Discover Your Core Values with the Schwartz Values Assessment: A Path to More Meaningful Life Decisions

Celebrating World Values Day 2024: Discover Your Core Values with the Schwartz Values Assessment

Thursday, 17th October 2024 marks World Values Day, a day dedicated to celebrating and embracing the values that guide us. Values are the passions in our hearts, the motivations behind our actions, and the glue that binds us together as communities. In a world that can feel increasingly divided, values help unite us, reflecting our shared humanity and offering the potential to create a better, more connected world.

This year’s theme is Bringing Values to Life, and what better way to do that than by understanding what truly matters to you? By identifying your core values, you can bring them into every aspect of your life—your decisions, your relationships, and your financial plans.

The Schwartz Values Assessment offers a simple yet profound way to do just that. It helps you explore your core values and understand how they shape your life. Are you driven by a desire for personal growth and creativity? Or are values like security, tradition, and stability more important to you? Knowing your values helps you make choices that feel more authentic and fulfilling.

What Is the Schwartz Values Assessment?

The Schwartz Values Assessment is based on the Schwartz Values Wheel, which organises values into a circular structure. This wheel highlights two main dimensions of human values:

1. Openness to Change vs. Conservation Do you thrive on new experiences and creativity, or do you prefer stability and tradition? This dimension helps you understand whether you lean towards change or prefer the familiar.
2. Self-Transcendence vs. Self-Enhancement Are you motivated by caring for others and making a difference, or are personal success and achievement more important to you? This spectrum reveals where your values fall in relation to helping others or focusing on self-improvement.

The Power of Knowing Your Values

When you know what values drive you, you can bring them to life in everything you do. Whether you’re setting personal goals, planning your finances, or navigating a career change, aligning your actions with your values helps create a more meaningful, purposeful life. The Schwartz Values Assessment helps you identify where your values align and where they might be in conflict, guiding you towards decisions that feel more authentic and balanced.

Bringing Values to Life at the Academy of Life Planning

At the Academy of Life Planning, we believe that financial and life planning should reflect your deepest values. That’s why we integrate the Schwartz Values Assessment into our coaching sessions. By understanding what matters most to you, we help you build a life and financial plan that aligns with your values and aspirations—whether that’s pursuing personal growth, supporting your loved ones, or creating a more secure future.

Celebrate World Values Day with Us

This World Values Day, take a moment to reflect on what values are guiding you. What matters most to you, and how can you bring those values to life? The world can feel divided, but our shared values are what unite us and give us the power to create positive change.

By exploring your values through the Schwartz Values Assessment, you’ll gain clarity, purpose, and direction for the future. Let’s work together to build a life plan that is deeply aligned with who you are and what you care about.

Join the conversation at #WorldValuesDay What will you be inspired to do?

By embracing our values—whether as individuals, families, or organisations—we can move past the negativity and division to create a more connected, compassionate world. Together, we can make a difference.

Ready to bring your values to life? Contact us at the Academy of Life Planning, and let’s explore how your values can guide your future.

Celebrating World Values Day 2024: Discover Your Core Values with the Schwartz Values

When we make decisions in life—whether big or small—our core values guide us, often without us even realising it. Understanding these values can be incredibly empowering, helping us make choices that feel more aligned with who we are and what truly matters to us. That’s where the Schwartz Values Assessment comes in.

Developed by social psychologist Professor Shalom Schwartz, this tool offers a structured way to explore your values and gain insights into how they shape your life. It’s not just about finding out what you believe in, but about understanding why certain choices and paths resonate with you more than others. Let’s take a closer look at how the Schwartz Values Assessment works and how it can benefit you.

How the Values Are Organised

Values that are close to each other on the wheel tend to complement one another. For example, values like benevolence (caring for those close to you) and universalism (caring for all people and the planet) are side by side because they share a similar motivation. On the other hand, values that are opposite each other, like security (seeking stability) and stimulation (seeking excitement), often clash. This structure helps you identify where your personal values align and where they might be in conflict.

