What Values Teach Us About Our Choices

5 min read

Summary: Do you ever wonder why you make the choices you do? Have you ever felt like you're on autopilot, just going through the motions? This article will help you understand the power of your values and how they influence everything you do. You'll also learn a simple method for identifying your core values and aligning your goals with them.

Let's Go Deeper

Every person has some idea of what's right or wrong, good or bad, scary or safe. However, most of us don't ask ourselves why we think or act the way we do.

We might have a surface-level understanding of what makes us tick, but probably not enough to understand it fully. As a society, we're mostly on autopilot, doing things the way our parents, peers, and society taught us.

Ultimately, though, our core values drive everything we do.

Why Is It Difficult To Talk About Values?

Values and needs are tricky topics to talk about. Mainly because what makes something a necessity and another a value differs from person to person. That's why evaluating your values is so significant, because these are the principles that drive your belief system and, therefore, your decisions.

The first principle I mentioned in my article "Set boundaries. Set your life up for success." (Vasquez and Lucas) is "Identify Your Preferences." So how do we figure that out?

Before you start saying what you want, I think it's more critical to really think about who you want to be. Until you establish your values, you don't really have a solid foundation for making decisions.

Values: What Are They?

A value is an internal representation (a picture, feeling, or sound) of what we consider the most important in a certain area of our lives. 

Core values are considered deeper than beliefs in cognitive psychology. We keep them in our unconscious (subconscious) mind. During childhood, values are actually programmed into our unconscious mind as images and are imprinted on us long before our beliefs. It's been found that this occurs between the ages of 0 and 3, and by the time we are 3 years old, our core values have already been set in place.

In standardized lab settings, recent research showed that values are related to attention and interpretation of situational information. However, until now there hasn't been much study on how values affect situation perception in real life. 

According to sociologist Morris Massey, values develop along these lines:

The Imprint Period (ages 0-7)

• We absorb everything we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and feel. Everything leaves an impression on us.

The Modeling Period (ages 8-13)

• We adopt the characteristics of people we look up to. We copy other people and try different things.

The Socialization Period (ages 14-21)

• As we move through this phase, we're trying to figure out our place in society. We start pushing back on earlier programming and rules as we develop our individuality.

Between our early 20s and mid-30s, we develop our business persona. Maybe that's why some people don't end up doing anything with their college degree. They chose it when they were 18 years old, and it no longer resonates with who they are.

These periods are key to developing our values, or what we hold dear. It's from those values that we get our beliefs, or what we believe to be true.

For example, I have struggled with this a lot in the past. I had this big thing in my life where I valued freedom above all else. As a result, I traveled a lot and had no time to build meaningful relationships. As far as I was concerned, I was making choices based on what I value. That's when I realized this need for freedom was really coming from a fear of commitment. As I reevaluated my values and looked at them more carefully, I realized that deep connection is more meaningful to me than an arbitrary sense of freedom.

Here's How I Identified My Values

To identify values in a major area of my life, I followed these simple steps:

1. I chose an area of life for which I'd like to identify my core values (For example: health and fitness, career, relationships, family, personal growth and development, or spirituality).
2. Then I asked myself: “What’s meaningful to me about (fill in the area of life)?"
3. I wrote down a list of words that came to mind.
4. When I couldn't think of anything else, I numbered the words according to their order of importance to me. NOTE: Of course these things are ALL important to me. So I tried to put them in order of highest priority.
5. Next, I rewrote my list of words in order of importance on a fresh sheet of paper.
6. This list became the basis for identifying my values in this area of life.

But it shouldn't stop there. Let's take relationships as an example. Suppose I decided I wanted a value of "connection." I could take it further and say that I want to have a relationship with "meaningful connection." And I can extend that even further to say I want to have a value of "meaningful connections that are transformational." That's just for one area of life. And this is where mindfulness and meditation can help us to become specific about what we desire, and how to go about achieving our desires. 

I developed a methodology to simplify this process called the "Life Purpose Worksheet". Send me a DM or click the link at the end if you would be interested in this.

Now that we know what our values are, we can be more conscious of our choices before we make them.

Goals Should Support Our Values

I think it's important to align our goals with our values. There will be a conflict if they don't support each other.

For example, if we value community and yet, we choose a career that requires us to sit in an office all day long, work in solitude and travel for work very often, we will feel tension and dissatisfaction brewing within us. Think of the example I gave from my own story above relating to freedom. I had the goal to travel and see the world but a deep value in me which was meaningful connection. I didn’t start with my value, but with my goal instead and had I done the opposite, I would have found a way to find alignment internally and externally. 

We'll be able to achieve the things we want in life if we coordinate our decisions to support both our values and our goals. For the most part, we can control this.

Writing down our values in each area of our lives will help us align our goals with what's really meaningful. Balanced living brings joy, experience, and satisfaction.

Conclusion

Here's the thing: your values are largely influenced by others. We're all indoctrinated by society, politics, and our parents about who we are and how we should act. I know this can all be a bit scary. Choosing who we want to be is not a small thing. Because we have the potential to be anything! I think it all comes down to asking ourselves the right questions.

Are my choices based on the values I determined for myself? Or am I simply choosing from the options that were presented to me?

Stay Inspired,
Lina V.