Feel Happiness

  • Home
  • New? Start Here.
  • As Seen On…
  • Archives
  • 30 Days of Happiness
  • Contact
You are here: Home / Beliefs / Day 17: Find Your Values

Day 17: Find Your Values

May 31, 2012 by Mikey D 12 Comments

Today you are going to elicit your deepest values. Your values are the principles that guide all of your behavior.

They operate in the background, but they are of immense importance.

Knowing what your values are will help you in the future to act congruently with them.

Incongruence with your values is the primary cause of what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. This is the discomfort that results when a person simultaneously holds conflicting beliefs, ideas, emotions, or values.

Having an understanding of your values also gives you a guide for how you should organize your life.

If one of your values is stability, you shouldn’t be a travel writer. If one of your values is adventure, being a travel writer is probably a better idea than an accountant.

This idea goes well beyond career choice, however.

Living congruently with your values involves literally everything that you do.

Every choice that you make, and every action that you take, can be in accordance with your values, or it can be incongruent with them.

When you regularly act counter to your values, your life veers off course, and you find yourself experiencing cognitive dissonance. This is why so many people experience mid-life crises.

You want to avoid that problem. But you want to do even better by not just avoiding cognitive dissonance, but to act in alignment with your values as much as possible such that you live a more fulfilling life.

The process of eliciting your values and even prioritizing them is very simple.

Despite being so simple, most people don’t take the little bit of time to do it, and they don’t get to take advantage of the many benefits knowing your values can provide.

First, ask yourself the question, “What do I want out of my life?” Write as many things down as you can think of.

After you have done this, distill each thing you have written into one word.

For example, “I want to have good relationships with friends and family” might be “socializing”.

Once you have a list, distill it down to the top 10-15 items.

If multiple values you have on your list are similar you can just make them one thing, if that makes it easier.

Steve Pavlina has a fairly extensive list of values here, but I will include a shorter list taken from the book NLP: The New Technology of Achievement here:

 

aliveness, autonomy, beauty, caring, challenge, courage, creativity, dignity, elegance, excellence, excitement, fairness, freedom, fulfillment, fun, grace, happiness, harmony, helping, honesty, humor, innovation, joy, justice, learning, love, making the world a better place, mastery, order, perseverance, playfulness, revolution, safety, security, self-reliance, service, simplicity, solving problems, stimulating change, synergy, truth, uniqueness, using my abilities, vitality, wisdom, zest.

 

Now that you have your personal list of 10-15 values, it’s time to prioritize them. This can actually be tough.

Look through your list and ask yourself which one value you would want fulfilled if no other one could be.

Then go through the rest of them and pick the one value out of the remaining ones and choose the one you would most want fulfilled. Keep going through them like this until they are in order.

You will probably have difficulty with a number of these.

That’s ok. Take your time going through them until you are reasonably satisfied with your list.

It doesn’t need to be perfect, and it will certainly change over time, so don’t worry about it! We will be using this list tomorrow, so keep it somewhere you can access it then.

For more information on values, Steve Pavlina has a good series here and here.

Move on to Day 18: Write a Mission Statement.

Related posts:

How To Appreciate The Simple Pleasures
A Lesson In Gratitude Taught By The Jews
The Meaning Of Happiness
Filed Under: Beliefs, Goals

Comments

  1. Ganeshkumar says:
    September 28, 2014 at 6:44 am

    You have almost chartered down a “happiness model” and I must say it is quite brilliant and well conceived. Totally agree to the importance of living as per our Values. Life becomes a mess, if one were to divert from one’s own values.
    Ganeshkumar recently posted..10 “Finding Happiness” videos that will touch youMy Profile

    Reply
    • Mikey D says:
      September 28, 2014 at 1:56 pm

      Thanks for the comment, Ganesh!

      Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Feel Happiness » Day 18: Write a Mission Statement » Feel Happiness says:
    June 14, 2012 at 5:36 pm

    […] Today, you will need your list of values from Day 17. […]

    Reply
  2. Feel Happiness » Day 19: Hobbies » Feel Happiness says:
    June 15, 2012 at 4:21 pm

    […] free time? You’ve probably thought about this question a lot over the past two days while eliciting your values and writing your mission statement. That’s good, because today we will explore the question a […]

    Reply
  3. A Lesson In Gratitude Taught By The Jews says:
    January 15, 2013 at 4:48 pm

    […] It must be congruent with your own personal beliefs. […]

    Reply
  4. Day 16: The Map Or The Territory? says:
    January 18, 2013 at 10:02 am

    […] Continue to Day 17: Find Your Values. […]

    Reply
  5. How You Can Achieve Anything You Want In 3 Simple Steps says:
    February 2, 2013 at 11:54 am

    […] out what it is we actually want to be can be challenging in itself. I encourage you to consider finding your values, writing a mission statement, and using the starting from zero technique to help you determine […]

    Reply
  6. How You Can Increase Your Personal Freedom And Become More Independent - Feel Happiness says:
    December 5, 2013 at 5:41 am

    […] But it’s important to revisit them regularly, because they can and do change. Here is a useful technique for eliciting your values, and a strategy for converting your values into a personal mission […]

    Reply
  7. Kabbalah and Self-Reflection - Feel Happiness says:
    January 8, 2015 at 7:40 pm

    […] version of this, maintaining the methodology, while personalizing it to suit your own values (go here to help you find your personal […]

    Reply
  8. No One Owes You Anything - Feel Happiness says:
    June 13, 2015 at 3:21 pm

    […] Mr. Browne’s philosophy here is not about being self-centered. It’s about clarifying your values, finding out what makes you happy, and going after it, while considering the consequences of your […]

    Reply
  9. How To Recover When You Are Off-Course - Feel Happiness says:
    July 11, 2015 at 4:56 pm

    […] while they are important, they are just one aspect of your life’s path. This applies to living your values, making mistakes and poor moral judgments, and so on. You need to be able to forgive yourself for […]

    Reply
  10. Overcoming Stubbornness and Defensiveness – All That Is She says:
    January 12, 2017 at 2:06 am

    […] and nutrition. And I tend to get very defensive when someone calls into question my efforts or the values that I live […]

    Reply

Speak Your Mind Cancel reply

*

*

CommentLuv badge Show more posts

Subscribe Now!

When you sign up to receive updates from Feel Happiness, you will also receive your FREE 8 day e-course, How To Create A Healthy Lifestyle That Makes You Happy
unsubscribe from list

powered by MailChimp!
Follow @feelhappinessMD

Recent Posts

  • Learning Better: Ultimate Guide to Hacking Your Brain And Supercharging Your Productivity
  • Coffee And Health: Brewing The Healthiest Cup Of Coffee Possible
  • Impostor Syndrome: Why Success Makes You Feel Like A Fraud
  • Never Get Sick Again: How to Optimize Your Immune System
  • How To Meditate: A Beginner’s Guide To Meditation Practice

Categories

  • Beliefs
  • Diet
  • Exercise
  • Goals
  • Interpersonal Relations
  • Lifestyle
  • My life
  • Philosophy
  • Positive Psychology
  • Stress
  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org
Lifestyle Blogs
Lifestyle blog sites

Quick Links

  • Home
  • New? Start Here.
  • As Seen On…
  • Archives
  • 30 Days of Happiness
  • Contact

© 2021 feelhappiness.com - All rights reserved.
  • Privacy Policy