Values are a great way of gaining much needed clarity in this information age. They  can help you make better decisions by sifting through all the clutter and getting to what is important quickly. In this post I’ll be showing you how to determine which values are most important to you, how to prioritise them and how to make them actionable.

This is the way I discovered My Values. It’s a tested and proven method that’s been used again and again by people at different times. It is a process that if done thoughtfully can lead to many insights into what is truly important in your life. If understanding yourself is important to you, going through this exercise will be well worth the effort needed to do it.

What are your values?

The first step to determining which values are most important for you is to understand what values are. I see values as guidelines. They are principles you live by, standards to which you hold yourself accountable. They embody certain characteristics or feelings and your ideal self would have. They are a something you strive for. Benjamin Franklin had a list of 13 values he would strive to embody and he used them to correct course constantly. Your values are like a compass in that sense, they help you get to where you want to go.

Now that we understand what values are, let’s get into the nitty gritty of it all : Actually figuring out what your values are.

You’re going to need an overview of the major values that exist. You can use the Values List, I published last time. It isn’t exhaustive but it’s a fairly good place to start.

What you are going to do is to pick out the values that stick out the most to you. To do this you can take a sheet of paper and jot down the values that stick out, or simply copy/paste the whole list into a text file and sort through the values there. The ones where you think, “hey, that’s me”, or “this is really important to me”, are the ones you should mark. (Use color, bolding or anything else to fit your needs and preferences)

I prefer the copy/paste method as it allows for greater flexibility in moving the words around and grouping synonyms.

Once you’ve gone through the list you, should have noticed that many values are similar or fit into the same category. I’ll call these clusters of values. These clusters of similar values will help you later on when you get on to fleshing out your values.

Now do your best to get down to ten or twelve clusters of similar values. You can have more, if you want. Personally eight works well for me. Eliminate the least important ones, if you are having trouble deciding which ones to get rid of.

Once you have a general idea of the main groups, you want to find a value and make it the head of the group. That would be your core value.

Say I have a cluster of values I judge to be similar: Learning, Curiosity, Understanding, Growth, Improvement, Humility.

I find Growth summarises this cluster fairly well. Thus Growth would be the core value, of the cluster composed of Growth, Learning, Curiosity, Understanding, Improvement, Humility. A core value can be all by itself in a cluster.

Once all your core values are detailed you might have something like this:

• Growth: Learning, Curiosity, Understanding, Improvement
• Discipline: Self-control, Efficiency, Freedom, Diligence
• Love: Play, Kindness, Compassion, Generosity, Courage
• …

Now that you have determined which values seem the most important to you, it’s time to prioritise them.

Prioritisation

Prioritisation can seem particularly difficult, even though it is quite straight forward. It’s all a matter of how you do it. Let me walk you through it.

Since you have about 10 values are going to compare them and see which ones are most important.

Say you have the following list:

• Growth
• Health
• Love
• Contribution
• Tranquility
• Prosperity
• Discipline
• Justice
• Dependability
• Adventure

Take the first item and the list and compare it to the others. For instance Growth might be more important than Health to you, so now you know that Growth > Health. Now you check Growth against Love. Which one is more important? Sometimes it might be tricky to determine which one is more important. In that case you have to ask questions. If you had to choose, which one would you pick? If you could only live with one which one would you discard? It might help to imagine an example to facilitate the decision. This is where the synonyms you wrote down before come in handy. Would you prefer always learning new things, improving and understanding, or would you rather have a life filled with love, compassion, intimacy? This is a personal choice. For the sake of the example let’s say Growth > Love. And, you also happen to think that Love > Health. So now you have by order of priority Growth > Love > Health. You go through this entire list this way, and before you know it you’re done. It’s pretty straight forward.

Once you’re done you should have a pretty accurate overview of what your core values are, by order of priority. Now it time to get a little more practical.

Making values actionable

Now there are a couple more steps you can take to make these values meaningful and practical.

By themselves this list you have made is quite nice to have, but frankly it’s only a list of words. It’s not very exciting, and you can’t do much with them. The values aren’t very actionable, they are simple nouns, they aren’t verbs. Things that you can act upon easily.

So lets verbify these nouns ! (yes, this isn’t an error auto-correct, verbify is now a new word)

It’s up to you to explain your value to yourself, and give yourself guidelines, things you can act upon. Define the value. What does it mean to you? What do these words represent? What can you do to embody them?

Here are some examples of my actionable values.

Growth: Stretch continuously. Learn with passionate curiosity. Assume humility and ignorance when in doubt. You know only that you know nothing. Remember Ygritte’s words: “You know nothing Jon Snow”.

Discipline: Master thyself, Know thyself. Be true to yourself. T’is the only way to be free.

Love: Give abundantly and without restraint. Love unconditionally and compassionately. Remain playful, cheerful and have fun. You’ve only got this life.

A word of warning, when I first tried this exercise I simply copied the values of the person I was learning this exercise from, as did not want to go through the mental work needed to come up with my own meanings and wording. That was frustrating and not very effective. I even felt it didn’t work very well. It wasn’t until I actually, honestly gave myself a shot at doing it that I felt a difference and a great satisfaction.

Constant Reminders

I believe it is very powerful to remind yourself frequently of what is important to you. So to do that I hung a sheet of paper on a wall at my desk and wrote my values on it. Now whatever I do I have them in the corner of my eye.

It also allow for fine tuning. As sometimes, especially at the beginning, I would find that the ordering wasn’t that precise and need to be changed.

Changing Values

Change is ever-present in our lives. We always evolve. We always change. You are not the same person you were 5 years ago, nor are you exactly the same as you were yesterday. As you change so will your values.

The advantage of seeing your values all the time allows you to feel when there is something that is bugging you. For instance, when I first set up my values, Contribution kept bugging me. It didn’t feel right the way I had prioritised it. I let it be for a couple days, and the feeling persisted, after two weeks, I sat down, thought about it and realised it was more important to me that I had thought at the time.  I also felt that Health and Discipline could actually fit in the same general category. So I decided to just integrate Health into Discipline.

These are normal changes that will come. When you have a feeling that is bugging you, or something just doesn’t feel that right, investigate. You might find something interesting and add clarity to your values.

You may also decide to focus more on specific values or may even find that something that was important to you now may be totally unimportant to you in a few months or years.

After this long post, I want to thank you for hanging in there. I really recommend this exercise. The clarity and insights you gain on yourself and what is important to you is very valuable and will help you become your better self.

If you would like an examples you can look at My Personal Values.

If you haven’t yet started, go ahead, here’s the List of Values.