What are your values?
Last week I conducted a workshop Manager’s Planning Day for a group of managers at a Government Department in Perth. The workshop involved using Extended DISC to understand behavioural styles and the later half the elicitation of values for the team. Since conducting the workshop I have been thinking more and more about values. We all have values, we have values in our personal life, we have values for our business or company that we work for and we even have values for our local sporting club we play with on the weekend.
So, what are values and why are they important? Values are beliefs or ideas that we all hold special, it can be a philosophy that in some way is meaningful to our lives. You may not be consciously aware of your values, however you do have values and these can learned from your parents, can be learned from your peers and even imposed on you by other people or the organisation you are employed by.
Understanding your values is all about understanding what you believe in, what gives you purpose and meaning for your life. If you want to more in control of your emotions and also to be able to make better decisions then documenting your values is a powerful tool to bring about change in your life and lessen emotional conflict.
Examples of values can be acceptance, accuracy, honesty, competitive, care, calmness, friendship, generosity, integrity, power, spirit, teamwork or zeal. These are only small number of values that you can have.
How do you elicit your values? Follow these steps
1. Gather your values. Think about what is important to you at work, day to day and in your relationships. Brainstorm as many words you can think of and write them down.
2. Now prioritise your top ten values out of your list. You will notice some of the values could be similar to others. For example, you may have selected values of humour, happy or fun and these can be group together as one.
3. Think of and write down other values that you need.
4. Finalise your list of values so that you have around 8 to 10
5. Now detail your top 10 values. You must put your values into words and specify why each of these values is important to you. For example you may have selected honesty as a top 10 and you may write
- “Honesty: By always being honest I am true to myself and it helps me to avoid inner conflicts between what I think and what action I take and what I say”.
- It is important that values do not rely on others to do something. For example, if you say “honesty is my value and I feel it when my partner tells me the truth. This is relying on your partner to enable your value of honesty to be fulfilled. Instead it must be something that you do such as “being true to yourself”.
Now that you know your top ten values you can use these for setting and achieving goals. Whether you are doing this exercise for your personal life or your team or the business, the same steps can be used.
By understanding what values you have and the importance of them to you, enables you to live a life where you are congruent with your own values. If you have a job that meets your values, then you will generally be in a position that you enjoy and gives you satisfaction. By understanding your values will assist in removing stress in your life and provide you with more direction and clarity.
So, what are your values?
