A mosaic or a chemical mixture or a kaleidoscope, whatever you may want to call, this post is exactly that. I wanted to look at how other bloggers see personal vision and values and add a little different flavor to Chat at the Cooler. Tell us how do you like this experiment in the comments below.

Picture Source: Lynn (Gracie’s mom)

Personal Vision and Personal Values – Different Shades

1. How to Define Your Personal Values, Vision and Goals – This is a great article by Rachel Walker. Rachel talks about discovering values, pairing it up with vision and setting up goals. However, I do not agree with Rachel on her disintegration of vision. In the article she explains that vision includes, envisioned future  and core ideology. I would rather say core ideology is your value system and they are not two different things. That’s my opinion, what do you think?
2. Seven Characteristics of a Powerful Vision – George Ambler on Practice of Leadership talks about Visionary Leadership by Burt Nanus. George has does a wonderful job in summarizing the main points of seven characteristics of powerful vision. We also mentioned 5 Simple Tips to Powerful and Effective Vision. 
3. Company Values and Personal Values – Author Sergiu Truta from the blog SergiuTruta.com takes a look at an interesting aspect of aligning company values and personal values and how should organizations align company values with employees’ values. Interesting post, I say.
4. Is Personal Vision the Key to Getting What You Really Want From Life? – Karl Rogan writes about Coffee Philosophy and asks this question in the post – Is Personal Vision really the key? Karl details what is personal vision and its benefits and also talks about how to create a person vision. I think this post pretty much sums it all up really nice. Earlier last month we posted the Create Your Personal Vision series. We talked about creating a personal vision in great detail.
5. Vision Boards – In this post, author at Vision Board blog talks about a product called Vision Board. However, if you read the entire post (its kind of long), author talks about 4-step method for success using vision – Dream it, (Write it), See it, Achieve it. There is a lot you can get from the post, its a really long post, so scroll and the post has some great content.
6. How does one discover their core values? – This is a different type of post. Charlie is on a quest to, like many of us, the quest of understanding life. In this post, she presents her personal experience and how she goes about finding the core value. Charlie, you might find a previous post Discover Personal Values in Less Than 10 minutes. Once personal values are discovered it is important to develop these personal values.

The next post is about Top Best-in-Class Newsletters you must Subscribe to. The list includes many best selling authors and is a must read. Get this and other similar articles first by subscribing to the blog via RSS or via email and get the latest posts from Chat at the Cooler.

Did you like this experiment of bringing bloggers focusing on variety of aspects on personal vision and personal values topic? Tell us in the comments. What else would you like to see? If you like this article please stumble it, digg it or share it any way you like.

Related Posts:

1. Personal Vision is Useless Without a Good Ladder
2. Discover Your Personal Values with Your Personal Vision
3. 3 Ingredients of Success - Vision, Core Values and Mission Statement
4. Values Statements – An Important Missing Piece of Your Success Puzzle
5. How to Create a Compelling Vision and Successful Vision Statement

(Continue Reading)

In the previous posts, we talked about how to discover your personal and core values in less than 10 minutes and how to write a value statement. In this post I am going to talk about developing your personal values.

Developing Your Personal Values

Developing your personal values is a three step process. You need to define the value clearly and then clarify it further. After that, create value-based guidelines to support your personal values. Once you have the guidelines, start the 30 day roll-out. This is a really quick summary of development process. Lets look at the process in detail.

• Define Clearly – The first step to start developing your personal values is to define the value clearly. What do you mean by excellence, for example. If excellence is one of the value you have selected, what does it mean to you? Define what is excellence. Use values statement for defining your personal values. For example, your value statement might be, “I will excel in everything I do.”
• Create a checklist– Once you have put a definition to the values, the next step is to create a checklist. This list should have specific value-based guidelines that are in line with  the value statement. Based on your values statement for excellence, develop a checklist of value-based guidelines. Some of the guidelines may be:
  1. I will stay updated on ___ (the subject you want to excel in).
  2. I will give 100% in everything I do and will not compromise for less
• Start the 30 day roll-out – Now that you have a list of value-based guidelines that defines each personal value you discovered, it is time to implement the set of values. In the next 30 days, resolve to make all decisions, take all actions with the set of values in mind. Anything you do, no matter what, should support your personal value system. Continuing our example about excellence – to embed excellence in your value system, you should start by making small commitments. Make some small commitments and keep them and little bigger ones and keep them. Start with just first value-based task and embed it and then next one and the next one. At the end of 30 days, look back and find where you came short and improve those in coming days.

