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Taking the time to figure out your life values can be the difference between a happy life and one plagued with seemingly endless levels of burden and stress. Figuring out your values and aligning your lifestyle around them is a huge predictor of life happiness. So today I’m teaching you my process for determining your unique life values.

Before we hop into this education session today watch this short video on “Why we need core life values” by James Franklin. It’s an incredibly insightful TED Talk. It’s going to really prepare you for what I’m going to be talking about with you today.

My Original Approach to My Life Values

For many years, far too many, I lived like a lot of you probably are right now. I agreed with everyone else’s opinions and values in order to avoid conflict. I did what was asked of me when it was asked of me. Doing that kept me on everybody’s’ good side.

Essentially, I did whatever I was told to do. I wanted to be seen as a good kid, then a good student, and eventually a good worker. To do this I changed my views and values to continually align with those around me. I refrained from revealing my own opinions, values, goals, and desires because I didn’t want to upset anyone.

However, this path did not lead to my happiness. I eventually learned that I needed to honor my values to be happy. I needed to accept that my values wouldn’t always align with everyone else’s. Basically, I needed to understand that disagreement and conflict were simply a part of life. If I wanted to pursue my happiness I needed to come to accept them.

My Approach to My Life Values Now

This realization led to big changes in my life. I began exploring what my values might be. I needed to figure out which of them brought me the most happiness and fulfillment. Essentially, I began creating a lifestyle surrounding the values which resonated the strongest with me at my core.

I created a life which revolved around my own values on my own terms.

If you’re starting out like I was, you likely have no idea what your life values are. That’s OK.

The answer to this important question lies within you. You just need to take the time to explore the potential solutions which resonate with you. It’s important because regardless of your ability to achieve your goals, you will always be able to choose to live by your values. That can bring you significant happiness and fulfillment in life.

That’s why today’s blog article will help you to define your life values. We’ll work through the step-by-step process I use to help people determine their life values!

What Are Life Values?

Our life values are the principles that create our personal code of conduct. They provide our lives with meaning and help us to persevere through adversity. Essentially, these values identify what’s important to us in life.

Life values are things that we all have. They are unique to us, our personalities, our lifestyles, and our goals and desires. Though they may change over time as we learn, grow, and evolve, they remain fairly consistent short-term.

Some common examples of a life value could be continual learning and self-improvement, physical fitness, and community and giving back.

Though I can’t tell you what your life values are, you can figure this out for yourself if you’re willing to.

Your life values answer the question “who are you?” Not “who do you think you should be?”

They get right down to determining what is important to you at your core and within your soul.

Why Figuring Out Your Life Values Is Important?

Your life values make up the character of who you are. They help you determine the different paths you should consider pursuing in life. Overall, they help to provide you with a much-needed sense of direction. When you are able to determine your values very clearly your life typically improves drastically.

If we fail to take the time to understand what our life values our, chances are we won’t understand what’s important to us in life. As a result, we blindly wander and wonder what we should dedicate our lives to. If our life values aren’t clear, we can’t hope to understand what we truly want. Nor, can we know what actions will lead us towards balance and inner peace.

When you figure out your life values and align your life with them you’ll truly understand life-balance. You’ll experience inner peace and fulfillment. And, most importantly, you’ll take your life to the next level despite the challenges and barriers.

Going through this process of reflection to determine your life values is thus a highly rewarding one. It helps you not only determine what path is right for you but how to walk it as well.

Clarifying My Life Values Improved My Everyday Life

Transitioning from no life values to developing very clear life values made it obvious what was important to me in my life. This allowed me to continually assess whether my actions were bringing me closer to my goals.

Being motivated, passionate, and happy about the things you are doing is a huge driving force and predictor of success in many areas of work. So it’s important to find this alignment.

For example, one of my values is growth. When I noticed that the job I had was no longer allowing me to grow, this fell out of alignment with my values and my job satisfaction decreased. This indicated to me it was time for a change and soon afterward I began looking for a new position that would allow me to grow.

