The importance of knowing your values

I love supporting people to make inspired change in their lives and to break through from whatever’s holding them back. Over the years I’ve found that helping my clients to truly understand themselves is a powerful starting point for them to make positive change.

What are values?

Our values are life principles, the filters we use to make choices. They are what’s most important to us, and they underpin how we behave and how we live our lives.

When we are able to live and work in alignment with our values, we feel good. But when our values are missing or if there is a misalignment, we can feel dissatisfied, unhappy or stressed.

Knowing what your values are can give you insights about yourself, including why certain people, places and situations resonate more than others. If you discover that a part of your life is not aligned with your values, you can gain an understanding of why you are feeling unhappy or dissatisfied, and pinpoint some actions to take.

For example, imagine you had a strong value of integrity, and a colleague asked you to fudge their expense claim. How would that sit with you? How would you feel? Would you be ambivalent, or maybe even inspired to do the same? Or would you be upset, stressed, uncomfortable, even angry? If integrity was an important value for you, it’s more likely to be the latter.

A values misalignment might not be as obvious as this kind of ethical dilemma. Here’s another example:

A few years I had a client who thought he wanted a senior executive role, and yet was unsure about whether to pursue it. He also felt quite stressed about his home life - he dearly loved his wife and two small boys, but he found the mess and noise of two lively children to be quite draining. When he explored his values, he discovered that family was his number one value. With this insight I coached him to reframe how he viewed and prioritised his family life, and he chose to focus his attention on becoming a better father and husband before he went for his career goal. This made a significant difference to his relationships with his wife and sons, and he became far more relaxed at home. His insight around the family value also helped him create some new non-negotiables about his dream role, including being able to put boundaries around work time so it didn’t impact his family. The values work was a solid foundation for him making positive change in his life (and he literally landed his dream role shortly after).

What are your values?

Do you know what your own values are? If you’re not sure, or if you want to refresh any previous thinking on values, ask me for a copy of my free values worksheet.

Take a look at my core values and what they mean to me. Do any of them resonate with you?