Living a Values-Based Life

What is a values-based life? A values-based life is a self-capable life free of doubt or fear; a life that allows you to take risks, fulfill dreams, capture goals and live to your fullest capacity. Sound wonderful? It certainly is. Too good to be true? Not at all. When you live a life according to your personal values all of these awesome options are possible for you. However, there is some work involved that is an absolute necessity before any of those amazing things can happen for you. That pre-work involves identifying and accepting your values as the guiding principles in your life. Only when you have chosen this self-responsible attitude are you able to live a values-based life.

So, what are values? Your values are your unique and individual essence. They identify who you are. They are what make you, you. The authors of The Lemming Conspiracy (Longstreet Press 1997) define values as 'what you hold most personally meaningful in your life'. I love that definition because it speaks to each of our authentic selves. When we honor our values by the decisions we make, our lives feel satisfying and full of possibility to us. Since our values are defined by who we are, we need to remember to make a conscious shift in our thinking from looking externally (what the world tells us we should do) to looking internally (what is important to our authentic self). Our values define who we are so we need to continually remind ourselves to look inside our authentic self to determine what is essential instead of getting dictation from the outside world.

It is easy to see the controversy involved with such a 'me'-oriented attitude. Take, for example, a societal norm such as attending college after high school. Where does that decision come from? For most of us, there wasn't a decision as to whether or not we would go to college but, rather, which college. Of course, we would attend college. That is what everyone does. Traditionally, at the end of college, we are told that we should know what we want to do for the next 50-odd years of your professional life. To the rational mind, does that mindset seem realistic? Not really. Currently, the average American changes job over six times in their career. Many of us didn't know what we wanted to do after college so instead of deciding, we kept going. More schooling in hopes this additional formal education might tell us what we should be doing. Additional schooling can occasionally help determine what we want to do but more often than not we are simply prolonging the inevitable-actually making a decision on how to live our life. All the while, we are generally not encouraged to look inside ourselves for the answer. Looking inside us can yield fuzzy, emotional or irrational thoughts that are usually easier to ignore and to choose, instead, the rational (read: what society expects) path. And, all the guilt over the thousands spent on our education doesn't help us take an honest look at our individual wants and needs.

But inside us is where the answers lie. When I work with clients to uncover their values, they ask themselves a variety of questions to help get at the crux of who they really are- what their desires are, what is essential for them, how/when they are at their best, etc. We call this process 'mining for values'. We are simultaneously uncovering and paring down our authentic self to get at our values. When we mine for values, we aim for a list of 5-6 values that we can clearly recall and articulate [when we get beyond this number, our values list becomes difficult to remember as well as there is a good possibility that two values can be combined]. Five values are a handful and can be remembered by counting off one value on each finger.

With values work, we strive to get specific. This is where my theory of values differs from other coaches or consultants. I don't believe that a generic term such as 'family' is powerful enough to count as a personal value. Since I contend that values are essences that make you uniquely you, unlike anyone else, then how would a generic term like 'family' -with its meanings and various connotations--be enough to define an intrinsic part of who you are? So, I require clients to get specific when defining their values. Each value pair contains two words; an adjective or adverb paired wi