Case Study - Integrity

Lets take another example and apply the above steps to it. Lets assume, integrity is one of your personal values. Now we will apply the three-step approach to your personal value.

• Define Clearly – What does Integrity mean to you? Define it. Lets say we define integrity as below.

Integrity is being honest and fair with everyone in my daily life. It means that I would make decisions and take actions based on facts and be honest in all parts of my life.”

• Create a checklist – Now that you have defined integrity, break it down and create a list of value-based guidelines. Remember not to create too long list or its effect might  be lost. 4-5 tasks should be the limit. In this case, some of the guidelines could be:
  1. I will be answer all the questions honestly.
  2. I will be honest when dealing with everyone
  3. I will treat everyone fairly.
  4. I will not judge anyone and treat people fairly
• Start the 30 day roll-out – You have created the checklist ready to use. Number of guidelines may vary with the values. But remember the tip in the above point. Don’t make the checklist too long. Now, in case you just can’t resist making it long go ahead and fulfill your desire. But when you come to this stage and are ready to implement, select only 4-5 guidelines to implement in a 30-day span. Use the approach discussed in previous section. Make small commitments, start with just one guideline and keep the commitment. Commit to following another guideline and the previous one and keep the commitment. After 30 days, review your actions and improve.

How do you develop new values? Have you used 30 day roll-outs before? How about 30-day tests have you used that?

If you liked this article subscribe via RSS or subscribe via email and get the latest posts from Chat at the Cooler. Photo Courtesy: thinkpublic

Further Reading -

1. Personal Vision is Useless Without a Good Ladder
2. How to Discover Your Personal Values in Less Than 10 minutes
3. 3 Ingredients of Success - Vision, Core Values and Mission Statement
4. Values Statements – An Important Missing Piece of Your Success Puzzle

(Continue Reading)

So you discovered your personal values by using the two methods or vision exercises, what next? Will knowing your personal values help you succeed? Nope. Knowing your personal values is a start, and the next thing you need is to define and clarify these values and develop these values. In this post, we will define the values by using values statements.

So What the Heck is Values Statement?

I am sure you have heard of vision statements and mission statement, but values statement? What is that? Out of 1000 people out there, only 50 people seriously think about planning for success, only some 10 people have heard about values statements and only 2-3 use it. If you are one of those 2-3 people who have used values statement, please tell us about it in the comments below.

Value statement is a line or short paragraph that defines what each value means and clarifies your personal values by providing it a strong and clear definition. This can be done by having a statement for each value or by having one paragraph that addresses all your personal values. Let’s look at an example.

Let’s assume one of the personal values your discovered is “Integrity”. A sample values statement might be

“I will embrace integrity by being honest and fair in my everyday life.”

How to Create a Values Statement

Now, let’s look at how should you go about constructing the values statement for your personal values. Creating your personal values statement is a systematic process. The steps for creating a values statement are:

1. Understand – Understand the importance of personal values and how your personal values help you succeed.
2. Discover – Once you understand the importance of personal values you should discover your core values.
3. Rank – After discovering your set of personal values, measure how important each of these values are to you. Out of the set of discovered values, rank the personal values.
4. Define – Now you have ranked these values, it is the time to define them. What does each value mean to you? How would you live by the value in your daily life?
5. Choose – There are two basic formats for writing a values statement. The first and more commonly used format is to have an individual statement for each value. The second format is where a paragraph describes all the values. I prefer individual statement format, because it is more readable and easier to understand.
6. Finalize – This is one step when you should review your values statement and refine it. Change the words or make the statement catchy by playing with words and grammar.
7. Display – After you have finalized the format, the last step is to put it on a piece of paper display it at a place where it can be seen until you can remember everything on that paper.

