Finding flow through your values

This is an excerpt from my Be Your Own Therapist course, which I’ll be releasing later this year. It is taken from the Finding flow through your values lesson. Which helps you identify your top ten values, and discover how being able to *act consistently in alignment, with what feels like a true sense of ourselves, is the key to a meaningful life.

*And how hard that can be!

What do we mean by ‘values’  

We define values as process-oriented qualities and behaviours. A value can be both a noun – a specific quality, a ‘thing’. And also a verb, there’s a behavioural ‘doing’ component to it as well.

They are a way of living your life.

How you want to approach and respond to it.

How you want to treat yourself, and others. What you stand for.

The person you want to be.

Who you are when you at your natural best.

They act as a compass so you can orientate yourself towards a rich and meaningful life. And also the vehicle to get you moving along that path. Not a path laid out by someone else, but y our very own unique journey.

There are literally hundreds of values. In this lesson we’ll try and hone in on which values are most important to you. Let’s have a look at a couple of examples of values.

Examples of values

• Independence: the desire to be self-supportive, to choose your own way of doing things.

• Excitement: to seek, create, and engage in activities that are exciting, stimulating or thrilling.

• Trust: to be trustworthy, loyal, faithful, sincere, reliable.

• Courage: to be courageous or brave; to persist in the face of fear, threat, or difficulty.

• Fun: to be fun-loving; to seek, create, and engage in fun-filled activities

 Value are different to goals. They aren’t about a specific point in time, something to achieve, a box to tick.

Goals are outcome orientated. Values are process orientated; they are available to you right now, in this very moment.

Values sorting exercise

Your task here is to identify your top five values from the list - your five most important values. That’s not many! You’ll feel like you have many more than just five. In recognition of that, you can still acknowledge values that are important to you and place them in the Important category.

Some values won’t feel very important to you, place those in the Less Important category. Don’t worry too much whether something is Less Important or Important; it’s the top five Most Important values we are most interested in. You can move the values around the different categories if you change your mind.

Take your time over this exercise but also don’t overthink it too much. See if you can let your gut and intuition guide you.

Don’t pick what you think are the right values, perhaps the ethically or morally superior ones. There’s no judgement here.

I’ve never worked with anyone who put ‘world peace’ in their top ten. But that didn’t mean they didn’t want it. It’s just a life of activism wasn’t part of their identity, it wasn’t what inherently drove their meaning, motivation, and purpose.

 The values you choose might be something you feel an expert in, integrated within your life and very much part of your character. But maybe some feel a bit more aspirational, qualities you are willing to embody on a more consistent basis.

 Values can change over your lifetime. So doing this exercise ten years ago, or ten years from now, might elicit different results. I tend to find many values remain consistent throughout life. But some come and go, and new ones can often appear as circumstances change or big life events occur.

This exercise is really about what matters to you now. How do you want to show up in the world. What fundamentally feels like a part of who you truly are.