How to Identify Your Values and Start Living a Purposeful Life
There’s so much power in figuring out your values. Understanding what’s most important to us allows us to go through life with confidence, knowing that our decisions are aligned with our goals. Core values can act as a compass, supporting us in finding our path and creating the life we want. No matter what your career or life vision is, living and working in alignment with your values is key to achieving your life goals.
What are values?
Values are what make you, you. They are your fundamental beliefs. They are the things that are most important to you that guide your behaviours, decisions, and actions.
When your actions and behaviour are in sync with your values, life is good, you are happy. But, when there’s a disconnect, when your actions stray away from your values, that’s when things feel wrong and unhappiness creeps in.
If you design your life around your core values, it will bring you more joy and happiness, and after all, who doesn’t want that?
When you know your core values, it’s easier to be brave and stand tall against fear, anxiety, or those pesky negative thoughts that often try to hold us back. Your core values act as a driving force, propelling you forward even when self-doubt and jitters pop up.
Further, when exploring new career opportunities, you can use values as a way to understand whether the company culture would be a good fit for you. For example, if growth is one of your values, you could ask at an interview How does your training & development program looks like? If autonomy is one of your values, you can ask about the measures they’ve put in place to empower and give freedom to their team members.
Essentially, your values guide you in taking action when it comes to what truly matters to you.
How to identify your values?
Begin with Self-Reflection
Here are some prompts to get you thinking. Find a quiet space and let your stream of consciousness go.
1. Reflect on Your Life: Tap into your feelings and memories of past moments. What big or small event, learning, or experience shaped you in some way?
2. Ideal Dinner Guests: Imagine you are hosting a dinner for your role models, and you could invite anyone you want, dead or alive. Who would you invite and why? Write down one characteristic for each of them. Think on what is it about their life that inspires you. Which of their traits or values do you admire?
3. Influential Figures: Who are the biggest influences in your life (family or role models) and how do you think they’ve shaped your values?
4. Defining Your Legacy: Imagine your funeral. Somebody gets up to say a few words in your honour. What would you like that person to say about your life?
5. The Impact You Seek: What kind of impact would you like to have on people and the world? What would you like to contribute? How does the room change when you walk in?
Use a Values List and Narrow It Down
Step 1: Go through the list and highlight the values that resonate most with you. Don’t overthink it. Go with your gut and feel free to add your own words if you can’t find what you’re looking for.
Step 2: Organise your selected values into groups or themes and create a label for each group that describes this value for you.
Step 3: Reduce your list to 5 key themes and rank them in order of importance. If you’re struggling, face pairs off against each other until you have a top 5 that feels right. Ask yourself, If I could satisfy only one of these, which would I choose?
Step 4: Define each theme. Articulating your values helps you to better understand them. For example, the concept of Freedom looks very different for everyone. What does it mean to you?
You can also consider taking an online values assessment to see how it might enrich your existing set of values. Check out 👇
With your values now clearly defined, reflect on the extent to which you are currently living in line with your top 5 values. What do you need to feel like you’re living in alignment with your values, be it at work or in your personal life?
As you go through your days, take note of behaviours and actions that align with your values and strive to infuse more of these into your life while getting rid of those that clash. Whenever you set a goal or assess an opportunity, let your values be your guiding light in your decision-making process.
Final thoughts
The path to living a purposeful life starts with getting crystal clear on your core values. Your values will guide you through life, helping you prioritize activities, relationships, and projects that truly matter. They will be your compass, helping you navigate life’s twists and turns.
Now, with this newfound awareness, consider: What’s one value-driven step you can take today? 💪