Another one of my values is human connections. So as I searched for a new position, I knew being able to interact with people in a meaningful way would be an important consideration.

The clarity that I had developed around my life values enabled me to make guided decisions. My decisions aligned with my life values and what was important to me at my core. This lead to me entering healthcare research which I am still doing to this day.

This life value clarity helped me make decisions which brought me greater satisfaction. They led me down a path that helped me to develop more self-confidence, a greater sense of happiness, and greater success on a daily basis.

Clarifying your life values is not going to make you perfect. But that’s not the goal anyway. What they do is help you to establish a more personally fulfilling lifestyle to bring you greater levels of happiness and success.

Benefits of Clarifying Your Life Values

Investing time and effort into clarifying your life values will be highly rewarding. It will pay you back in ways you couldn’t even imagine yet.

Reflecting on which life values are important to you and developing a core set will provide you with a sense of direction you have never had before. They will help you make decisions and guide you towards your best life.

This is because when we’ve taken the time to uncover what values are most important to us it’s a lot easier to identify what things in our life is either delaying us from achieving happiness or preventing it entirely. They will help you identify what is reducing your mental, emotional, and physical states.

These life values will help you remove the negatives from your life in favor of the things that bring you more happiness, satisfaction, and fulfillment. This is because your values identify what is important to you at your very core. Your life values highlight what you as a person stand for and create the essence of who you are.

These life values will make the path towards your happiness and success so much more clear. They will remove a lot of the worry and the doubt most people experience on their path as they blindly search for personal success and happiness.

 7 Steps to Determining Your Core Values

The unfortunate reality is that many of us don’t know out life values. Because we haven’t taken the time to reflect and define them we simply adopt the values of our family members, co-workers, society, and media.

Though this isn’t the worst option, because it’s likely you will share t least some life values with these people. It is still far from ideal and won’t bring you the happiness and success you could have from taking the time to answer this question yourself.

It’s easy to assume what things you should value based on society and what is highlighted by the media. However, it takes a lot more effort to figure out what it is that you truly value at your core. But remember, that effort is more than worth it for the reward.

So go grab something that you can take notes with. I’m going to walk you through the process I use to help people discover their core life values that will bring them more happiness and success in both their professional and personal lives.

 STEP 1: Approach Life Value Discovery with an Open Mind

It is amazing how many people simply assume that they know their life values. Yet, when prompted to list out 5-10 of those values, they can’t do it. That’s because they just assumed that they knew what was important to them. They had never put in any effort or taken the time to actually answer this question for themselves.

For this reason, it’s important to approach this process with the mindset that you know nothing. Don’t assume you know what’s important to you going into this or you will bias the end results. If you want to truly discover your core life values, you need to enter this process unbiased and uninfluenced.

Create some space in your mind to creatively approach the questions and process you’re about to go through. Try to open up some space to implant some knowledge and understanding of yourself which is completely new. Get ready for some new personal revelations and insights.

When you’ve achieved this step, you are now ready to proceed to step two of this process.

STEP 2: Brainstorm a Life Values List

Trying to immediately list off your core life values is tough, and would result in you guessing. That’s not what you want.

There are lists online with tons of life values to choose from. However, try to avoid these, at least at first.

This is because I don’t want you to just pick random things off a list that you think you should value or make you look good. I want you to take the time to reflect on who you are and what’s important to you. The things that are the most important to you will pop out to you on their own.

Ask yourself questions such as:

What are some meaningful experiences you’ve had? What happened? Which values were being honored?

Think about times when you were angry or frustrated. What was going on? Which values were being suppressed?

What’s most important to you in life? What brings you joy and fulfillment? Do you need to honor certain parts of your life in order to live happily and successfully?

The answers you provide to these types of questions should make it apparent what types of core life values you have at a very personal level.

Remember to be honest through this process. If for example prestige or money are two things you value highly, don’t shy away from them just cause some people would say they’re self-absorbed. The more honest you are throughout this life value discovery process the better the end result will be.

After you’ve made your initial list, now go over to one of these online life value banks. Once there, I want you to create a second list of life values that you feel align with who you are and what’s important to you.

