How to Find Your Core Personal Values

A journey to living a fulfilled life happens when you honour your own values and you live by them.   When you are incongruent with your values you may be living someone else’s life and you may form bad habits or become lost in trying to find yourself.   

Understanding what you value is less about looking outside and wondering what you should value, or what society says you should value, looking at what everyone else is doing and thinking this is what therefore you should do.  

Instead, understanding your value system is an inside, personal job that is best done on your own or with the help of a professional who has no agenda, instead someone who holds space for you to help you tease out the information for yourself.

I want to look first at what our value system is. 

 It’s a set of principles or ideals that drive and guide our behaviours.   

Your personal values give your life structure and purpose.   They help you determine what is meaningful to you at a deep emotional level, the level beyond cognitive thinking.  It’s the realm of your deep desires and how you want to serve.   

Your core values define your character and when you live in alignment with your core values you are living in alignment with your authentic self, that part of you that is true to you.        

You will be aware that others have judgments about you or what you do but you no longer let their judgments define you.

You are aware that they are entitled to their opinion and you don’t have to agree with them.    There is non-attachment to other’s opinion.  

This is fundamental to empowerment and to living your life on purpose.

When and how are values from

Your values start to form from a young age and are established from the views expressed by your parents, teachers, friends and others in your environment.   

You may have to adopt societal values regardless of whether or not you agree with them.  You may have questioned these values at a young age as you didn’t understand them, but knew you had to conform or be cast out or punished.  You adopted them even though they didn’t feel authentic to you.  You were told this was the way it was and that was it. 

Some people find they go away from the religion they were brought up in for this reason but come back to it at a later age when they release the true meaning of what was being taught to them.  It may be that the way it was taught didn’t resonate, but the overall essence and meaning does.

It is through your life experiences that you gain a better understanding of what you value most and your perception of life changes. In fact your values influence how you perceive your world and how you act comes from your perceptions.

This is the crux of the situation and why you will get results that bring you what you want if you are living your life in alignment with your values.   Of course the opposite is also true, and you will find that if you are living your life in alignment with societal views that don’t resonate with you or you are living your life vicariously from someone else’s values you won’t be getting results that resonate deeply with you.

Understanding What Values You Hold

Dissecting the things that trigger you are a way to take a deep dive into your value system.   Think about the last time you got angry with someone, really angry.    What was the underlining “thing” that was being provoked in you?   

Did they undermine you or something you valued?    

Anger is the barometer you can use to gauge when your personal boundaries are being rattled.   That is anger’s job, it’s an emotion and an emotion is a messenger that gives you information.    Anger steps up and says NO you cant do that to me, you cant treat me like that.    Of course you may be referring to a story you read and it is the essence of what is in the story that is triggering you.    That essence is one and the same as your trigger.       When you pull back the layers of that particular story you will begin to understand this.   

Try it

·       What is the essence of the story?   

·       What value is it undermining?  

·       Is that value something that you find is not being valued in your life?

Some of our greatest moments happen as you have your “AHA” moments or to put it another way when you realise you were living in an illusion about something and now you have revealed its truth. 

It’s an opening into a way of looking at something that resonates with you and your value system, it will feel better and bring you better results.

Another way to find out what values you hold is to think about a time when you did something that brought you extreme joy.     This was a time when you were working on something in alignment with your values.  

You were fulfilled.

Until next time .. Dolores Andrew