The Power of Self-Reflection: Understanding Your Values and Impact in the Workplace
Identifying your values and the impact they have on your work life and career can be a powerful exercise in self-reflection and growth. By understanding what values are fundamentally important to you, you can better navigate your career path and make decisions that align with your personal beliefs. Additionally, understanding how these values are driven by internal and external forces can help you address any areas for improvement and work towards creating a more positive work environment.
Your Values
Take a moment to describe three separate values that are fundamentally important to you in your work life and or career, use one word to describe your value.
Examples may include items such as Empathy, Collaboration, Growth, Balance, and Giving.
Value Forces
For each of these values, identify whether they are primarily driven by external or internal factors.
For example, collaboration is primarily driven by the environment you are in and secondarily driven by your own behaviors.
Your Impact
Lastly, take a moment to self-reflect on each one, and be critical of how you can address your own behaviors to drive impact on external factors in those value areas. All too often individuals fall into the trap of simply writing off a colleague that may exhibit different values than their own or walking away from managers and organizations that may need help in addressing value gaps. The reality is, you only have positives to gain by pushing past the differences and living true to your values in all your interactions and engagements. There is a lot of self-learning that can be obtained in these often challenging times in one’s career.
For example, you may determine that empathy is an externally driven value within your organization and your role.
Therefore, you may self-reflect that you have potentially been less empathetic to your colleagues, whether it would be your peers or managers, or team members due to forces around you that are outside of your control. However, you do have some control, the control of how you show up and respond in those instances. How can you be the change you want to see in that instance? Is there something you should change in your day to day, to be more empathetic, and live the value you wish to see in your situation?
Why is this important
First, it’s important because no matter what your career aspirations may be, if you do not have an environment that allows you to live your values, the rest is going to be much harder. Second, it is important to realize that you also have a major role and furthermore responsibility in impacting your environment such that it may reflect the values you wish to be surrounded by.
Simple isn’t it? By living true to your values and addressing any areas for improvement, you can create a more positive work environment and ultimately achieve greater success in your career. Remember, you have the power to impact your environment and the responsibility to make it reflect the values that are important to you. So give this exercise a spin towards making a conscious effort to align your actions with your values.
