008 – Understanding Your Core Values

Hello again and welcome to episode eight of the everyday confidence podcast from the skillfulmind.com. I’m your host Steve George, and on today’s show we’re going to be talking about your core values, how they affect your confidence. And so how likely you are to step outside of your comfort zone.

What are your core values, and why do they matter?

Well, your core values essentially define who you are as a person. And they dictate your highest priorities when you’re making decisions about pretty much everything that you do.

Values are abstract emotional states. And what I mean by abstract, is that everybody’s interpretation is going to be slightly different. If we use for example, respect. Now for me, respect means that if I’m meeting someone, then they should be courteous and polite. I mean, we live in a civilised society and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be courteous and polite, even if you don’t particularly like the person.

But for someone else, it could mean that if for example, they’re walking down the street and someone’s walking in the opposite direction, and they just walk straight past them without acknowledging them, then that person would feel that the other one is being disrespectful.

So everybody’s interpretation is slightly different for the same value. Now, I like to think of ‘toward values’ in three different categories. First of all, there are like general values, which are things like for example ‘respect’, ‘honesty’, ‘creativity’, ‘compassion’, ‘loyalty’, things like that.

Then you have what I call confident values, which are the values that seem to be higher up the list of the more confident person. Those are things such as ‘adventure’, ‘courage’, ‘bravery’, ‘decisiveness’, ‘fearlessness’, things like that.

And then, on the other side of the coin, you have the values that people who have less confidence are likely to have higher up their hierarchy.

Those are things like ‘commitment’. ‘Comfort’, ‘modesty’, ‘dependability’, ‘reliability’, those sorts of values.

So can you see how the values affect the decisions you make and the likelihood of whether you’re going to try new things?

Also with values, they’re placed into a ‘values hierarchy’. Which is basically a list from one, to however many values you have in the order of priority. Every decision you make, is put in the context of that hierarchy.

So let’s say for example, a friend of yours asks you to go skydiving with him. Now, if you’re number one value is ‘certainty’, and then down somewhere around about number six, or seven is adventure. Then skydiving might seem quite appealing. But then ‘certainty’ pops its head up and says, “Well, what if something goes wrong? You might be injured, or you could even die!”

And so, you probably won’t accept the invitation to go for a skydive.

Or maybe you thought about starting a business. But you never really ever got past the initial stages. You always needed one more thing. You needed to learn one more skill, or just needed a bit more experience, or you’re just waiting for the right time to start.

And if that’s you, I know exactly how you feel. That was exactly my problem, for probably close to 20 years. I just needed one more bit of training, just one more qualification, just one more skill.

At one point, I even incorporated the company. I tried to get that to boost me and get me started. But what I didn’t do, was address my values. And because I had values like ‘consistency’, ‘certainty’, ‘security’, things like that. So, starting a new business didn’t seem to meet those values. And so ended in self sabotage. There was always something else I needed to do, before I started.

Now, people with low confidence do start businesses clearly. And the reason for that, generally speaking, is that they’ve got maybe a few lower values but further down their list. Values that do meet the benefits of starting a new business. And those lower values overpower the one, or two higher values and give them the ability to start.

But over time, many slowly start to lose their drive. For example, they might not show up for meetings, or they don’t provide the best value for their customers, etc. And over the course of, sometimes a few months, sometimes a few years, but eventually, the business dwindles and eventually fails.

Now we can change our perspectives on what we’d like to do, to start to meet those values. But obviously, you need to know what those values are.

It’s vital that you know what your values are, and that you know their order of importance, so that you can start to address them. It sometimes takes a little bit of time, but it’s fairly easy to do.

I’ve designed a ‘values worksheet’, which gives you a list of about 70, or so values to start with. Obviously, you can add your own, and hopefully the list will give you some ideas. So, work your way through the list. Pick the values that resonate with you and write them down.

Now, for some people that might be six values, for other people that might be 26. It doesn’t really matter. Just whatever resonates with you. Then, work through the list for whichever area you’re trying to get the values for. That area could be your work life, your personal life, it could be finances, relationships, whatever it is for you, you can do this for all of those areas.

So let’s say for example, that you’re looking at your personal life, and three of the items in your list are security, trust, and let’s say commitment.

The way you work through your list to find your priorities is: You take the first item on the list which is security. And you ask yourself the question, “In my personal life, is security more important to me than trust?

And you might say well NO, trust is more important. So then you ask the question, “Is trust more important than commitment? And you might say YES. So ‘trust’ goes to the top of the list.

And then you go to the next one, which is security. So, is security more important than commitment? Let’s say, NO, commitment is more important. Therefore, commitment becomes number two, security becomes number three. And you just work your way down the list. By the time you’ve finished, you’ve got a complete list of priorities, from the things at the top of your list, down to the things at the bottom. By completing that, you’ll know not only what your values are, but what their priority is.

Then you can start to make changes.

So let’s go back to the skydiving example and put that up against the three values we just spoke about, ‘security’, ‘commitment’ and ‘trust’.

If you were asked to go skydiving and those were your three top values, chances are you would probably say you didn’t want to go.

But, let’s say that you could be ‘secure’ in the fact that you’d conquered one of your biggest fears. That you’d achieve ‘commitment’ to try something new every month. And you were going with your best friend who you ‘trust’ with your life. All of a sudden those same three values, give it a whole new meaning. This time, you’re probably more likely to go skydiving.

And we do that, by changing our belief systems, which we’ll discuss in the next episode.

But for now, download the worksheet. Identify your values and put them in order.

Okay, that’s it for today. If you’ve got any questions you can shoot over to the podcast page, which is the skillfulmind.com/podcast/008, where you can check out the show notes, and you’ll also find links and any other relevant information to today’s show.

Thanks for listening, and remember that nothing changes unless you take some action.

Until next time, Bye for now.