The Assessment Process: Simple, Insightful, Empowering

The Schwartz Values Assessment is a straightforward process that leads to deep insights. Here’s how it works:

1. Explore Your Values: You’ll start by reviewing the different values represented on the wheel. These include everything from achievement and freedom to security and benevolence. As you reflect on each value, consider how strongly it resonates with you.
2. Rank Your Priorities: Next, you’ll be asked to prioritise the values that are most important to you. This step encourages you to think about what drives your actions and decisions, helping you clarify your top values.
3. Reflect on Your Life Choices: Once you’ve identified your key values, you can start connecting them to your life decisions. Are your current actions and goals aligned with your values? If independence is a top value for you, are you living in a way that fosters autonomy? This reflection helps you see where your life may need realignment.
4. Use Your Values to Set Meaningful Goals: Armed with a clear understanding of your core values, you can now set goals that are truly meaningful to you. This might involve adjusting your financial plans, career choices, or personal relationships to better reflect what you care about most.
5. Revisit and Adapt: Our values can shift over time, and that’s perfectly normal. The Schwartz Values Assessment is a tool you can revisit whenever you need to reassess your priorities and make adjustments to your life plan.

Why Knowing Your Values Matters

When you’re clear about your values, your decisions feel more authentic and fulfilling. You’re not just going through the motions—you’re living a life that reflects who you are at your core. This is especially important when it comes to life planning and financial decisions. By understanding your values, you can make choices that not only improve your financial wellbeing but also contribute to your overall happiness and sense of purpose.

How We Use the Schwartz Values Assessment at the Academy of Life Planning

At the Academy of Life Planning, we believe that life planning is about more than just managing financial capital. It’s about ensuring your plans reflect your personal values, goals, and aspirations. That’s why we integrate tools like the Schwartz Values Assessment into our coaching process.

By understanding what motivates you on a deep level, we help you build a life plan that aligns with your values—whether that’s pursuing personal growth, fostering stronger relationships, or creating a more secure future. It’s a process that not only empowers you to make better decisions but also brings greater satisfaction and purpose to your life.

If you’re ready to explore your values and take a more intentional approach to life planning, we’re here to guide you through the process. Let’s work together to create a plan that reflects who you are and where you want to go, ensuring that every step you take feels authentic and aligned with what matters most to you.

Exercise: Using Chat GPT

Follow these three Steps:

1. Download the Schwartz Values Wheel PDF here.
2. Choose the ten VALUES that best represent you and are the most important to you? They can be any ten. You can have more from one area and none from others.
3. Enter the values at the end of this Chat GPT prompt, and press return: “Can you create a Character Statement for [FIRST NAME] based on these ten values. Use an approachable, inclusive, and conversational tone that builds trust and encourages action. Keep it supportive, reassuring, and motivational, emphasising accessibility and transparency. Adopt a clear, straightforward style, free of jargon, that educates and gently persuades. Highlight the benefits of the introspection while maintaining a professional and motivational approach. [VALUE1] {VALUE2] …etc”

About Professor Emeritus Shalom H. Schwartz

Professor Emeritus Shalom H. Schwartz is a highly respected figure in the world of psychology, particularly known for his groundbreaking work on human values and their influence on behaviour. With a long and distinguished career, he is currently the Sznajderman Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Over the years, Schwartz has taught at prestigious institutions such as Princeton University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shaping the minds of future leaders in psychology.

Schwartz earned his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 1967 and has since contributed greatly to our understanding of how values shape individual and collective decisions. His influence goes beyond academia; he has led international projects involving over 80 countries, with his research on values applied globally. His work on the European Social Survey’s Human Values Scale, for example, has provided valuable insights into the shared and diverse values of people across Europe.

One of the remarkable aspects of Schwartz’s career is his ability to bridge psychology with other fields like sociology, education, and even management. He has written or edited nine books and published over 220 articles, making his work widely recognised and respected across many disciplines. In fact, his seminal articles have been cited in over 50,000 publications—a testament to his enduring impact on social and cross-cultural psychology.

What makes Schwartz’s work so meaningful is how it can be applied in everyday life. His research on values isn’t just theoretical; it has real-world implications, from understanding what motivates us to improving societal policies. By focusing on values like altruism, well-being, and prosocial behaviour, Schwartz provides a framework for understanding how our values influence everything we do—whether in our personal lives or within broader social structures.

At the Academy of Life Planning, we draw inspiration from the work of scholars like Professor Schwartz to ensure that our holistic financial planning approach is deeply aligned with your core values. Understanding what drives you on a personal level allows us to help you build a life plan that reflects your true self, not just financially but emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually.

We’re here to support you every step of the way, using tools like the Schwartz Values Assessment to guide your decisions and help you create a meaningful, values-driven life.