The “Growth without Striving” chapter from What Works by Tara McMullin contains a recommended method for identifying which values are most important to you.
Notes
- Identifying and defining our personal values is a vital step towards working out what’s meaningful and important to us.
- We may have had values imposed on us by our upbringing, or by the society and institutions we live and work in.
- McMullin suggests searching online for lists of values – it should be easy to find long lists of values to consider.
- You should narrow the list down to the values that are most meaningful to you. A value might be important to us and we don’t want to go against it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it should be on our shortlist.
- Then ask: “What do I do that demonstrates this value in my daily life?” If it really is one of your key values, you should be doing things that are aligned with it.
- Once you’ve identified your most important values, they can become a foundation for future visions and projects that will help you fulfil your visions.
- One trap is converting the value into something simpler and less nuanced that can be captured by metrics. Then we might become too focused on the metrics and lose sight of the actual value. (This trap is referred to as “value capture”.)
Reflections
I suspect that some people find it straightforward to identify their key values and others find it more difficult (if this is true, I’m definitely in the second group, and I’m planning a follow-up post describing the convoluted process I went through to reach my current list of key values).
A risk is that stating your values might feel sufficient. For example, someone who claims that “fairness” is their most important value but treats people in their group of friends very unfairly may simply be unaware of how their actions are contradicting their statements, but they may also be unconsciously focusing on what they say to avoid fully acknowledging to themselves what they’re doing. This is where I think McMullin’s recommendation to consider how you’re demonstrating your values in daily life is particularly useful – this will bring your conscious attention to whether you’re really acting in alignment with your values.