Have you ever looked in the mirror and realized you didn’t recognize yourself?
I have.
It was right after college.
I’d grown accustomed to wearing the nicest clothing, always being present for the party, driving in my princess blue convertible listening to Kei$ha, and insisting that I was allergic to the word budget.
I was the human equivalent of Barbie… without the unlimited funds (and perky boobs).
Then, like a ton of bricks, I woke up crying. Exhausted and filled with guilt, I wanted something different. Something that felt more like… ME.
I didn’t care about the clothes I wore so others would think I was beautiful.
I thought the parties I pretended to love were too loud.
The voices of social norms, media, celebrities, music video stars were so loud and ubiquitous that I couldn’t hear my inner voice.
I couldn’t follow in my personal values, because I didn’t know what they were.
What Are Personal Values?
Personal values (or core values) are the things that are important to us. It usually relates to an activity we love to do, how we interact with the world or how we want to feel. Common core values are honesty, creativity, growth, lifelong learning or building relationships.
Your personal values are unique to you because you’re allowed to want and feel whatever your life requires.
If I was going to live in a way I felt proud of, I would have to rediscover what my personal values were so I could advocate for them and live by them.
Where Do Personal Values Come From?
Your personal values are closely aligned with your beliefs. Your values can come from your parents, your past, and how your life experiences have shaped the person you are today.
For example, my grandmother instilled in me a love of learning. She insisted that learning was the only way I’d get ahead and the only way I’d do something with my life. With that message drilled into me from a very young age, I quickly developed a love for reading, learning, and improving myself. That still exists today.
Why Should You Define Your Personal Values?
Defining your personal values is a game-changer. You’ll be able to advocate for your needs and desires better than ever before because you’ll know clearly what serves you best. You’ll choose better relationships. You’ll activities and hobbies that suit you. You’ll choose friends who share similar values.
You’ll get to choose a direction for your life that’s aligned with your values and take steps that are rooted in your purpose.
How Personal Values Impact Your Life?
When you have clarity on your personal values, you can make decisions that are aligned with your core in any situation. You can live more authentically. You can honestly be yourself.
For example, one of my core values is self-expression. I am happiest when I can explore a new way of expressing myself through music, dance, or writing. The decision to try a new form of self-expression is simple. That means, if I’m asked to participate in an event where I’ll have to conform to someone else’s definition of correct, I have to decline because I know I won’t be happy in that situation.
Before defining my core values, I rarely made the choice to disappoint someone else to live according to my beliefs. However, every time I make the decision to choose what will make me happy, I feel more confident in my ability to be honest with myself and choose myself. I trust myself to make good decisions.
How To Find Your Personal Values
It’s great to understand what personal values are and why they're important, but the best way to use personal values in your everyday life is to find your personal values.
Spend some time engaged in genuine self-exploration
If you want to find what’s most important to you, then you have to ask the hard questions and pay attention to your life on a deeper level. You’ll have to be honest with yourself about what those answers are.
Here are a few questions to get you started:
Think about five times you felt joy in the last 7 days. What were you doing?
What activity were you doing when you felt the most confident?
Who do you love spending time with and why?
What don’t you enjoy doing?
Are there any activities that you feel obligated to do that you’d like to stop doing?
Defining your values starts with YOU. The more you can check in with yourself to ask questions about what brings you happiness and joy, the closer you’ll get to discovering what’s truly important.
Journal
I’ve always found journaling to be a wonderful way to hone in on what’s underneath. I don’t have to be presentable, nice, or acceptable to anyone. Therefore, I can get as honest and raw as I want.
A journal is a great space to start writing and you’ll notice that there are some topics that you talk about all the time.
Start with as many ideas as you like
You don’t have to get your personal values exactly right on the first try. In fact, you can spend some time brainstorming different ideas that might work well for you before choosing the most important.
Use the questions from the first activity or journal entry from the second activity to see which common themes pop up in your self-discovery. When a theme keeps showing up in your life, it’s likely one of your personal values. Similarly, if something never shows up in your life then it’s probably not as important.
When I listed all the things that are important to me, beauty literally never came up. Not once. I realized that I spent my early twenties buying more clothes than I could wear and it didn’t even contribute to my happiness at all. Knowing this, I could buy clothes and spend (or save) in a way that would better serve my values.
Narrow your list down to four things
I’m going to be honest with you. If you have 17 core values, then you really don’t have any core values. To be true to yourself, you have to be willing to cut the unnecessary or “nice to haves” because they simply clutter your space and distract you from what’s really important.
Take your list of ideas and order them by importance. (#1 on your list is a personal value that you cannot live without.) Once you have the list ordered by what’s most important to you, remove everything after #4.
Once you get super clear on what fills your soul, you can better differentiate between the things that matter… and the things that don’t.
Your personal values serve as your guiding light. They help you choose the next steps of your journey without fear of missing out because you’re well aware of your priorities and make decisions with confidence. In short, when you know yourself, you can better choose yourself - in any situation.
What’s one personal value that you can’t live without?
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About the author
Cyrene is a fun and accomplished workshop facilitator, learning and development guru and Human Resources professional. Being at the helm of Thrive Lounge has been a long-time dream. Through vision board workshops she plans to accomplish two-way learning. Sharing her vast years of knowledge to motivate and encourage others; while simultaneously getting the reward of great energy, ideas and questions to ponder back from each group. A super win-win. Please join our Thrive Lounge community so you too can benefit!
