Awareness of your values is one of several very important ingredients in career and workplace decisions. If a person is doing something that is not consistent with his or her values, the lack of alignment can be a great source of stress and energy depletion. And when you are working in service of your values, the fit can give you zip, verve and vigor.
Sure, you know you have values but do you know exactly what they are? We each have our own palette of values with varying shades and depths. They may change over your lifetime, and probably will, but let’s find out what yours are today.
A revealing yet easy-to-use tool to assess your values is the values card sort (PDF). (When you download it you will see that it bears the following: “This instrument is in the public domain and may be copied adapted and used without permission.”)
Here’s what you do after downloading and copying.
- Find a quiet place at a time during which you will not be interrupted.
- Cut the cards apart.
- Separate the cards into three piles: Not Important, Important, and Very Important.
- Reduce the Very Important pile to your top 10 values. You may find this narrowing process easier if you check to see if two or more of your Very Important values mean the same thing to you.
- Now reduce your top 10 to your top 5. These are the values closest to your heart, the values that are innermost parts of you and of who you are in the world.
Enjoy this exercise. I think you will find it, well, invaluable. I can assure you that it is very, very likely you’ll learn something new about yourself. Now that you are armed with this knowledge, you will be better able to make excellent career decisions.
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