Leadership / Life Skills: Personal Values

Your core values are key to personal growth. I have spoken about values before and you may wonder what I mean: values comprise your internal belief system and are beliefs that are important to you. Each person has a different set of values that they use to make decisions with. For example, a career woman who is also a mother will probably place the value of family before all else, even at the expense of her career. If her child's school phones to say her child is ill, she will dash home to fetch her child from school even if she is in the middle of a very important meeting. This woman places the value of family uppermost. Another career woman may have a different set of values and may have decided to delay having children until later in her career. Having a family is unimportant to such a woman and her career is her most important value. Each person is different and will have a set of values that drives his or her decision making. Values become part of a person's integral set of beliefs and drive behaviour.

Do you know what your values are? Try the following exercise--list 7 or more of your key values. Some examples could be: relationships, family, career, faith, relationships, wealth, honesty, your home.

Once you have decided on a list of values, recorder your values and place those that are most important to you first and ones that are least important last. If you value relationships above all else, then make that value number 1, but if honesty is more important to you than relationships then change the order. It may take some time to sift through your list. The placement of your values provides insight, because a different set of values means different behaviour, for example, if you always keep the peace even at the expense of honesty, then your personal values will be very different to someone who is always honest, even at the expense of relationships with people. There may be occasions when you swap the order of your values around, but generally you will have an overriding set of values you fall back on under pressure.

Knowing one's values is a key step in knowing one's core self. Personal values explain why people make different decisions and have different ethics given the same set of circumstances. For example, some people are against abortion and others are for abortion given certain circumstances, and these individual views, which are ethics, are a direct consequence of each one's personal set of values.

This exercise may be easy for some people to do and quite difficult for others. I found it quite challenging to list my values when I first attempted to, as I had never thought about the driving forces behind my behaviour before. Now I realise that my values underpin much of my life and my core beliefs.