Going that Extra Mile

Once you have a values statement and get more clarity about what your personal values are, chances are there will be some new personal values that you would like to incorporate in your daily life. For doing this it is important to develop these values so that you can adopt them and use them as your foundation for everything you do. The next post will discuss how to develop personal values and how to adopt them in your everyday life. Grab subscribe via RSS or subscribe via email and be the first ones to get the future posts from Chat at the Cooler. Photo by Jeremy Books

Further Reading -

1. How to Discover Your Personal Values in Less Than 10 minutes
2. 3 Ingredients of Success - Vision, Core Values and Mission Statement
3. Discover Your Personal Values with Your Personal Vision
4. Personal Vision is Useless Without a Good Ladder
5. Create Your Personal Vision Series

(Continue Reading)

You can create your personal vision in less than 15 minutes by using vision exercises and by asking vision questions. You can use the same exercises and questions to discover your personal values. Previously, we have talked vision exercises and vision questions, in this post we’ll use these two tools to discover your personal values.

Vision Exercises

Vision exercises are great tools for creating a personal vision. These vision exercises can be used to discover personal and core values too. Vision exercises mentioned in Create Vision Statements with Vision Exercises - Part 1 and Part 2 can be further explored to discover personal values. Here we modify the 6 vision exercises to use them to discover your personal values.

1. With the End in Mind – Read the vision exercise 1 before proceeding further. Now answer these questions. What would you want the four speakers to say about your values? What would you want them to say about your character and your guiding principles?
2. Your Superb Lifetime – Read vision exercise 2 and then read ahead. What personal values do you need to getting to this superb life? What personal values do you like in people around you?
3. Can’t Live Without and Want to Get Rid of – The next four vision exercises are mentioned in the post using vision exercises. As described in the exercise, divide a piece of paper and label “Can’t Live Without” and “Want to Get Rid of”. In the Can’t Live Without column please write any of the values that you feel you feel are important and would like in you life. For the Want to Get Rid of think about your past behavior and write everything you wish was different in your personality.
4. Genie Exercise – What are the three things you asked for yourself, your family and community in this exercise? Do these tell you what values are important to you?
5. Retirement Day – What values do you want your colleagues, your employees to have seen in you?
6. Your Legacy – Think about your grandchildren. What values would you like them to have seen in you? Which values would you want your life to be defined by? What adjective would you want people to use when describing your life?

By adding just few more lines to the vision exercises, you can discover your personal and core values.

Vision Questions

Just like vision exercises, vision questions can be used to discover your personal values. Vision questions can be a powerful way for creating your personal vision. Similar approach can be used to discover your personal values. Asking questions, like those for creating personal vision statements, will be a thought-provoking adventure.

So You Discovered Your Personal Values…

Most people discover their values and stop. They believe discovering personal values or core values will help them reach the pinnacle of success, and then they fail. Just discovering the values will not help. They next step is to define what each of those value mean to you and then develop these values and use them in your daily life. The next posts will be about defining your values and developing them. Be the first one to get these articles. Subscribe via RSS or subscribe via email and get the next from Chat at the Cooler.

Do you or your organization has a values statement? Did you discover your values? Did I miss something? Talk to us through comments.

Further Reading -

1. How to Discover Your Personal Values in Less Than 10 minutes
2. Personal Vision is Useless Without a Good Ladder
3. 7+ Powerful Questions to Ask Yourself For Creating Your Personal Vision
4. Create Your Personal Vision Series

(Continue Reading)

There are many lists for personal values that can be found on internet. Some of them are long, some are very long and some are short. In this post I have tried to put together few lists available out there to help those who are searching for a perfect list.

Here are the few lists of personal values:

1. List 1 – This is the list we have used for discovering your personal values in past. I think this list is sufficient and covers almost all the required values.
2. List 2 – Steve Pavlina gives a huge list of personal values. I think that list is unnecessary and is redundant. However, some may want a very comprehensive list, so here is the most comprehensive list of personal values.
3. List 3 – If you are looking to develop a vision or mission statement, the list of values at  timethoughts.com created might help you. 
4. List 4 – This list has about 300 different values, a little too many for me, but may help some others who are looking for more.

There might be hundreds of other lists out there, but these four lists pretty much cover everything. So here it is - the list of list of personal values.

