4 Strategies For Identifying Your Core Values

There are a lot of reasons that you may feel stuck or not where you truly want to be in life.

It might be your job, your relationships, or your health.

Underneath all of these problems are your values.

If you do not know what your values are and how they influence your life, then you could spend years trying to change careers, relationships, and your habits, ultimately to end up feeling the same as when you started.

Whether they realize it or not, everyone has a set of values that serve as the foundation of their life, decisions, and experience with the world.

Some values can literally change how you see the world — and sometimes in a bad way.

That is why it is incredibly important to understand what your values are.

Understanding what your values are is an unavoidable step you have to take if you want to be able to change and grow them in a way that serves you. If not, then you risk allowing the foundation of your personal morality to be captured by the influence of others, society, and forces beyond your control.

In this article, I provide you with 4 general strategies you can take to begin identifying your values so that you can control them, rather than them controlling you.

How To Identify Your Values

This isn’t an article about the importance of identifying your values, but I think it will be helpful to say a few things about this before I teach you how to identify your values.

When most people think about what a successful life would mean for them, they almost always envision a life in which their deepest values are fully realized or actualized.

Often times people will talk about these values as their “desires” or “wants”, but values are not the same as your desire for a cup of coffee.

They are at the very core of who you are and how you think about life.

When the Wizard of Oz grants Elphaba “her heart’s desire”, she chooses to help the animals in Oz. You could say that her life was built around getting her desire satisfied, but I think this would misrepresent what’s really going on.

Elphaba’s “desire” to help the animals wasn’t like a thirst or craving that needed to be quenched, that would make it too selfish and fleeting. It was really a direct expression of her core values and vision of the world — a world in which the values of Care and Justice are actualized.

So when you think about your values and why they matter, what you are really thinking about is what you really want at the deepest level — what kind of life or world you fundamentally wish to be a part of and create.

Here’s the problem.

When you don’t know what your values are, or what they really mean for you, then it becomes hard to even know what you’re aiming at in life (and also to know when you have gotten it!).

Elphaba’s decision to visit the Wizard Of Oz was partially clouded by her desire for status, recognition, and power.

She wanted to matter and be accepted.

Elphaba could have visited the Wizard and asked to become a more powerful witch, or to be beloved by all of Oz, but she didn’t.

When she reached the moment of choice, her core values helped her see what really mattered.

It was only because Elphaba was so powerfully in touch with her core values that she was able to avoid making the wrong choice and following her superficial desires.

No one is able to always choose perfectly, or avoid following empty or false desires that throw us out of alignment for months or years at a time.

But the stronger your connection to your values, the more likely it is that you can avoid getting thrown off course and waste time pursuing the wrong things.

So, how do you figure out your values?

I want to offer you three general strategies here.

One crazy thing about values is that there are hundreds of them, and there are also many different ways to think about them, to define them, and to think about how they work.

So there is not going to be any perfect or singular approach to take towards values.

It’s a messy business.

But that makes it even more important to have some kind of strategy or framework.

Strategy #1: Create A Ranked List

One of the most common approaches to figuring out your core values is to review a list of values and to create a value-ranking.

This is a good way to started thinking about values and exposing yourself to all of the different values that exist.

In my Micro-Philosophy: Foundations course, I created a list of 250+ human values that students used to go through this exercise while building their own philosophy.

While I think this approach is a useful starting point, it can become a bit confusing and frustrating when trying to think about how to rank values, especially when it seems like many of the items on the list are valuable.

One piece of advice I have is to recognize that some values are more fundamental than others.

For example, if you value Health, you are also likely to value Nutrition, and Movement, and Sleep.

How do you rank these values?

Well, it makes the most sense to understand Nutrition and Sleep as sub-values that fall under Health.

The world of values is often structured and falls into hierarchies.

In other words, not all values are on equal footing, and some values seem to conceptually depend upon others.

Recognizing this allows you to reduce some of the anxiety around creating rankings, since you can decide that Health is your top value and not be forced to leave out all of the sub-values that are attached to it.

Strategy #2: Thought Experiments

I was recently listening to Mark Manson’s podcast Solved which featured a 4-hour episode on values.

In the section of the podcast focused on value discovery, Manson mentioned something called the “Desert Island Exercise”.

The Desert Island Exercise is a thought experiment that is aimed to help you identify what you value without factoring in external factors, like social expectations or perceptions. The exercise asks you to imagine what yourself stranded on a desert island full of everything you could possibly need or want.

The central question is what would you spend your time doing?

Would you read book? Learn to play violin? Relax on the beach for all of eternity?

This exercise is very useful for identifying activities and pursuits that you take to be intrinsically valuable for yourself.

But it does have one major flaw.

You aren’t able to do things with other people.

It is assumed by the exercise that you are alone. The reason the exercise is set up this way is to help you identify what you care about regardless of what people will think. But it is possible, of course, that what you care about and want to do involves other people.

So, while this is a great thought experiment for learning some fundamental things about yourself, it will only get you so far.

Strategy #3: Analyze Your Actions And Decisions

When it comes to thinking about how Values and Actions connect, I have a pretty strong belief that you can’t really value something if you don’t act on it in some way.

For example, if you say that you value music, but you don’t listen to music very much, you don’t play an instrument, and you don’t go to concerts, then in what sense do you value music?

You might say that you value it in the sense that you are glad other people value it — that is, you think it has value.

That’s fine.

But it isn’t going to be one of your values unless you act upon it.

This insight is very useful for helping you identify your values, since you can simply look at what you actually do to see how your values are showing up (or not) in your life.

Many people recognize the universal valuableness of Health, but at the same time don’t do anything to suggest that they take their health seriously.

A doctor will look at your actions to determine whether you are really valuing your health and, if they think you are not, will recommend that you do or avoid certain actions.

So one of the easiest ways to figure out what values are being actualized or neglected in your current moment of life is to look at what you are doing on a daily basis.

Strategy #4: Ask Other People

This fourth and final strategy piggybacks off of the last one.

When you take actions, other people notice.

Yes, it’s true that some of what we do is completely private. But the vast majority of our actions occur in a social context.

Think about people in romantic relationships.

People in romantic relationships are constantly observing each others actions, mannerisms, and feelings. Over time, these observations add up and allow other people to notice patterns in your actions and behaviors that are highly indicative of your values.

Although it can be very difficult at times, asking people who know you well to tell you what they think your values can be a very effective strategy for identifying your core values.

The main benefit of this approach is that it can help provide a more objective answer to this question that isn’t influenced by your own wishful thinking about who you think you are.

The harsh truth is that we are all judging each other constantly.

Use the judgmental nature of others to your own benefit.

Conclusion

I hope that you found these strategies insightful.

If you want to learn more about how to determine your values, change them, and integrate them into a complete personal philosophy of life, consider reading some of my other work here on Substack.

Thanks for reading.

-Paul