Don’t Pick Your Values From a List

Here’s a better way to discover what truly matters to you

People pointing at a stone slab. Imagined by James Robinson, generated by Bing Image Creator, powered by Dall•E.

Your values — the qualities that are important to you and guide your decisions — are already lurking about in your reactions, actions, and interactions. Here’s a simple way to spot them.

The answers are all coming from inside your house

I’m not the biggest fan of psychometric testing. A lot of these methods are needlessly complicated, taking what you already know and manipulating it (and you!) into some contrived set of reductive categories.

“The test said I’m a Blue, and Blues don’t do well in these situations, so that means I should focus on this other thing instead.”

No.

Picking your values from a list is a smaller and more harmless version of this methodology. Sure, you might scan the list of common values and say to yourself, “No. No. Nope. Definitely no. Maybe? YES…trust really IS important to me.”

And that’s great! It might even be true. But could you say why? From this list-selection process, could you point to an example of where that value appears in your life?