The Value of Knowing Your Values

Values and the collective

Politicians love talking about values and appealing to the emotions by telling us of the importance they attach to promoting the ‘values we ascribe to as a nation’.

Likewise, you’ll frequently hear sports coaches motivating their teams, or promoting their teams’ interests publicly, by referring to the collective values they stand for.

Companies, too, love to speak of their values.

I spent 27 years in employment and can remember many occasions being drawn into team discussions to debate common values or being addressed by leadership on the importance of knowing and understanding the values of the company or department concerned.

So, when it comes to people as a collective, values is something you’ll hear a lot about.

Values and the individual

On the other hand, talk of personal values is, at best, infrequent.

How often do we as individuals get involved in serious introspection and reflection regarding the nature of our own personal values?

The answer, from my own experience, and from many years in the life coaching industry is … seldom, if ever!

That’s both shocking – given the critical importance they play in our lives – and understandable, given how common it is for humans to prioritise the interests of their external worlds over the connection with their inner beings.

What are values?

But what, exactly, are personal values?

A big clue lies in the name, of course, but our values are far more narrowly defined than simply ‘things we deem to be of value’.

States of being

In the New Insights Life Coach Training and Certification Programme we explain that values are those ‘states of being’ that are most important to us to uphold, live in accordance with, or experience.

There is an almost limitless possibility when it comes to the values a person may hold, but a few commonly expressed examples are:

Adventurousness
Freedom
Family togetherness
Fair exchange
Healthy living
Honesty
Integrity
Love and Connection
Wealth

Directing actions and behaviours

The importance of values lies in the role they play in directing our actions and behaviours.

As a general rule, we will seek to uphold and promote our values when making choices about how to live our lives.

Basic needs trump values

But there is a very important caveat to this. I’ll explain by way of an example.

Let’s say you’ve always valued honesty but your life has become so challenging that you are left without sufficient money to put food on the table. Then someone unknowingly drops a $50 note on the ground and, without thinking, you quickly pocket it and disappear out of site.

This is dishonest behaviour that goes against your value but it is driven by a desperate need for food and survival.

I’ve offered a somewhat extreme example here but it does serve to demonstrate that your basic needs will trump your values, especially if your values are held at the subconscious level.

Guilt and discomfort

I mentioned earlier that few of us ever spend quality time becoming consciously aware of our top values and the priority we assign to them. So, in most cases, they remain deeply buried and, if needs be, when the going gets tough, we will compromise them.

When we compromise our values we experience feelings of guilt and discomfort or disharmony. But the compromises will continue for as long as we have basic needs that are more pressing and we remain consciously disconnected from our values.

Consistently indulging in actions and behaviours that contradict our values is destructive in nature as it is neither good for ourselves, for others, or the world at large.

Conscious living and being value-driven

In life coaching we work with clients to prevent the onset of a vicious destructive cycle and, instead, to promote what we call ‘conscious living’.

Becoming consciously aware of our values is the first step on the journey towards living a value-driven life. Life that promotes frequent experience of the states of being that we ascribe great importance to, is both happy and fulfilling.

What’s most important?

New Insights life coaches are trained to ask the question, “What is most important to you in life,” to start the process of surfacing a client’s values.

Once the client’s list of values is brainstormed and checked for authenticity by correlating it with the client’s lifestyle, the next step is to produce a list of, say, half a dozen top values ordered by priority.

There’s a lot more involved, and specific tools and techniques we use, that I won’t delve into here. Suffice it to say that value discovery can be an extremely powerful, albeit very emotive experience.

Towards constructive living

Conscious awareness of one’s top values, and their relative priority, promotes deliberate and informed choices when it comes to the important actions and behaviours we take in various circumstances.

Our actions and behaviours have consequences. But when they are taken after due consideration of our values, they are almost always constructive in effect.

That may be through promoting our ability to enjoy the states of being that are so important to us, or through the learnings that we derive that will serve this aim in the future.

The value of knowing your values

If you resonated with the previous blog post, As Without So Within, you’ll be connecting the dots to appreciate this:

The true value of knowing your values lies in its importance in harnessing the under-utilised inner power that resides within each of us.