What’s Guiding Your Life? — 6 Steps to Identify Your Personal Values
Every day, we’re faced with an endless amount of choices. Whether we’re deciding between a higher salary or work life balance? Solo-traveling the world or building a home? Career or family? Speak up or stay silent? Each of these decisions are guided by our values, “the principles that give our lives meaning and allow us to persevere through adversity*.”
Identifying your personal values helps guide decisions to live a life that’s fulfilling to you. There are many “good” values and we usually want them all to be part of our lives. But if everything is important, nothing is. By selecting your most important personal values, you can weed out those that will lure you into a good life and live by those that will give you a great life.
How Do You Identify Your Values?
There are many ways to clarify your personal values, one of my favorites is:
- List the 10 best decisions you’ve made in your life. (Remember that sometimes the best decision is to let go of something).
- Ask yourself, one by one, why they were your best decisions?
- If you answer shallowly, ask “why” again, and again, until you find the fundamental cause to why that choice really resonated with you.
- Gather all values you have identified, find inspiration in the list below if you need it.
- Choose the top 3–5 values that matter the most in your life.
- Test them for a few weeks, feel what they feel like, see if they are aligned with your decisions and adjust if you need to.
Let Me Give You an Example
To illustrate with a personal example, some of my own best life decisions have been to:
- Begin my career as part of shaping Klarna, a unicorn startup now valued at $31 bn
- Actively and intentionally develop myself to be more vulnerable and authentic
- Empower and support people as Chairwoman within the Red Cross
- Advance my career working for Oracle, enabling me to travel the world and reach my long-term goal to work in the U.S.
These decisions were some of the best I’ve made becasue they allowed me to live my values of Ambition, Authenticity, Equality and Growth.
Getting to these four values required a lot of work, took a long time and many iterations of self-reflection, discussion, observation and re-shaping. Today, identifying and living according to them supports me to make decisions easier and live more authentically. I may have an amazing opportunity in front of me but if my most crucial values won’t be met there, I’m probably not going to be happy there nor will I do a good job.
A few weeks ago, my mentee discovered her core values and shared with me, “I used to feel intimidated to ask my employer to invest in training for me. Now, I see Growth on a post-it on the wall in front of me every day, and I think: This is what matters the most to me, why wouldn’t I ask?”
What do you value?
Please share your thoughts about what you read in this article. I’d love to hear from you ❤
* Quote from Barb Markway and Celia Ampel in The Self-Confidence Workbook.
