What Defines your Personal Values

You are what you value.

Every action you take in life is influenced by your personal values. The sooner you realize what they are, the sooner the quality of your life improves.

You may or may not always be aware of all your personal values but it’s not that hard to find out if you start noticing.

Let’s go over a few popular examples:

If you show up for your meetings a few minutes early, you value punctuality.

If you pay your bills on time, you value responsibility.

If you help other people, you value humanity.

But not all values are positive. We like it or not there are some values that although not so positive they are still practiced by many people.

Now let’s go over a few of these bad boys:

If you never give money to street performers, you value stinginess.

If you don’t hold the door for others, you value selfishness.

If you pass the red light, you value craziness.

You see, there’s one main thing all these values have in common regardless of being positive or not.

They all involve taking action. By taking an action you show the world what values you stand by and people will judge you based on your actions.

Now it’s up to you to make sure you have good values in life.

You know why?

Because you can’t change how people think of you but you can always change your habits and how you act.

There are a few good reasons for why personal values matter.

It’s important to know your personal values because without them you’ll have a hard time making decisions in life.

For example, consider the situation of having to make a choice between walking, taking the bus or the taxi for your meeting.

If you know whether you care about punctuality or not, you won’t have to take a second to make that choice. It’s obvious to you.

Knowing and cherishing your personal values will help you increase your self-awareness. Why? Because who you are is defined by your values.

There are certain universal human values that most of us cherish on earth. Those are passed onto us from many generations. We learn them from our parents and don’t even question them.

Like saying hello when you enter a room and saying bye when you leave. But the majority of the important values are chosen by us.

We’re influenced by other people but we’re adult enough to make our own call and keep what we like and let go of what we don’t like.

But wait there’s more. There’s one last reason why you need to care about your personal values and that’s your legacy.

What you leave behind a trace of what you valued in life. There’s a reason why people remember Muhammad Ali. He left behind a legacy that will continue to inspire the rest of us.

I hope this has inspired you to dive deep and learn more about your personal values. Without them, you don’t have much to offer.

I wrote this piece as part of a 90-day challenge I took on to get better at this type of writing. To learn more about me you can visit my website here.