Here’s one with over 220 core life values:

https://scottjeffrey.com/core-values-list/

 Other Ways to Choose Your Core Life Values

Consider the most important people in your life.

It’s very common that some of the people you admire and look up to in life could embody a lot of life values you feel are important. For example, if you admire an athlete it’s possible you value strong work ethic and perseverance. If you admire doctors and lawyers maybe you highly value competence and continual learning.

By identifying who you admire, you may discover a variety of different life values that are important to you.

See a career counselor.

Another way to determine what your life values might be could be to seek out a career counselor. Your values have a huge influence on your life path and career decisions. Depending on the values you have you could go in totally different directions with your life.

Career counselors are equipped with a variety of different strategies, tools, and methods, for helping people figure these things out. This includes life value tools which allow them to help people discover their life values and then match them with a career which aligns with them.

Observe yourself and learn.

One final way through which you can come to discover your life values is through observing and learning from yourself. Be mindful of the decisions you make in your personal and professional life. Doing this will help you to identify which values you tend to prioritize over others.

By observing what values you are honoring throughout your daily life you will come to understand what your core values are by picking up on patterns. These may help indicate what it is you want from your life and what type of lifestyle would bring you the most happiness, success, and fulfillment.

STEP 3: Chunk Your Personal Values into Related Groups

What you’re going to do now is take your entire list from step two. Ideally, that original list will consist of approximately 25-50 items. If your list is smaller, see if you can go back and add any other potential core life values. You don’t want to risk missing one of your core values.

Now that you’ve got a large list of unique life values that you feel are important it’s time to begin trimming that list down. We are going to slowly categorize and cut values off this list until we arrive at your true core life values.

So figure out which life values are related and try to begin grouping them together.

For example, creation, curiosity, and exploration could all be related. Or, the skills of development, competence, and excellence might be grouped together. You could relate the life values of smart, knowledge, and decisiveness together as well.

Once you’ve moved each life value from your master list into a group you are ready to move onto step four.

STEP 4: Highlight the Central Theme of Each Value Group

Now that you have your groups of related life values, it’s time to identify the theme of each group.

Using the above groups, I might end up with the following themes:

Creation, curiosity, and exploration, might fall under the central theme of creativity.

Development, competence, and excellence could all come together under the theme of achievement.

And finally, the values of knowledge, smart, and decisiveness could fall under the theme of intelligence.

Once you’ve identified the main theme for each group move on to step five.

STEP 5: Determine Your Top Personal Core Values

This is probably the most difficult of the steps. You’ve made your master list and grouped them into related groups and assigned themes. Now it’s time to trim that list down.

Your goal here is to come up with a core life values list that is neither so small that you are missing important pieces of who you are nor too large that you can’t focus on what’s most important to you. This range typically falls around 5-10 life values.

You do this by asking yourself questions such as:

What things do you need in your life to be happy?

What do you need to achieve in order to feel successful and fulfilled?

Which life values would you never be willing to sacrifice?

Read through your master list of core life values carefully and thoroughly. Circle the ones that your gut tells you are going to resonate with you the strongest. You can also begin to cross off and remove the values that don’t seem quite as important to you as the others.

Once you have your core life values list, it’s time to rank them in in order of importance to you. I urge you to not rush through this phase of step 5. Take the time to thoughtfully rank these core life values so that you can be sure they serve you as effective guides towards your best life. This clarity will serve you well in life!

STEP 6: Clarify and Understand Your List

Now that you’ve got your core life values listed out, it’s time to make sure you understand it. This is because simply putting together a list of values isn’t enough. You need to clarify and understand what each of those values means to you personally.

There are a variety of different methods you could do this through. All of them should help you not only develop a clearer understanding of your life values but will also help you remember them.

The method I tell people to use is to define the value in relation to the lifestyle they want to live and the goals they want to achieve. This adds an additional layer of value to each of the traits on your list.

Your goal should be to define your life values in a way that inspires you, triggers the desired emotional response, and is meaningful to you personally.

