Find and Live in Alignment With Your Values
Values are the things in our life that we feel are most important to us. Everyone’s values are different and there is no right set of values to have. Knowing our values is crucial because they serve as guiding principles that influence our decisions, help us set meaningful goals, enable us to live authentically, enhance our resilience and well-being, improve our relationships, and contribute to our overall life satisfaction and fulfillment. But how do we discover our values? Which techniques do we employ to live in alignment with them? In this article, we will go through the steps to help us answer these questions.
Finding your values
To make this step easier, I will be sharing a (unfortunately) long list of values to choose from, taken from an acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) exercise. Taking the pressure off our shoulders to think about all possible values we may be guided by, here is the list:
Having glanced at the options, the next step is to divide these values into three piles: pile one one is for the “very important” values, pile two is for the "somewhat important" values, and pile three is for the values we either don't care about or find to be either weak or absent in our lives. Do not worry if one pile is more stacked compared to the other two as we will filter them further shortly.
In fact, once you have divided the values into three piles, we will get rid of piles two and three, as the only pile we care about is the first. After discarding the other two piles, we are left only with the values we are most attached to.
From pile one, we are then just going to select our top five values. These are the five values we feel are most important to us.
Finally, from the five values we have chosen, we are going to select our top one value. This is the value that we resonate with the most.
While the sub-steps of this process may seem redundant, they are a crucial part of it. This guarantees that we carefully consider each value and categorize it accordingly. By the time we reach the final step, we have already pondered on the options a few times, making our final decision not only less doubtful but also more accurate.
Reflections
Now let's check in with ourselves. How did you find the process? Was it easier or more difficult than you expected? I personally found it arduous because all those values are great values to have, and you may feel a bit like a horrible person discarding some of them. The important thing to remember, though, is that these are just words. They literally have no value in themselves. You are not making the most important decision of your life. Besides, values change over time. Just as we change, our values change with us. You may want to focus on a particular value for a period of your life, and select a different value later on. How frequently depends on your personal preferences.
Moreover, I would also say that it is easier to do this exercise alone than with other people. In my experience, I did this exercise for the first time in a room full of psychologists I worked with, including my bosses. It was slightly uncomfortable as I felt I was being watched and judged for the values I was putting away.
Aligning with our values
Now that we have selected our core value, we will proceed doing a "life audit". We will do his, by using a Bullseye Life Audit wheel measuring all the different areas of life.
For each area of the wheel, we are going to colour the boxes depending on how aligned with our core value, the associated area of our life is.
After doing this, have you found some areas to be misaligned with your value? Everyone will have at least one misalignment, and most will likely have multiple. But now that we have measured and detected the issues, the next step would be to identify actionable goals we can take to align all areas of our life with our core value values to a desirable level.
I hope you find this exercise useful. Getting to know our values makes us more aware of our decisions, reactions and emotions, and the clarity we gain by doing this is invaluable to our lives and to the lives of those around us.
References
https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/a...
https://www.mindtools.com/a5eygum/wha...