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What are your Core Values?
Your core values, essentially define who you are as a person. They are your highest priorities when making decisions about everything you do.
Some of the more common values are things like… Honesty, Creativity, Compassion, Respect, loyalty, etc.
So, it’s no good trying to learn new behaviors that will change your current situation, if you don’t truly know what your current situation is. You’ll also learn today, a little bit about how you make decisions. This, by the way also includes the decisions you made to destroy your self confidence.
You entire existence revolves around making decisions. And not just a few decisions either. We all know about the common ones such as “what shall I wear today?”, or “what should I make for Breakfast?”, etc.
Every day, you make thousands of different decisions, sometimes many per minute. But generally, they’re taken care of by your unconscious and it’s unlikely that you even notice.
They’re taken in a fraction of a second and are thought of as second nature. So automatic that you don’t even register that it happened.
No matter how many decisions you make in a day, they all follow the same pattern. Every decision you make is really a determination of whether what you are about to do, satisfies your Core Values.
How Core Values affect you decisions
It doesn’t matter whether that decision is about which of your favorite foods you should cook for dinner today, or whether you should apply the brakes on your car before you hit the truck that’s pulled out of the turning, right in front of you!
In that example, when the car enters your lane you ask yourself a question… “Will continuing on at my current pace take me closer to, or further away from, my values?”
If one of your highest values is SECURITY, you’ll hit the brakes immediately.
If however, your top value is EXCITEMENT, or UNCERTAINTY, you’ll probably try some other more exciting way of avoiding the collision.
The process also applies to decisions you made about yourself. What your thoughts were about different experiences and situations in the past, etc. These same values determine how you’re going to deal with those types of experiences in the future.
Here’s a quick example for you…
Let’s say, one of your top core values is security. If you lack self-confidence, you probably put most of your energy at work into making sure you don’t mess up. This endures you don’t put your job at risk. You never apply for promotions and never ask for a raise, just in case this puts your job at risk later on!
You most likely convince yourself that your just happy doing what you’re doing. There’s no need to make un-necessary waves. That’s your ‘security’ value making the decision for you.
Later on, I’m going to ask you to do an exercise. It will help you discover what your Core Values are and help you to produce your own success plan for your future.
There’s a ‘Core Values’ worksheet for download at the bottom of this post, which lists dozens of values, to give you some ideas to start with.
Values are abstract in nature and are emotional states. Like I mentioned before, things like, Passion, Power, Happiness, Love, Freedom, or Respect, etc. Because these values are abstract, my idea of what each one means, is probably different to what that same value means to you.
eg: For me, respect means that I would expect the people I come into contact with, to be courteous and polite. After all, manners cost nothing. We should expect nothing less from a civilized society.
To someone else, it may be that if a person was to walk by them without showing them some form of acknowledgement, that person would be disrespectful. Neither of these opinions are wrong, they’re just different.
Different people react differently, according to their values. So, someone else’s reaction to the same situation, may be very different.
And remember that your core value is the ’emotional state’ that a certain thing gives you, not the thing itself.
For example, you may say that the thing you value most in your life is having an abundance of money. And your lack of confidence is causing procrastination, so you’ll never reach it.
That being the case, let’s say I transferred $1,000,000 into your personal bank account. You would have an abundance of money; the one thing you valued more than anything else.
But, then I tell you that you can keep that money. It’s yours forever, but you can’t spend it, or any of the interest you gain from it. Suddenly having an abundance of money isn’t as fulfilling anymore!
What you really want, what you truly value, is the things that money can give you. It may be security, or adventure, or fun, etc. Everyone is different, but we all have a hierarchy of values that we try to live by. A set of life targets that our unconscious mind is constantly trying to achieve for us.
The way we try to meet our values, is by building a belief system. We’ll break down those in a future post.
Next step
For now, get clear on what you’re values are. Knowing what you value most, will help you plan the best things to do in the future.
Download the Core Values Worksheet here.
If you have any questions during the exercise, leave them in the comments 🙂
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