If you haven’t read the first part of “How to Live Your Values” series, then I recommend you go and read it first.
Eliciting Your Values
Here is a step-by-step method to create your own personal values hierarchy. I want to warn you that this can be a time consuming process, and it will require your concentrated attention. So if this isn’t a good time for you to do this, feel free to read it over now and then complete it when you can put in the time. It’s hard work, but it’s worth the effort.
The question to ask yourself is this: What is truly important to me in life?
Brainstorm a list of your values as your answers to this question. Try to reduce your responses to a single word or two that encapsulates each answer. For example, if one of your answers is, “having a successful career,” then you might reduce that to the value of “success.”
To make this task easier for you, I’ve put together an extensive list of values you can use to help build your own list. Don’t worry about the order of your list yet or how long it is. Just get everything down in writing.
So you might end up with a list that looks something like this:
- Love
- Health
- Wealth
- Comfort
- Fun
- Happiness
- Success
- Learning
- Peace
- Intimacy
- Adventure
- Security
There’s no hard rule for how long your list should be, but I usually prefer a list in the range of 10-15 values. If you have more than this, consider cutting out the marginal values that just barely made your list, or combine multiple values that are nearly identical on a single line, like achievement/accomplishment.
Prioritizing Your Values
The next step is to prioritize your list. This is usually the most time consuming and difficult step because it requires some intense thinking.
My preferred method of prioritizing my values list is to identify the top value, then the second highest value, and so on until I’ve rebuilt the whole list in order of priority from the top to the bottom. So you may begin by asking yourself these questions: Which of these values is truly the most important to me in life? If I could only satisfy one of these values, which one would it be? The answer to this question is your number one value. Then move down the list and ask which remaining value is the next most important to you, and so on, until you’ve sorted the whole list in priority order.
Sometimes the highest priority value will be obvious to you. Other times you’ll have it narrowed down to a few choices but will have a hard time figuring out which one is really the most important among those. When that happens here’s what I recommend. Invent a scenario for each value, and then compare those scenarios.
For example, if you’re trying to decide which is more important to you, learning or peace, then ask yourself, “Which would I rather do – read a book or meditate?” This example assumes that reading a book would satisfy your value of learning and that meditating would satisfy your value of peace, each to roughly the same degree. I usually find that when I create scenarios for the tough-to-prioritize values, the best ordering becomes clear.
So let’s say we’ve sorted our list above, and we’ve come up with this:
- Peace
- Love
- Intimacy
- Security
- Comfort
- Happiness
- Fun
- Health
- Learning
- Adventure
- Wealth
- Success
What can you tell me about this person? When you know a person’s values hierarchy, you should have a fair chance of predicting their behavior. If this person lives true to her values, she’ll lead a life focused on peace, love, and intimacy above all else. Her relationships (both with herself and others) will be extremely important to her, and she’d never put career success above her family.
On the other hand, let’s say this person prioritized her values in the exact opposite order:
- Success
- Wealth
- Adventure
- Learning
- Health
- Fun
- Happiness
- Comfort
- Security
- Intimacy
- Love
- Peace
What kind of person is this? Now we have someone who’s probably very career-oriented, perhaps an entrepreneur. She will lead a very different life than the person with peace as her top value. Succeeding and becoming wealthy is more important to this person than personal relationships, so if she has a choice between advancing in her career or going on a family vacation, she’ll almost always put her career first.
I want to say again that this is indeed a difficult and challenging process. These are not easy decisions to make. If a value appears on your list, then it’s definitely important to you. By prioritizing your values consciously, you’ll be able to rely on them when you need to make important decisions in the future. If you know that what is truly most important to you in life is to experience inner peace, then it will be easier for you to say no to those things that take you away from peace.
Now that you have your own values hierarchy worked out, it may seem like you’ve just unlocked something important. Many books that cover values treat it as such. But in my experience, this particular list isn’t actually that important. This list only tells you the values that have previously been conditioned into you – by your upbringing and by society. In terms of our airplane analogy, this list tells you where your planes are currently headed. But that isn’t necessarily the direction you want those planes to continue to go.
Now let’s go to our next step: Reexamining and Changing Your Values