For example, say you had selected the term “competence” as one of your core life values. Your value statement for this term could be as follows:

“Competence: to develop mastery of health-related knowledge and understanding of the issues and challenges confronting the field of healthcare.”

That life value statement is meaningful to me personally, it inspires me to take action, and it reminds me of why the term competence is emotionally important to me.

STEP 7: Check Back and Reflect on Your List at a Later Date

Once you’ve established this list of core life values along with your value statements it’s time to go live your life according to them for a while. However, make sure you revisit your ranking and value statements every so often to see if anything has changed.

You can determine whether your values and priorities have changed by asking questions such as the following:

How do these life values and value statements make you feel? Do they inspire you the same way they used to?

Do the life values and core value statements still reflect you who are? Are they still personalized to your unique essence?

Have any of these life values become inconsistent with your core? Has the ranking of the current priorities changed at all?

Going through this step in detail allowed me to transform my vague core values into specific life guidelines.

Remember, your life is not stationary, so your core life values list should not remain completely stationary either. As you grow and your life changes, it’s possible your life values will also change. Nothing on this list is permanent, feel free to make necessary changes as you please.

It’s natural to modify your life values list as you face new situations. However, some of these values will likely represent things you would never be wanting to change. An example might be the value of family. If this is important to you, it’s likely going to be important throughout the different stages of your life and will be unlikely to change.

Check if Your Lifestyle is Aligned with Your Values

After you’ve lived with your core life values for a little while it’ll be time to evaluate how well you’ve followed them.

This can be done through a simple scoring scheme. Simply rank your core life values in order and give each of them a score from 1 to 10. A score of 1 would indicate that you haven’t honored this life value at all and 10 would indicate that you’ve honored it completely.

Then based on this scoring, write a very brief statement about how satisfied you are with your current score. If you’re not satisfied say that and then leave an additional statement about how you are going to improve this situation. Include how you need to change to better honor this life value and how you can make those changes.

Ideally, this is something you should do every month. But every few months would be fine as well.

 How to Use Your Core Values to Make Decisions

Well, congratulations! Making it this far means you’ve completed your life values list. You likely have significantly improved the clarity of your life direction and what you need within it in order to feel happy, successful, and fulfilled.

These values will be huge guiding forces as you make difficult decisions in your life. You will be able to evaluate whether a decision brings you closer to your core values, or forces you to sacrifice some of them. This will help you determine whether or not you will be happy with the result.

Additionally, there will be times in your life when you are forced to choose between two different values. Know your life value ranking scheme and why you’re choosing one value over another will be very helpful to you.

Even if they don’t help you make an immediate decision, try to think about the outcome of the decision you’re about to make. How does it force you to change your lifestyle? What things are you doing now that you weren’t doing before?

Answer these types of questions and then determine if these improve your core life values or reduce your ability to honor them.

This process will bring you clarity that you likely haven’t had before as you go about making important life-decisions.

Further Life Values Reading

If you’d like to check out some other resources for discovering your values, you should check out this inventory:

https://www.lifevaluesinventory.org/

Open this in a new tab and take a look. It’s a value clarification program. It’s free. But I feel as though it’s slightly less personal than the steps I just took you through. That being said, it’s still an excellent resource for helping you figure out your core life values.

Also, I’d recommend that you check out my post on telling you about my life balance journey. It’ll tell you guys a little bit more about me:

1. From Distress to Success with Life Balance

What Is Next for You

Today’s article focused specifically on the topic of identifying your core life values to help you make better decisions in life. Then I walked you through the process I use to help people identify their core life values so that they can begin living their ideal lifestyle.

However, there’s so much more to do.

That’s why in my next post I’m going to help you figure out what your biggest life goals are. Since you took the time to figure out your values today, you’re ready to begin evaluating what life goals are going to align with those values.

So get ready to take that next step!

Until you’re ready though, you should be experimenting with the steps that I’ve walked you through here. Test out a few different life values. See what feel right and what resonates with you at your core.

You deserve to be living your best life. So take this first step!

Stay excellent everyone!

– Mark

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