A number of years ago, alongside a group of work collaborators and friends on a business retreat, we completed an exercise to get clarity on what each of our values were. We had realised that we were working together really well as collaborators, and wanted to better understand why. We knew there were similarities, and also differences, in how we each viewed the world. Now, I am a sucker for quizzes, and also for psychology and self-improvement, so I was fully engaged and excited. But you might not be as excited about quizzes as I am, so I want to explain the reasons that this one was so important and how it changed the way I live and work.
It’s a very simple concept where you pick cards on the screen – you choose the words/descriptions that you connect most with, and discard the ones you don’t. Make sure you read the descriptions and not just the words, as they give more clarity around the ‘value’. Then you keep narrowing them down until you are left with only 5. Those words and descriptions will likely become very significant for you over time if you keep them somewhere close you can see them.
Over the next few weeks and months, when you are feeling uncomfortable about a situation, or by contrast, if you feel really good about something, look at those values and see if you can figure out which one is being ‘activated’.
It was a huge shift for me – as I started the exercise, I had to be very careful to actually choose what I thought and believed, and not just choose behaviours that were ‘expected of me’ or that I had learned to ‘perform’ in certain situations. No-one else is going to see your results if you don’t want them to, so be honest and authentic in your choices.
Then once you start to see the values in action, go back and write something about each of those values to more clearly articulate why they are important to you. This exercise made me significantly change the work I was doing, the activities I choose to do, and I live a much more peaceful and fulfilled existence in both my life and work.
Values can change.
I re-do this exercise every couple of years, and I realised that the values can change, although not often significantly. For example, when I first did the exercise, I had Leadership as one of my values. When I did it again more recently, Leadership was not one I chose to keep, as it is just something I now take for granted as being part of my everyday life and I don’t really need to think about it. A new one that came up was Meaningful Work, which made sense to me, as I had been struggling doing some work that felt more transactional, and I couldn’t understand why it was impacting me so much. I now only take on work where it fits with most or all of my values, and therefore is much more fulfilling.
It’s taken me decades to be in a position where I can make that choice – if your work doesn’t feel as meaningful as you might like, you might be able to see that it is however allowing you to sustain a life that you want, so you get to do things that make you happy. Or you might be able to see that you are helping others in your job in a way that fulfils one of your values.
This all helps with self-awareness – it’s a different way to understand yourself better. To understand why certain situations might set off a spark in you – either way – it could be joy or it could be anger – and to then think whether there might be ways to cultivate more or less of that in your life.
If you’d like to try this out, the tool we use can be found here – https://www.think2perform.com/values, and I would love to hear if you get some interesting insights from doing it. Have fun, and enjoy the self-reflection!
