What are Your Core Personal Values? How to Discover Them!

Your true home is your core personal value, which is the center of your being. It is the culmination of all your efforts. Working from your core connects you to an internal council of advisors who acts as guides on the route to learning and self-mastery that you select. They can help you gain a better grasp of your own core as well as the core of your company. Your core personal value is a treasure store of information. It holds your special gifts for the world, your one-of-a-kind puzzle piece. Your own particular holograph of the whole is your core personal value.

What are Personal Values?

Personal values are desirable goals that motivate any individual and act as a guiding light in their lives. They are unique to every individual. This means that my personal values may be different from yours because my motivating factor is not the same as yours. These differences, if noticed, are majorly influenced by our culture, our upbringing, our experiences, and many other factors. For example, my core personal value is gratitude but maybe yours is something else.

They are the characteristics and behaviors that guide us. For example, your core personal value is gratitude. So you believe in thanking others for their actions. Then gratitude becomes your motivating factor, and you try to live in a way to thank people and when you are not able to, you feel disappointed.

It is not necessary that one individual has only one core value. Many core values can exist simultaneously in our lives but the values that are most important guide your major decisions like career, family, friends.

So, now that we know what personal values are, how do we discover them? 

How to Discover Your Personal Values?

Take a moment and think for a second. How do you come to believe anything? Ask yourself how do you know that the earth is round, the sky is blue, or that your eyes are brown? How do you know this? If you reflect carefully, you will notice that there are only a very few ways that we “know” anything. 

We know that the earth is round due to scientific experiments. For the colour of the sky and our eyes, we rely on our observation (direct sensory experience), and so on. It ultimately becomes evident that there are only six ways in which we can “believe” or “know” anything, and they are as follows which define how we form and choose values, as well as how we think about things in general:

• Authority
• Sensory experience
• Deductive logic
• Intuition
• Emotion 
• Science

How to Define Your Personal Value?

Reflect

Begin the process by doing some reflection. Go through a list of values and reflect. The key is to understand that you are not there on the list to choose from them but rather to make sure you get ideas regarding the things in life that others consider a value. If not all, some will definitely resonate with you.

You can take some time off to think of the moments in your life that have some meaning or are the highlight of your life. Next, think of a moment that was not fulfilling, was rather disappointing. Now try to chalk out in the happy moments who were you therewith, what were you doing, and if there are frustrating moments, what was the cause of your disappointment or what values were being suppressed. Once you know this, then only you will be able to understand what gives you fulfillment, was it being generous? Was it an adventure?

Once you identify these values, note them down.

Group

Now start grouping those values. For example, if you noted honesty, loyalty and gratitude were your personal values, club them up together to create a core value of human relationships. You may have more values, start to consolidate them all, and create a fresh list.

Rank

The next step is to rank these core values. Pick out those values that matter to you the most, that shape your life the most. Wait for a few days and then come back to the list to check if the rankings you gave are still the same, or if you feel like changing them.

Treat this list as your life document or maybe a manual even. While some of your values may be quite consistent with who you are right now, they may change throughout time. Always make sure that your principles feel distinctive and distinct to your persona. 

This list is not consistent. It might change with time. So make sure every month, you review the list that you had established and grade yourself on how well you’re honouring each value on a daily basis to verify that you’re living in line with your personal fundamental values. Consider some modifications you may make to boost your level of satisfaction with one of your values if it has been declining over time. Make a list of actions that will bring you closer to living in accordance with your values.

List of Personal Values

To help you define your personal value, here is a list of personal values:

1. Love
2. Peace
3. Creativity
4. Kindness
5. Gratitude
6. Learning
7. Power
8. Security
9. Authenticity
10. Compassion
11. Work-Life Balance
12. Consistency
13. Courage
14. Reliability
15. Fearlessness 
16. A sense of humour
17. Dependability
18. Determination
19. Friendship
20. Health
21. Honesty
22. Independence
23. Positivity
24. Loyalty
25. Open-mindedness
26. Optimism
27. Perseverance
28. Respect
29. Simplicity
30. Sincerity

This is not the end of the list. The list goes on. The idea is to create your own list based on your beliefs and your experiences. Use these examples of personal values to identify your own.

10 Personal Values of Life That You Should Live By: Schwartz Theory of Values