Clarity Exercise
Personal Values
What are personal values?
They are guiding principles to help you make choices and to live in alignment with your authentic self. Our core values highlight what we as individuals stand for. These values guide our behaviors, decisions, and actions. It’s not just what we care about, but what we want to embody.
Think of values as stars up in the sky that can help you come home to yourself when you’re feeling misaligned or lost. If you’re feeling off, it’s likely that one of your values is being neglected. If you’re facing a tough decision, you you can review your values for reminders of what is truly important to you in order to act with personal integrity.
Even if you've done a values exercise before, I’d recommend doing it again freshly to ensure you have the most updated value set.
If you feel daunted to do this by yourself, know that is totally okay and I would be happy to be a guide through it. You can sign up for an intro call to explore 1:1 coaching with me here.
Getting ready
Grab something to write with and a place to write. Make sure you’re somewhere where you won’t be interrupted. This should take you 60-90 minutes to complete.
Get in an open-minded headspace. Let go of all preconceived notions of how it’s “supposed to be.” Take some deep breaths and try to be receptive to whatever naturally surfaces as you move through the exercise.
Step #1 - Generate some material
Write out the answers to these questions.
1. What are two top life experiences of yours? Replay each peak experience in your mind as if you were seeing it filmed. What what happening? Who was there? What did the energy feel like? What were you feeling at the time? What made it so great? Be as detailed and specific as you can. **These experiences don’t have to be the most epic things that have ever happened in your life, they can also include everyday moments where everything felt in place.
2. Now think about some challenging experiences. Think about a time when you got really upset. What was happening? What was or wasn’t in place?
3. Who do you look up to (alive or dead, real or fiction)? What qualities do you appreciate about them? List at least 2 people.
Step #2 - Highlight the Values
Look back at the notes of what you just wrote. Circle words that feel like values. Values don’t just have to be singular and broadly applied words like “honesty” and “adventure” but can be also be more phrases and more personal to you, i.e. “sticktoitness” or “sunshine candy apple”. Just make sure it means something to you.
Step #3 - Group the values
On a fresh piece of paper, start to put the highlighted values into like categories. Some words will seem like they are dancing around the same theme, i.e. “Adventure”, “Exploration”, “Uncovering”
If there are some values that don’t have similar or related words, you can always leave them in their own distinct category.
In case it's helpful, you can see an example of the groupings from a previous client. You can see how she used some singular words (like “curious”) and also short phrases (like “pushing through the challenge”).
Step #4 - Prioritize your values
Look at each grouping of values and select the most resonant value for you in each grouping of words. What is the word that really gets to the heart of the feeling of the value?
Once you have the top picks from each grouping, organize them from most resonant/important to least so that you emerge with 4-5 top values.
Step #5 - Define your values
Now that you have your top 4-5 values, it’s time to define them. The way to make your values specific to you personally, is to get clearer on what they mean to you. The value of “Adventure” could mean “Discovering new ways of seeing and being” and to someone else it could mean “Pushing yourself to bravely chart new territory for others”. We have unique ways of understanding broad and abstract concepts like values.
Do your best to come up with a tagline or one sentence descriptor for each of your values.
Step #6 - Reflect
Take a break from this exercise and when you come back with fresh eyes, review your answers and see if they really land with you.
Remember you can always keep editing and tweaking these until they feel right.
Reflection questions:
When you read each one, does it make you feel excited, or more grounded? Like something in your core being has been witnessed?
Do you feel they are consistent with who you are? Or are any inconsistent with your identity (as if they belong to someone else or society at large) and not you?
Do they feel truly personal to you?
Step #7 - Use your values to improve your life
You’ve just created a personal tool for yourself. Well done!
One way to immediately put it to use is to assess how fulfilled you are feeling in each value.
Using a scale of 1 - 10 (1 means that you feel very unfulfilled and 10 means that you feel very fulfilled), score each value for how things feel in your life right now.
You can then choose one or two values to target and brainstorm ideas for how to invite more of that value into your life.
For example, if you scored 3 out of 10 on a personal value of “healthy living”, you could think of ideas to improve your diet, exercise more, reduce drinking, etc.
If you scored a 7 out of 10 on a personal value of “always be learning”, you could sign up for a course, buy a book on a topic that’s interesting to you, etc.
You know best what ideas are compelling to you!
Really want to get structured on this? Repeat this exercise every month to track your progress over time.