How to identify your values
Life ingredients that make you feel alive
In my last article, I mentioned running your hard decisions through your values, to see which option would help you live your truest, most fulfilled life. This article will help you identify your values — the ingredients of life that make it feel meaningful to you. And if you want to do the full exercise of defining your values, book a 1:1 session with me or sign up for my workshop on it.
Defining your values will help you gain clarity on what you truly want to optimize for in life, which will help you make stronger career & life decisions and solidify your leadership and work style.
Perhaps more philosophically, the purpose of articulating your values is to guide you towards your unique expression of life’s meaning. Life means something different for every person, and we all find fulfillment in a huge range of ways - there is no one meaning of life. It’s important to call out here that values are a fingerprint of who you are, right now. They are not who you’d like to be, or who you think you should be. Your values serve as a compass that points out what it means to be true to yourself. When you honor your values consistently, life is good and fulfilling. When you don’t, life can feel unfulfilling. You will know you’ve found a value when the thought of optimizing for it sounds alive, meaningful, profound, or even indulgent.
Here are two exercises to help you mine for your values:
Peak Moments
Identify special, peak moments in your life when life felt especially rewarding or poignant (the more specific, the better). These don’t necessarily need to be the happiest moments—the emoji 🥹 perhaps describes the type of moment best.
What was happening? Who was there? What made it special? What made it meaningful to you? And what about that was meaningful (keep digging deeper with that question until you can’t answer anymore)?
From these questions, come up with some words that describe the values that were being expressed in this peak moment. Repeat for a few more peak moments. It can be helpful to do this exercise with others, so you have someone else to bounce off of.
This exercise helps you identify values because “peak” moments often felt that way because we were living in accordance to one or more (maybe even all!) of our values.
Low Moments
Another exercise, although a little less fun, is to identify particularly low moments in your life, because moments of distress usually signal that we may have been suppressing or undermining one of our values.
Identify particularly low moments in your life when you felt angry/frustrated, upset, or meaningless/bored.
What was happening? Who was there? What made you feel badly? What about that felt bad (again, keep asking this question until you can’t anymore)?
From these questions, try to identify what values were being suppressed or undermined.
Putting it all together
After you come up with a list of words that may represent your values, start to cluster them and form your own values list. This doesn’t need to look or sound any particular way - use your own words and make it your own! For example, I have 9 values and each one is a string of words (e.g. one of them is “Bringing people together/Hosting/Facilitating”).
💡 Hope this helps you reflect on what you want to optimize for in your life!
Two relevant offers -
Sign up for a pay-what-you-can session if you are a new client who wants support defining your values (and in our session, we can create a life vision and purpose as well).
Sign up for this pay-what-you-can workshop on defining your values.
🌱,
Cissy
