I got my first introduction to values in the book Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez. It's a book about how to manage your money and your life so they work together. I don’t even remember the details of how values are used in the book, but I do know that it got me thinking for the first time about how to express what's really important to me.

A street and houses are seen through a narrow fence-lined pathway — Photo by Zosia Szopka

What are values?

Values are a way of putting into words what's important to you. They're usually abstract words like integrity or respect. Values are consistent over all areas of your life — you hold the same values at work, in your hobbies, with your family, and so on, because they're rooted in who you are.

Around the time I read Your Money or Your Life, I lived with my family in a neighbourhood of modest semi-detached brick houses. Decades of inflation had priced the neighbourhood out of the reach of the working class people it was built for back in the 1920s, so many of our neighbours were bankers, lawyers, and other affluent working people.

The vibe in conversations with those neighbours was often along the lines of "How blue was the ocean in Costa Rica?", "Where did you shop Milan?", and "What kind of granite are you choosing for the new kitchen"? If we had tried to keep up with the Joneses, we would have been sunk. I'm not a status-conscious person, but even I started to believe that it's normal and necessary to have a newly renovated house and go on international trips every year.

Thinking about my values helped me be more conscious about how we spent our money. For me, it was more important to be able to take my kids to visit my mother every year than it was to take them on exotic vacations. It was more important for me to spend relaxed time with my kids than to work full-time and build a career.

From those priorities you might think I have a value of family, but that's not quite right. My parents were more-or-less estranged from their families, and I wasn't raised to value ties of blood. The word I gave to the value that underlay those choices was connection: my connection to my mother, my connection to my kids, and a desire to foster a connection between my mother and my kids.

In this situation, I didn't name the value of connection and then act according to it. Rather, I looked at my behaviour — visiting my mother, spending time with my kids — and recognized the value behind it.

Why are values useful?

Knowing your values is useful for several reasons.

First, there's a fundamental benefit to knowing yourself. When you have a solid idea of who you are, it grounds you. You become more confident and less reactive to the ideas and opinions of other people. People who know themselves are comfortable and pleasant to be around.

Second, knowing your values gives you a framework to make thoughtful decisions. That's why values come up in personal finance: money is a finite resource, and it's easy to spend it automatically, on whatever your friends and neighbours spend their money on. Knowing your values will let you choose to spend your money on things which are important to you.

In my case, naming my value of connection helped me make decisions about courses to take, hobbies to pursue, and volunteer jobs to sign up for; I know if there's no element of connection in an activity, I will lose interest in it. (It even gave me a name for my newsletter.)

If you don't know what your values are, you may make choices for reasons that come from outside you: peer pressure, advertising, social norms, family expectations. After years of making decisions this way, you can find yourself in a life which is entirely incongruous with your values, which is as uncomfortable as wearing someone else's skin.

And finally, knowing your values will help you understand why you made decisions in the past. Looking back, you might have made decisions which weren't "logical" or "rational". Viewing them through the lens of your values could help you understand what led you to those choices.

In this sense, values can be especially helpful for giving context to choices that are unexpected or undesirable to the people around you. When you make a decision which raises the eyebrows of your friends and family, knowing that it's rooted in a value will give you the courage to stick to it. You may or may not get a chance to explain yourself to the people in your life, but at least you can explain yourself to you.

How to figure out your values

Naming values is a descriptive act, not a proscriptive one: your values describe who you are, not who you want to be. And so one of the tools that coaches use to discover a client's values is the "peak experience" conversation.

In psychology, “peak experience” is the name for a transcendent ecstatic experience. In coaching, as usual, we're a bit more practical; in the peak experience exercise a coach will invite their client to think of a time when they felt alive, fulfilled, and in their element. Then they explore that experience to discover the inner needs — the values — that the experience satisfied.

You can do this by yourself. Capture the experience you're thinking of in detail, in whatever format works for you: paragraphs, point form, a mind map, a sketch, whatever. Capture what happened, what you did, how you felt, and what about the experience made you feel good.

Then go back and circle the ideas which seem most significant. For each one, ask yourself, "What's important about that feeling?" Keep asking yourself that same question until you get to an answer which seems fundamental or irreducible.

For example, say someone's peak experience was flipping hamburgers for a community event. The conversation might start with something concrete like food, but you need to dig deeper. What is it about food? Is it the creativity of cooking, the community of gathering with people over a meal, the productivity of making something useful out of raw ingredients, the recognition of being thanked for their help?

Then keep going; if "community" is the thing, what's important about community? The answer might be the feeling of belonging, or being of service. Ask again: What about belonging (or service) is important? Once you start to circle around the same answers again and again, you know you are on to something.