Once you have the list of personal and core values, the next step is to develop them. If you would like to know more about how to develop your personal values or create a vision statement, grab the subscription to Chat at the Cooler. You can subscribe via RSS or subscribe via email  and get the next post.

Photo Courtesy: Crystl

 Related Posts:

1. Develop and Form Your Personal Values
2. How to Discover Your Personal Values in Less Than 10 minutes
3. Discover Your Personal Values with Your Personal Vision
4. Why You Don’t Live Your Personal Values
5. Personal Vision and Core Values – A Kaleidoscope

(Continue Reading)

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.

Accomplishment Accountability Accuracy Adventure All for one & one for all Beauty Calm Challenge Change Cleanliness, orderliness Collaboration Commitment Communication Community Competence Competition Concern for others Connection Content over form Continuous improvement Cooperation Coordination Creativity Customer satisfaction Decisiveness Delight of being, joy Democracy Discipline Discovery Diversity Ease of Use Efficiency Equality Excellence Fairness Faith Faithfulness Family Family feeling

Flair Freedom Friendship Fun Global view Good will Goodness Gratitude Hard work Harmony Honesty Honor Improvement Independence Individuality Inner peace Innovation Integrity Intensity Justice Knowledge Leadership Love, Romance Loyalty Maximum utilization  (of time, resources) Meaning Merit Money Openness Patriotism Peace, Non-violence Perfection Personal Growth Pleasure Power Practicality Preservation Privacy Progress

Prosperity, Wealth Punctuality Quality of work Regularity Reliability Resourcefulness Respect for others Responsiveness Results-oriented Rule of Law Safety Satisfying others Security Self-giving Self-reliance Self-thinking Service  (to others, society) Simplicity Skill Solving Problems Speed Spirit in life (using) Stability Standardization Status Strength Succeed; A will to- Success, Achievement Systemization Teamwork Timeliness Tolerance Tradition Tranquility Trust Truth Unity Variety Wisdom

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.

If you liked this article subscribe via RSS or subscribe via email and get the latest posts from Chat at the Cooler.

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

(Continue Reading)

In today’s world we all do things and we do it with all our heart in it. We blog, we use twitter, we engage in social conversations, we have a Facebook account and we try to be productive. We use gadgets and Firefox extensions and mobile productivity tools. We are busy reading articles and busy searching all the information in the world and we are really busy. And we become busy to keep ourselves busy with things that don’t matter in life. Take a step back!

You Think You Can Succeed With a Personal Vision?

Create your vision and then work on all these things. Write a blog, tweet all you can and get engaged with social networks. But only after you know why you are doing what you are doing. Without having a clear vision, its like trying to reach the top and not knowing which wall the ladder should be leaning on. We often get so worked up in keeping ourselves busy that we forget the bigger picture. We start climbing the ladder and we do it faster and faster only to realize that this is not the wall it should be leaning on and that we have been trying to climb on a wrong wall. Developing a effective personal vision helps, but just having a compelling vision will not  ensure that you will be successful.

You Cannot Succeed With a Personal Vision

After trying to climb on a wall for a long long time, you realize that you were leaning on a wrong wall and you now lean on the right wall. Great!! And you start climbing and you climb for a little while and the ladder starts shaking, it breaks and you are on the ground again. So, now not only do you need the ladder to be leaning on the right wall, you also need the right ladder. Ever heard of that - people falling on the ground because they used a wrong ladder to climb the pinnacle of success? How about Bernie Madoff, Satyam’s Raju Brothers or Enron to start with?

All these mentioned above used a wrong ladder to reach the top of a wall. Their ladder, the values on which they formed their empire, was wrong and that’s why it broke. The guiding principles – or the lack of – that drove them to be successful led them in the wrong direction. They had a vision – a strong and compelling one – but it had no relation with the core-values. The vision was to earn money and they compromised their values for their vision. So even though they were successful, it did not last very long.

You Need a Set of Personal Values

For long-term success, a set of personal values - the second ingredient in the recipe of success – is required. Your personal values or core values are the guiding principles of your life and each action you take should not violate these principles. Your personal values or your guiding principles make you aware of what's the right thing to do and what might not be ethical. Once you know your vision, it becomes your reference for all the activities and tasks you do.

