Understanding & Building Upon Your Core Values
- Written by Rein Trotzuk 12/12/2020
When it comes to deciding what interests in life you want to further explore sometimes it can be beneficial to take a step back and think about how (or if) certain interests actually align with your core values.
What are core values?
Core values are the fundamental principles that guide our actions in life. These principles or beliefs are what we view as being of central importance. We use these values as the foundation on which we perform work and conduct ourselves.
Why is understanding our core values important?
When life gets busy, we often start to drift from these values without realizing it. By understanding our core values, we can align our life decisions to what matters most to us.
Here at Vialchemy we created a simple 15-60 minute exercise (download) that you can use to help identify and understand your core values. This exercise helps to ground you to these foundational principles and enables you to move towards creating the best version of yourself. It can provide direction and purpose in your life as once you have your core values written down and embedded in your mind you can start taking action towards strengthening these values. Then throughout your day you can start asking yourself questions like “how do my current actions align with my core values''?
How has understanding my core values changed my life?
In the past I have found myself getting caught up in certain things that really didn’t add a whole lot of value in my life, things such as drinking on the weekends. Or I guess these days it doesn’t have to be the weekend... Now that I think about it, since when does every social activity need to involve drinking alcohol? It’s actually quite crazy. From drinking while watching sports to drinking while playing sports. Drinking with dinner, having that one drink before bed, oh and you guessed it, waking up and drinking champagne and orange juice at Sunday morning brunch! But wait, it doesn’t stop there! Now when you go in to get your haircut the first thing they offer you is a cold beer. It doesn’t matter if you're at the beach or the top of a mountain resort you will find this sneaky legal drug called alcohol hiding out.
But it’s not a problem, right? When you get caught up in comparing yourself to alcoholics or others that make it clear that drinking is affecting their life in a negative way it’s easy to think you don’t have a problem. Even if its not as frequent as others, alcohol still comes with all the nasty side effects such as dehydration, loss of memory, poor sleep, headaches, blurry vision, upset stomach, anxiety and a lot of poor decisions along the way. And it doesn't stop there, the next day or two you get to fight a hangover where your motivation towards being healthy or productive goes straight out the window.
It wasn’t until I took the time to truly understand my core values that I started to realize that certain decisions in my life (such as drinking) really didn't align with the things I wanted most. Things like health, meaningful relationships, growth, productivity, and ultimately to make a difference in this world. Does this mean that I will never drink again? Absolutely not. I still enjoy the social aspect of drinking and the taste of a cold beer or nice glass of wine. But now that I understand that it pulls me away from my core values I am able to make more conscious and educated decisions towards drinking. I chose to make it a treat for real celebrations in life instead of all the mini celebrations that are embedded into our society these days, like getting your haircut for example ;).
This brings me to one of my favorite quotes “You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage (pleasantly, smilingly, nonaplogetically) to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside. The enemy of the “best” is often the “good.” -Stephen Covey
Expanding on your core values:
Once you have a true understanding of your deepest values in life the next step is to start aligning your day to day actions to help strengthen and move you towards these values. A few examples might be as follows:
Reading a book or listening to a podcast
Exercising or meditating
Picking up the phone to call a family member or friend instead of texting them
Eating a healthy meal with no distractions from your phone
Going on a spontaneous adventure
Drawing or writing in your journal
Volunteering your time towards a cause you are passionate about
Performing random acts of kindness such as buying a stranger a coffee
Or sign up for one of our upcoming knowledge sharing sessions where you can learn and exchange useful information with like minded individuals around the globe :)
