values Now
Open the “My Computer” folder and then the folder where you store your photos, exactly the ones you took yourself. This is your view of the world, this is your visual impressions, these are the moments of your life. Immediately exclude photos that show you. Your assessment of these moments of your life will be distorted by logical analysis, you will think about how you look in this photo and the connected self-criticism will distort real impressions, which means that values will be conveyed with an error. We need a photo that you took, but a photo that doesn't include you.
Look at these photos. Photos that are especially dear to you will be photos that capture your values.
An example of defining your values
As an example, here are a few photos that I liked in a folder that I opened in my photos at random. One of my trips to San Diego. I quickly looked through a hundred or two photos and chose 4 that I found the most profound. I like them not because they have the right angle or professionally set camera settings (on some, the angle and settings are Wrong!). These photos show the values that I hold dear and that's what makes these photos so important and impressive for me in my album. Here are the 4 photos:
Photo 1
Photo 2
Photo 3
Photo 4
Justify
Now you can move on to the next step of identifying your values - in order to accurately determine your values, you must describe to yourself what you see in these photos that makes them valuable to you. Here is what I see in the photo above, my example:
1. Legacy - what you leave behind
Confirmation of this value of mine, I can easily find in my behavior - I write articles and shoot videos that will live long after me. I love spending time with my daughter. I love sharing my knowledge with people.
2. Movement
Again, you need to find confirmation in actions, because our values are not just what impresses us, they are what guide us to action. Analyzing my behavior in life, I understand that "I can not train." The longest I've been without training is 1 month.
3. Unbreakable relationship
This photo is of my wife's brother. He lives in San Francisco. We perfectly understand each other and I see in this photo the relationship that is in harmony. Coffee emphasizes the importance of a leisurely conversation based on understanding. Squirrel is just a hint about harmony for me.
4. Belief in your beliefs
In this photo, I see the ocean trying to divert attention from the red and blue flags. "Don't forget who you are and who your community is, even when you live in such a beautiful place." Evidence from my behavior in life? It is not difficult for me to find many examples when I went against the situation in which I found myself, starting from the communist school where I studied, then at the institute, and even now there are enough examples. Faith in my beliefs is one of my values. It's very reasonable What is the point of having beliefs if you have little faith in them? This belief ensures that all other beliefs work.
Finally
These were just examples so that you can clearly define your values. Once again, I will emphasize, be sure to describe to yourself what you see in the photos that impress you. So values will turn from something intangible and elusive into concrete concepts. Once you have selected the photos and described them for yourself, you can print them out and hang them up in your home or office. They will serve as a reminder of who you are and what you believe in. With such photos, you will not lose yourself in this crowded world of roads.