You can use the personal vision to set your priorities and whenever you are lost you can think about your vision to gauge if you are in the right direction. Your core values on the other hand give you the benchmark to live your life and do your job. Your personal values are like the metrics for living your life. You can use these metrics in your daily life to confirm that your actions support the guiding principles and your personal values. The way you conduct yourself in your personal and professional life should be inline with these values. Each day of your life should not violate the criteria of your personal values. If honesty is one of your value, then you should make sure that your every action supports this value of honesty. Nothing you do should violate this value.

In future posts, we will discuss what are some one the common personal values and how to identify these personal values.

You and The Ladder of Success

So to reach the top of the wall you want to, not only do you need to make sure that the ladder is leaning towards the right wall, you also need to make sure you are using the right ladder – a ladder that will not fail and that will take you at the top.

Share your comments. What are your thoughts? How do you determine what ladder is good and what is not? Do you think you can succeed without personal values?

If you liked this article subscribe via RSS or subscribe via email and get the latest posts from Chat at the Cooler. Picture Courtesy: Georgios Karamanis

Further Reading

1. 3 Ingredients of Success - Vision, Core Values and Mission Statement
2. How to Create a Compelling Vision and Successful Vision Statement
3. Start Creating A Vision to Transform Your Life
4. Creating Vision Statements with Vision Exercises
5. 7+ Powerful Questions to Ask Yourself For Creating Your Personal Vision

(Continue Reading)

In last couple of days we posted some articles about why and how to create your vision and vision statements. This post summarizes all the articles and may help to review anything you may have missed. 

1. 3 Ingredients of Success - Vision, Core Values and Mission Statement – What is a secret for being successful? What does success look like for you? Have you given a thought how you would achieve it? (Continue Reading…)
2. Why you need a Vision for Your Life? – Do you know where you are going? Do you what you want from your life? (Continue Reading…)
3. Start Creating A Vision to Transform Your Life – What is common between Walt Disney and Microsoft? Yes, they both define success in their own ways. Walt Disney created Mickey and Mini and Donald and Disney Land, Microsoft is the top software company and more than 80% of the companies running Windows. Both were extremely successful and both knew the secret of success. (Continue Reading…)
4. How to Create a Compelling Vision and Successful Vision Statement – Success starts with a good vision and creating a vision is not simple. Last week we started creating your vision, in this post we will talk about steps for creating a compelling vision and successful vision statement. This four-step approach is simple and logical and enables you to create your vision and vision statement. This post also presents you two most common ways to create your vision. (Continue Reading)
5. 5 Simple Tips to Powerful and Effective Vision and Vision Statements – A compelling vision inspires you when you are low, guides you when you are feel lost and provides meaning to your tasks at hand. An effective vision statement strengthens and solidifies the vision. So what makes a vision and vision statement powerful and effective? (Continue Reading)
6. Dr. Martin Luther King’s Vision Statement – “I Have a Dream” – Dr. Martin Luther King was one of the people of modern world who made a huge impact on mankind. He had a dream – a dream of equality, a dream that all people would be equal, that people will not be judged by the color of their skin. He dreamed of a world where everyone will be truly free. (Continue Reading)
7. Creating Vision Statements with Vision Exercises – Vision exercises are simple and interactive way to create your personal vision. Vision exercises are fun and can help you get focused. These exercises provoke some thoughts and help you understand yourself, your vision and your values in a more comprehensive way. (Continue Reading)
8. Creating Vision Statement with Vision Exercises – Part 2 – Vision exercises, as we mentioned in the earlier post, are great tools for creating your vision. Part 1 of this article discussed the four requirements to use vision  exercises and two vision exercises. This post present four more vision exercises for discovering your personal vision. (Continue Reading)
9. 7+ Powerful Questions to Ask Yourself For Creating Your Personal Vision – We discussed about vision exercises in great detail in previous posts. Part 1 of creating vision using vision exercises presented two exercises and part two presented four more vision exercises. While these exercises are very powerful and very effective each of them require some time to be spent on them. In this post we present a shorter and quicker way to discover your vision. (Continue Reading) 

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Photo Courtesy - h.koppdelaney

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