Understanding Your Values To Unlock Your Potential
How aligning your core values with your choices and actions can bring clarity, confidence, and renewed energy.
š Hi, itās Dipti - your prosperity coach ! After taking a pause during the holidays and getting reset for 2025, I am back with my weekly newsletter.
Every week, I share one transformational insight or tool to help you find clarity in chaos, and make confident decisions that lead you toward a more aligned and successful careerāall while living with a greater sense of joy and purpose.
We all have access to an internal compass which can lead us in the direction of the life we want - our core values. Uncovering and leaning into your values is powerful. We all have a set of values by which we make decisions, choose where to work, who to work with and how to prosper. Yet, we rarely pause to review them in the busyness of life. Often it is when some life event happens or the level of discontent with the way of living increases that we question not only our values but many other things about it.
āYour core values are the deeply held beliefs that authentically describe your soul.ā ā John C. Maxwell
Values help us choose our priorities, make significant decisions and help define a fulfilling life, specific to us. The set of values you have at home and at work are the same, although the priorities can shift at different phases of your life.
Letās take a look at how this plays out in real lifeā¦
For example, for someone whose core value of adventure was a priority in their younger days may have traded places with certainty after having a family. This person probably leans into adventurous trips with their family even now, and that keeps them thriving and doing their work in the best way possible. On the contrary, if this person never integrated the elements of adventure in their life, they would start feeling dissatisfied, almost as if they are looking for what is missing in their life.
Hereās another example of how it shows up at work: A person who values integrity is asked to release an unfinished feature, knowing it will cause issues. Leadership insists it must go out and be fixed later. Over time, as this pattern repeats, they feel stressed, guilty, and question their credibility. Their value of integrity is constantly undermined, leading to frustration, second-guessing leadership, and eventually wanting to leave for a company where integrity is part of the culture.
Knowing your values and aligning your life with them can be an energy generator. It can help you amplify the work you are doing. It is similar to tuning into your radio frequency and getting sound clarity vs static noise. You can now hear the music and enjoy it. The fascinating thing about human beings is that we are all unique, born with our own blueprints, thumbprints and all that makes us unique. Hence, our set of values are different from each other, even in the same family. Both your kids are probably going to have a different set of values they live by eventually.
Discovering our values takes self-reflection and awareness. There is power in talking about them, which helps you zoom in to which ones are truly your values vs what you think are your values that either you inherited from your family, your culture or school. Some of them could be the same, yet there is power in knowing that.
Living life in conflict of your values will deplete your inner power, make you fatigued and eventually demotivated. You may start to feel a sense of discontent at first, even if everything on the surface seems to be great. Because it requires constant energy to suppress your true desires or beliefs, it can lead to feeling overwhelmed, stressed, exhausted and eventually burn out. Think of it as your device getting discharged. We tend to take better care of recharging our cell phone, than we do of ourselves.
Each time I felt confused or lost on making a decision, leaning into my values gave me a framework to pick a path. Personal growth accelerates when you align your life and work or external actions toward your inner values. Iāve seen time and again with people I coach and mentor, that slight adjustments of actions taken towards their values helped them be more energized. Each one of us has a purpose, and leaning into our values can also help discover your purpose.
Finding your values:
There are many experts who have researched and written more about our core values. One good free resource I often point people to is the VIA character and strength survey designed by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman. The survey helps organize 24 character strengths into these six virtues, and assesses how much a person endorses each of these strengths. Another person who does value based work is Brene Brown. I have links below if youāre curious to do some of this on your own.
Conclusion
I wish I could read peoplesā values stuck to their forehead. A lot about them and their world would make sense in a lot less time. I wonder sometimes, what would the world look like if each of us was doing the work that was in line with our values. The grown up in me knows life is more complicated than that. Yet, hereās wishing that everyone truly gets to live by their set of values that is fulfilling and purposeful to them.
What are your top three core values? How are you leaning into them even more in this phase of your life ? Take a few minutes to reflect, and share them with your trusted group of people. Reply - Iād love to also know.
Recommendations:
Here are some ways to help you discover your values.
VIA Survey: https://viacharacter.org/
James Clear Values List: https://jamesclear.com/core-values
Brene Brown: https://brenebrown.com/resources/living-into-our-values/
If you enjoyed this read or found a piece of yourself in it, tapping the ā¤ļø lets me know. Thanks for being part of this space.