Understanding our values can help us engage life.
What are values and how can understanding them help us better engage in life? Why are they important to know?
Values are the guidelines that help shape our goals and objectives in life. They are part of a source that helps bring fulfillment in our life.
Values affect all areas of our life. For example, how we use our time and to whom we spend our time with are all shaped by our values. Our values will play a major role in our decision making. They are part of our identity as individuals as well as every organization. .
Juan Carlos Jimenez shares: “When we truly believe that a set of behaviors constitute an essential cornerstone to life, we act accordingly, and don’t care what others say about it.”
For many, our values are formed in our early life as children. As we watch our guardians, we will often take on their worldview. As life moves forward we will be influenced and challenged by peers, which is not a bad thing. Experience can also shape our values. For example, if someone has a bad experience in a situation, it develops behavior in that person. Perhaps this has more to do with a natural protection of their self, but that experience creates a foundational belief and value in their life.
Values are foundational beliefs in our life that effect behavior. Values can be changed, but that is a hard road to walk. Change can occur as people honestly think about the implications of the things they stand for. Sometimes values will change because of new influences in one’s life. However changing those foundations takes work and time.
Often the greater challenge is our lived-out values compared to our stated values. They are not always the same.
It is good to spend some time reflecting on your values. As you do that ask yourself, why do you have that value? Why do you want to have, or live out , that value? We hold to values because of their benefit to us, so what benefit does it bring?
Values are the things that matter most to us.
When we understand them we begin to understand the things that drive us.
Understanding them will help us to be in a better position for ourselves to enter, engage, and experience life as we were created for.
Here is an exercise to help identify your values. Click here