What guides your decisions, if you aren't in touch with your inner compass?

In my work I have the privilege to create and host workshops on things that are valuable to our people and to the culture of Hedvig. Topics especially close to my heart are personal communication, team development, self-growth and productivity.

One of the most popular is one that I call "The Life Compass", with the goal to make it easier for participants to make decisions in their life, by identifying their personal values and their personal purpose. Quite a big scope for a workshop, I know – but you've got to start somewhere.

When I first hosted this workshop over a year ago, one of the reactions was "oh my God Kina, you're starting an existential crisis at the company. What if people realize they want to do something completely different with their life and leave?". My answer: "Then that's a good thing. Because that means they were not in the right place to begin with – and they will be happier somewhere else". (For the record, no one left ??)

Why is it so important to know your values and your purpose? Because they define the way you act and the choices you make in all aspects of your life. But when you do things that misalign with what's most important to you (which happens quite often when you aren't aware of your own values and your own purpose, but rather act out of other people's principles and expectations), you eventually become unhappy.

Since my personal purpose is to develop people and organizations to make them thrive, and since I see values and purpose as the first and most basic step in that endeavor, I thought I’d dedicate two posts to exploring both in more detail. In this one I’ll talk about values and ways to identify the ones driving your actions and decisions. And in the next one, we’ll look deeper into personal purpose and how having one will set a clearer direction for your life.

Why values are a big deal?

Simply put, values are the things you find important and are shown in the way you live your life, whether you are aware of it or not: in your behaviors, actions and choices. They are the guiding principles or moral code that motivate you to be in a certain way. Ultimately, your values define who you are.

All of us are of course products of our environment, and that also goes for the values we’ve internalized – from the family we grew up in to the religious or cultural context we are part of. Then, there are some values that we adopt along the way, from friends, society, our workplace or through our own personal development. Our values can change over the course of our life as we learn more about ourselves and what we want at different stages. If I as a 20-something valued adventure, freedom and learning, then I might very well value stability, health and status as a 40-something. So as we change, we need to revisit our values continuously to see if they are in fact mirroring who we are today.

By knowing your values, you become more self-aware of who you are and what you want in different situations. Thereby it’s easier to make better decisions and communicate more effectively both with yourself and others. When you act in alignment with our values you are more likely to feel satisfied with your life, but when you don’t, you tend to feel that something is off. And as I mentioned before, this is a real source of unhappiness.

Observing your values

Let’s start with a few questions to get you thinking, and see if we can find some examples in your life that demonstrate your values in practice:??

• Think about the best decisions you've made. Can you see what values or motivations that drove those decisions? What impact did this have in your life?
• If you think about the worst decisions you've ever made, what were the values or principles guiding you? How did these decisions make you feel about yourself?
• Identify a few situations that make you angry or frustrated. Can you see what values that are being suppressed in these moments? What is it that hits your nerve?
• How do other people usually describe you? Can you observe any clear values behind these descriptions?
• What’s important to you?
• What kind of person do you strive to be like? What qualities do the people you admire have?

Write down your answers. Writing forces you to be specific, and you can come back to your reflections whenever you need. This is just a starting point to increase your self-awareness and help you become more aligned with your own guiding principles.

Identifying your values

Now it’s time to start scrutinizing all the different values that are part of you and your life, regardless of where they come from and regardless how you feel about them.

1.?????Create a gross list

During my workshops I give participants a long list of values and then, during a limited time of 5 minutes, they highlight the ones that resonate with them and add the ones they miss. Set a timer, look at these words and try for yourself:

When you do this, don’t overthink your choices. There are no right or wrong answers here. The idea is to bring all values out in the open to be able to investigate them later on, to see which ones that are at play in your life.

2.????Group your values

Once you have completed the list and have a bunch of values, you can probably start seeing a pattern, values that could be in the same category. If you have values such as kindness, empathy and compassion they might be in one category, while health, well-being and balance could go into another. Grouping your values makes it easier to get an overview without getting too much into the nitty gritty. That comes next.

3.???Define each category

If you end up with five, seven or twenty categories, see which value best represent each category, capturing the essence of what all these values are really about. Once you have a value for each group, it's time to see what they really mean to you, by asking:

• What does X mean to me?
• In which situations do I demonstrate X? How does that make me feel?
• When other people demonstrate X, what do I think and feel? And when they don’t?
• If X didn’t exist in my life, what would my life be like?
• What would I think of me if I didn’t demonstrate X? What would others think of me? Do I care about that? Should I care about that?

Tips! You can also look at each individual value on its own, asking these questions before grouping them, to make sure you’ve explored them fully and know what they mean to you.

4.???Ignore your own judgement

It’s worth mentioning again here that this exercise is not about judging yourself or determining whether your values are “good” or “bad”, but to start an open conversation with yourself. When I do individual coaching sessions based on this exercise, it’s not uncommon for people to feel ashamed of valuing some things, for example power or money. But there’s nothing to be ashamed of! The important thing is to get to the root cause. Why is money important to you? Is it because it enables you to be generous with your friends and family? Or because it gives you a sense of security? Or makes you important in the eyes of others, as in bringing status and recognition? I like the “5 why” approach, asking why? five times to get below the surface and seeing what’s really going on under the tip of the iceberg.

5.???Prioritize

The last part is the toughest one. Because it’s easy to come up with a long list of values, but at the end of the day, it’s by putting them against each other that forces you to choose and decide what matters most. So now, no matter how many values you have, cross over half of them. This doesn’t mean they are not important to you – just that they are not as important as the core values we are trying to distil here. Then, cross over them one by one, until you only have 3-4 core values left.

6.???Iterate

Now when you are becoming aware of what your core values are, keep them top of mind and see if that’s really true once you go about your life. Sometimes we like to think of ourselves as someone holding a specific value, but when push comes to shove, we don’t really prioritize it. Then it’s most likely not a core value for you – or perhaps there is pressure or other limitations in your life that are hard to go against. No matter the circumstances, remember that actions speak louder than words and intentions. If you consistently act against your values, thinking “I don’t have a choice”, then that’s a choice you make.?

A final comment

I bet many of you read your way to the end, thinking this is an interesting exercise and all but that you don’t have time, you’ll do it later or you already have this stuff figured out. Regardless, I dare you to team up with a friend, colleague or family member and dedicate a solid one or two hours to deep dive into this. That’s a very small investment for quite a big potential ROI.

Take inspiration from some of the team members at Hedvig who decided to spend a Saturday night together to do these exercises (all over again!) with a bottle of wine and lengthy conversations. Now that are people who value self-awareness and happiness, by taking control over their own life.