We are driven by our values. You do what you value. You are what you value. They are what we use to determine what we consider a successful and meaningful life. They are our inner compass that helps us keep what’s important to us in sight. Values aren’t achievable, rather they’re a chosen life directions and are part of making up who we are.
The way we approach the world and how we interact with others are all influenced by this inner compass, whether you realize it or not. When we set goals and choose actions to pursue them, we are being guided by values. They are what we use to determine what’s “good,” what’s “bad,” and steer the decisions we make in every aspect of our day-to-day lives. Because they differ person to person, they can also become a potential source of disagreement and misunderstandings.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about values and how powerful they truly are; they give us purpose in our lives. I was trying to deconstruct my own values and understand what I live by; ultimately I came to find that personal values contribute to one’s satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with life. Acting in alignment with our values = satisfaction.
But why is that? Defining our personal values increases our self awareness, which then influences our outcomes, and finally improves our quality of life. Because we are the ones who set our own goals and decide how we act guided by our values, we are the ones in control of what we consider to be success and ultimately we are the ones in control of our happiness. Achieving success in life is not nearly as important as our definition of success.
I think the simplest way to identify our values is to think of it as identifying our priorities. An exercise I did myself to help identify my values was I started by listing several aspects of my life (e.g. friendship, career, family, spirituality) and then I listed how I wanted to act in those categories (e.g. friendship: empathetic, thoughtful, engaged, caring, fun-loving). We don’t always feel like we have control over our life and forget that we are the ones that have the inner compass to guide ourselves to a meaningful life. I feel like doing something as simple as that exercise helped reassure me that even if things are hard and stressful, I follow a path that fundamentally brings significance and happiness to my life.