The Importance of Identifying Your Core Values
What are core values and why do they matter?
Values are big concepts like honesty, creativity, honor, and justice. They’re commonly expressed to convey morals and ideals, but they become even more meaningful to us when we look at them within the context of our own lives.
Personal core values are the principles that guide and motivate us. As non-negotiable boundaries, they establish our unique moral character and help us articulate what we stand for. Our values are the fundamental beliefs and parameters that enable us to practice integrity with consistency and engage with the world more authentically.
When we take the time to identify and name these values, we become conscious of the forces that shape our priorities, influence our conduct, and align us with what we consider most important in life.
Where do our values come from?
Our values form and evolve over our lifetime. In our early years, we internalize the beliefs of our families. We assume the cultural backgrounds we were raised in. Our life experiences, education, and social networks also shape our values - as do the feelings we have about those experiences. When we enter adulthood, we begin to make choices about which values to hold on to and which to leave behind. We have agency and can develop different value systems than those that were modeled for us. It’s an ongoing process throughout our lives. We can re-evaluate, modify, and choose new values as long as we’re paying attention and striving for self-awareness and authenticity.
How to identify your core values
Whether you realize it or not, your decisions and actions already reflect your values. But if you want to be more intentional about your choices, you must first identify your values and distill them into clear, actionable value statements. We’ve put together a thoughtful workbook to help guide you through the process of discovering and refining your values.
Once we know our values, they can help us gauge the degree to which our life choices are in alignment with our best intentions. We can use them to determine how we want to spend our time and energy, and what we choose to do with our lives. By completing these exercises you will gain clarity on what your values are, how to articulate them, and how to apply them intentionally to your decision making.
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