Define your Core Values - 3 questions to discover your personal code of conduct and lead a life of integrity
A short exercise to clarify your core values and help others to do the same. Use this for personal introspection, or as a connection activity at your next company gathering.
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What does it mean to have personal integrity?
I’ve pondered that question for many years and was even mentored by the woman who owns the trademark on “Personal Integrity.” The simplest answer I’ve been able to boil it down to, is this…
Personal integrity is living our values, telling the truth and keeping our agreements.
Our agreements are the things we’ve committed to, with oneself and others.
Telling the truth is being objective with positive intent.
Our values are what we believe to be meaningful and important, they are our personal code of conduct. “To be me, I must express these.”
To lead a rewarding life, one must simply aim to live with integrity.
I often invite my clients to imagine themselves at the end of their lives and ask them to think of what they’d feel like if they truly committed themselves to the practice of integrity.
For most, they agree that that would equate to a life well lived. I certainly think so.
Of those three pillars of integrity, I believe that clarifying our core values is the best place to start. That’s why I created a simple exercise to help people articulate theirs in a meaningful way.
First, Why are values so important?
According to the Identity Model of Change, the most important aspect of sustainable habit formation is not strategies or tactics, it is our identity. Our identity is simply our sense of self. We do the things that align with who we think we are.
Our values are one of the most practical and empowering ways to articulate who we are.
Think about it, if you are the CEO of a company and want to create a great culture, one of the first things you need to do do is articulate your company’s core values. Corporate values show the team what type of behavior is celebrated and appropriate at your company.
Personal values do the same thing for ourselves. They remind us what type of behavior we want to celebrate, or mitigate in our lives.
When we are conscious of our values, we are more capable of knowing what we want, taking aligned action and making clear choices.
It also helps us to identify behavior that is out of alignment with our values, which is crucial for our ability to come back into integrity.
If you want to articulate your core values, work through the simple exercise below.
This is also a great activity to work through with your team on an offsite or a team-building call. It’s a great way to get to know people on a deeper level.
The Core Values Exercise:
Step 1: Start your list of personal values
Start by answering the following question and creating a list of your values. Write down as many that come up for you and feel important, we will trim to your “core values” later.
* What values are essential to your life?
* What values represent your primary way of being?
* What values are essential to supporting your inner self?
Helpful tip: Here is a list of the world’s most influential values to get you started.
Step 2: Peaks and Valleys
While it is helpful to conceptually articulate our values, there is another way that is often a more pragmatic and authentic way to uncover what our values truly are. I call it the peaks and valleys exercise.
First, look back on your life, focus on the past couple of years and think about a few moments where you were feeling your best. A moment where you were in the flow and simply being the most YOU.
I guarantee that your values were being expressed in that moment.
Our peak experiences are fundamentally just moments where our values are being deeply expressed.
On the other end of the spectrum, the darkest moments and valleys in our life are often those moments where our core values are being suppressed.
So, if you want to take this values work a bit deeper…
Walk through several of your peak experiences from recent memory and then write down the values that were being expressed in that moment.
Then, walk through several of your low points in recent memory and write down the values that were being suppressed.
This is a great way to build out a truly exhaustive starter list of our values.
Step 3: Trim the list to create your core values
I think it is important to limit our core values list to 5-10 values. If we can’t remember our core values off-hand, it’s unlikely that we will be guided by them.
Once you have your exhaustive list in front of you, take some time to trim it down to only the most essential.
This practice is a powerful way to refine what truly matters to us. See if there are some values that can be merged under one word.
The fewer there are, the easier they will be to remember and integrate moment to moment.
BONUS POINTS: Create an acronym that makes your values easy to remember. The order is not important, and this will definitely help you to remember them.
For examples: Mine are currently… S.A.C.C.A.
Service
Authenticity
Creativity
Connection
Adventure
Closing exercise: Using values to lead a life of integrity
I have spent a lot of time thinking about confidence and how it can be created, cultivated and maintained.
At the end of the day, I believe that confidence is mostly achieved by respecting ourselves and telling the truth.
That first part is super important, respecting ourselves.
For me, respecting myself is tied to an appreciation of “HOW I am in the world,” it is most correlated with how I act, relate and show up. Loving myself is more tied to WHO I am, an internal reverence for myself.
For me, I believe we are only truly capable of respecting ourselves when we are expressing, or living our values.
So to put this work into action, I will encourage you to consider a final question - How deeply are you living your values?
Take your refined list of core values and rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 for each one.
Base your answer on the question “how fully am I expressing this value in my life?”
10 being fully and 0 being not at all.
After you are done, take a moment to be with yourself and see how you feel. If you are an 9 or above, you're doing great. Anything below an 8 and you know where you have work to do.
It may be helpful to write a short paragraph after each value that is below an 8 to clarify how you perceive you are coming up short in this arena.
Once we are clear on our core values, our next step can always be found by asking ourselves the question.
How can I live this value more deeply? What are the next steps that will help me to embody this value?
As we learn to fall in love with that question, it will guide us, again and again.
Until one day, we wake up feeling confident, knowing, without thinking, that we are being ourselves and living the life we are supposed to be living.