How to Discover Your Personal Values in Less Than 10 minutes

What is 10 minutes worth for you? How about changing your life by knowing what is important to you? You think you already know what’s important to you? This post may prove you wrong. A majority of people don’t know what their core values are, they do not give enough time to figure out how they want to live their life.

How much time it takes? Less than 10 minutes. That is how quickly you can start discovering your personal values. Read this post and discover what guiding principles or personal values are important to you.

Discovering Your Personal Values

A set of personal values is like a good ladder that helps you to reach the top of the right wall. Personal vision is necessary for personal growth, but a set of personal values is required for making the growth sustainable. Here we present some methods to discover your personal values. Once you have read these methods set aside 10 minutes for this exercise, pick up your writing instruments, carry your calm mind and find a quiet place. This required preparation is necessary and is briefly discussed in the post Creating Vision Statement With Vision Exercises. Lets look at these methods.

Method 1 – Generation Method

This method is based on the fact that your past decisions and problem solving attitude reflects your personal values. In order to identify your personal values, lets start with the two questions. Answer these questions to start the discovery.

1. What is the most memorable decision you took in the past that makes you feel good about the incident? Think about this question for a moment. What made it memorable? What makes you feel good about it? What is that you liked about this incident? Write everything down.
2. What is the most memorable decision you took in the past that does not make you feel good about the incident? Similar to the question above, what is it that has made the decision memorable. Why this does not feel good? What was something that you did not like about this incident? Answer these questions and write them down on a piece of paper.

These two questions are important. They help you discover your liking and disliking about the situation. Now stop here for a moment and try to answer these questions:

1. From the things that you liked and disliked, can you identify the guiding principles or core values?
2. What personal values are reflected in the incident here?

If you can not answer these questions at first, don’t be disheartened. Just try hard.

This method should be used to discover your existing personal values. This method will help you determine what is important to you based on the way you have handled situations in past. This is a comparatively simple method but you should also consider the fact that as with most people, your behavior changes with the time and if the incidents you listed are not recent enough, the personal values you discover from this method will relate to the time of the incident.

Method 2 – Filtration Method

This is a more straightforward method. I like this method because, it is easy and the result of this method – the values you discover seem to be more relevant than generation method.

To start with discovering your values, look at the list of most common values below. This list has more than 125 personal values. Select your top 25 values you would like to have and that seem important to you.

This list is a sufficient list of values to choose from and covers mostly all major values. If you have a burning desire to scan all the possible personal values in the world, a comprehensive list of personal values might help you.

Once you have a list of 25 core values, look at them again and select 10 most important personal values. Now, you can stop here or filter it even further to select 5 top personal values.

You Discovered Your Values What Next?

Once you have discovered a set of personal or core values, it is time to define then and develop them. It is time to start living by them and accommodating them in your daily life. At work, at home, with friends or with adversaries, these personal values should be followed all the way to the success.

Did you try Generation Method or Filtration Method? What seems simpler and direct to you? What advise do you have for other readers? Tell us in the comments.

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Further Reading –

1. Personal Vision is Useless Without a Good Ladder
2. Discover Your Personal Values with Your Personal Vision 
3. List of Personal Values
4. 3 Ingredients of Success – Vision, Core Values and Mission Statement
5. 6 Qualities You Need to Make a Better Impact