What are your values?

What Are Your Values?

How would you define your values?

Before you answer this question, you need to know what, in general, values are.

Your values are the notions that you believe are important in the way you live and work.

They are mostly derived from your upbringing but can also be developed by the individual due to your life experience.?Your values will change during the course of your life and you should try to review them when you can.

They (should) determine your priorities, and, deep down, they're probably the measures you use to evaluate if you feel comfortable with your current life situation.

When the things that you do and the way you behave at work match your values, life is usually good – you're satisfied and content. This will usually correlate directly to your stability and success in your role.?

But when these don't align with your values, that's when things feel... wrong. This can be a real source of unhappiness that will usually translate to you leaving your role early and not achieving what you’d hoped.

If you can identify your values, apply them to your career, you will increase your chances of career success.

How Values Help You

If you value family, but you have to work 70-hour weeks in your job, will you feel internal stress and conflict? And if you don't value competition, and you work in a highly competitive sales environment, are you likely to be satisfied with your job?

In these types of situations, understanding your values can really help. When you know your own values, you can use them to make decisions about how to live your life, and you can answer questions like these:

• What job should I pursue?
• Should I accept this promotion?
• Should I start my own business?
• Should I compromise, or be firm with my position?
• Should I follow tradition, or travel down a new path?

Tip:

As your values inevitably change throughout your life, you should embrace that change and adjust your perception as you decide on your career direction.

For example, when you start your career, success – measured by money and status – might be a top priority.

But after you have a family, work-life balance may be what you value more.

As you go through life, bear in mind that values that were important in the past may not be relevant now.

Defining Your Values

When you define your personal values, you discover what's truly important to you. A good way of starting to do this is to look back on your life – to identify when you felt really good, and really confident that you were making good choices.

Step 1: Identify the times when you were happiest

Find examples from both your career and personal life. This will ensure some balance in your answers.

• What were you doing?
• Were you with other people? Who?
• What other factors contributed to your happiness?

Step 2: Identify the times when you were most proud

Use examples from your career and personal life.

• Why were you proud?
• Did other people share your pride? Who?
• What other factors contributed to your feelings of pride?

Step 3: Identify the times when you were most fulfilled and satisfied

Again, use both work and personal examples.

• What need or desire was fulfilled?
• How and why did the experience give your life meaning?
• What other factors contributed to your feelings of fulfilment?

Step 4: Verbalising your Core Values.

Using the following list of common personal values to help you get started – First pick your top 25 Words that best describe your Values.?Then see if you can reduce that number down to 20 ,15, 10, 5 and then eventually down to 3.

This process of elimination should be taken with care and consideration.

Once you have your 3 words, consider if they truly stand out to you as key motivators that you derive happiness from in your current role.

Click this Link to View Common Personal Values List

Step 5: How you use your values.

• Are you proud of your top three values?
• Would you be comfortable and proud to tell your values to people your peers who you admire.
• Do these values represent things you would support, even if your choice isn't popular, and it puts you in the minority?

You can then start to see opportunities both current and future through the lens of these core 3 tenants of your person and hopefully make better decisions when defining what is a good choice for you.

Start to speak to future employers or current, using values as a conversation topic.?Get their take on their own values and of the companies.?Try to understand your teams values if you can, as you’ll be amazed how better you can understand someone when you know this information.

You can also start to really see, if you align with this organisation for the long run.

Hope this has been slightly helpful.

Hope the process was fun!

Good luck for the future.

If you want career advice or help with your search, drop me your CV.

[email protected]

Or message me on Linkedin -?Simon Bennett .