How close or distant you are from living the life that you want depends on the clarity of your values. More importantly, it depends on the actions you take every day.
Many people don’t actually know what values are. They mix them with personality traits such as optimism and curiosity or virtues like integrity and generosity. Some equate them with big terms like freedom and love. But they are none.
A value is a guiding principle—something you want your life to stand for. It’s what helps you decide what matters, what to prioritise, and how you want to show up.
Your values are not about whether you are a good or a bad person or whether you live the right or the wrong kind of life.
In an academic setting the way the values are taught to graduates, MBA students, professionals and basically, all ‘walks of life’, they are defined as “the desires, motivations, and beliefs that animate our actions and decisions” (Professor Suzy Welch of NYU Stern School of Business).
How do values look like?
Wanting to be on the front cover of Forbes – that’s a value.
Wanting your children to be your top priority – that’s a value.
Wanting to lead a business with 1000 people –that’s a value.
A value is something inside of you, like an intention or a yearning, that influences which job you pursue, what kind of a partner you choose, where you live, how you dress and the list goes one.
Depending on how aligned you are with your values, they also show you the gap of who you are now and who you want to be.
The gap is the chance to pivot regardless of your age, status or your current job.
To establishing how important certain values are (to you) and how big is the gap between your current and desired life, Professor Welch developed a values identification tool called the Values Bridge. There are fifteen core human values and you have them all to a certain degree:
1. Family-centrism: How much you want your immediate family to shape your life’s direction.
2. Affluence: How much wealth you want and how much are you willing to prioritise obtaining it.
3. Belovedness: How deeply you value a romantic partnership as a central organising force.
4. Agency: How much do you want and need to control your life’s direction.
5. Luminance: How much do you desire fame.
6. Achievement: How driven are you to succeed, excel and accomplish goals.
7. Voice: How much do you yearn your creative expression and individuality in everything you do.
8. Radius: How much you want to change the world?
9. Eudemonia: How much you aspire to organise your life around pleasures.
10. Work-centrism: How much you want work to be the organising principles of your life.
11. “Not for oneself”: How much you want to help others to feel authentic and fulfilled.
12. Scope: How big a life you want.
13. Beholdersim: How much importance you put on aesthetics.
14. Belonging: How deeply you value friendship and community.
15. Place: How important is the place (city, country) where you live to you.
16. Cosmos: How much importance you put on ‘higher power’.
Getting insight on your values is the first step, the second step is taking action – which brings us to obstacles, the reasons that usually prevents us from living the life that we want. Typically, these reasons fall into four groups:
- Economic security; prioritising financial security above all else. Try and establish how important is money to you and how much would be ‘enough’.
- Expediency; choosing the path of least resistance over our needs, wants and desires. Try and establish what is worth fighting and working for in your life.
- Expectations; surrendering to the expectations of others, and also to those burdens we put on ourselves.
- Events; disruptions (good or bad) changing the course of our lives. Divorce, children etc.
How can you start to better understand yourself? Here are several exercises:
- Six Squared: Think about your life so far and write a 6-word title of the book of your story. Then, think about your next 25 years of perfect life and write a 6-word title of the book of your story. (This ideas comes from a 2006 Twitter challenge where users were asked to submit their life story in six words. Millions of people responded.)
- Who’s Life Do You Want: List four people who’s lives you would want to live. Identify the elements that spire you about that person – their personality, achievements, impact. Then, identify the elements that make their lives less than perfect – the things you don’t want. What value patterns do you recognise? What values emerge and what tradeoffs wouldn’t you be willing to take?
- Alpha Omega: Answer these three powerful questions:
- What do you want people to say about you when you are not in the room?
- What did you love about your life-style growing up and what did you hate?
- What would make you cry on your 85th birthday – from regret?
The answers will point you to the values that matter to you.
Usually, we think about what we really want in times of change or even crisis; and sometimes, when we think about what truly matters to us, we learn that we are exactly where we want to be. Other times, however, we realise we want to change.
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Forbes, Kalshi’s Cofounder Went From Ballerina To World’s Youngest Self-Made Female Billionaire.