Then test what you've come up with by thinking about other areas of your life. If you love running the barbeque, and you think service is a value, how does that show up at work? Does it grind your gears when someone asks for help, or do you love that, too? Values will be consistent across all the contexts of your life.

This kind of reflection on previous experiences is not the only way to figure out what your values are. Here are two more.

The values shopping list

If you do an internet search for "list of values" you will find lists of 50 words, lists of 400 words, and everything in between. Choosing your values off a list can be tricky, because it's easy to get caught up in "shoulds". The lists are, by their nature, things that lots of different people feel are important, and it's easy to trip over a value that you know your family or peers would expect you to have.

When you're shopping for values on a list, you need to pay attention to how you feel: a word which captures who you truly are will make you feel different than a word which chides you for what you're not.

On the other hand, values lists can be useful for giving names to things which you might not have thought to name, like dignity or reason or sensuality. I also enjoy values lists for the satisfaction and clarity of saying NO to values that don't resonate. Naming values is an exercise in self-awareness and differentiation, and recognizing values that you don't hold goes a long way towards that. (That's how I got clear that family isn't a value for me — I saw it on a list and it didn't do a thing for me, even though it seemed like it should.)

My favourite way to use a values shopping list is to take a few passes at it, like this:

On the first pass, go fast. Cross off the values that are clearly yucky and circle the ones that are clearly yummy (sorry).
On the second pass, take a closer look at the values that are left over. Are they close but not quite? Maybe redundant with values that you circled? Circle them too (maybe in a different colour, if that's what you're into). Conversely, did you leave them unstruck because you really feel like you should be into, say, productivity or uniqueness? Cross them off — goodbye. (No-one has to know.) What's left will be values that you're entirely indifferent to, so cross them off too.
Finally, take a look at the values you circled. Some of them might cluster together for you, like community and service and compassion. Some of them might stand alone. Play around with them until they're gathered into groups that make sense to you, then try and prioritize them.

Often when you try and name your values, a single word doesn't capture it. Go ahead and give your values compound names if you need to. For example,

connection / community
connection / cameraderie
connection / friendship

They all have different vibes. Naming values isn't about forcing your priorities into predefined boxes; it's about drawing a line around them as they are.

How many values do you get to choose? Some people say you have to choose your top two; others say five or seven. I tend to think that you can have lots of values, but some of them will be more important than others, and the more you name, the less useful they will be. Try and pick your top four to eight, for now.

Finally, another way to get ideas about values is to take the VIA Character Strengths survey. VIA stands for "Values In Action", and the survey reveals your values as they are reflected in your behaviour. Everyone who takes the survey gets the same 24 values, and the difference is in how they're ranked.

My top five VIA strengths are curiosity, love of learning, critical thinking, forgiveness, and love. Connection isn’t in that list — my connection is closest to what they call love. You don’t have to keep their words!

Values change over time

As we saw above with my realization about connection as a value, sometimes the behaviour comes first, and you name the value later. There's a back-and-forth; examining your values can help you understand your choices, and examining your choices can help you understand your values.

Looking back, I recognized another value at play in my long-ago decision to back-burner my career: It's a deep desire to not be harried; to be relaxed and have time and mental space, both for my own well-being and to show up as the kind of mother I wanted to be. I call this value serenity.

My retrospective recognition of serenity shows two things: First, that we often act according to our values without having named them. Again, values are descriptive, not proscriptive; they're there even if you don't know it.

And second, values are useful as a defense against expectations. The expectation is that parents will go back to full-time work as soon as they can; the expectation is that people (parents and others) will be very busy; the expectation is that we deliberately fill our days with productivity and action. I only named my value of serenity when I looked back, somewhat defensively, and tried to explain to myself why I made the career-limiting choice to stop working.

Do other people respect my value of serenity? Pft, I doubt it. (And I recognize that privilege allows me to honour it as much as I do.) But when I look back at the choices I've made and start to feel ashamed that I don't have a career or a good income, I remind myself that I have been true to my values though it all.

Don’t take values too seriously

The last thing to remember about this values work is that it can be playful. You don't have to tattoo your values on your body or carve them in marble, you don't have to register them with the government or declare them on a form. (Unless you do for work, in which case... just tell them what they want to hear.) You can change the words you use, change the priority, and add or remove values as you recognize them or as you yourself change.

In Summary

Here's the rundown on values:

Values are the words you give to the things which are important to you
Values are descriptive, not proscriptive: you discover them, you don't aspire to them
Values can help you understand decisions you've made in the past; and, decisions you've made in the past can help you understand your values
Values can help you decide how to spend your money, your time, and your attention
Values can help you maintain your loyalty to yourself in the face of outside pressure

You can figure out your values by yourself, but if you would like the guidance of a professional values-figurer-outer, put yourself in my calendar for a one-on-one coaching session.

The How and Why of Values