Values are Like Lighthouses
“Values are like lighthouses; they are signals giving us direction, meaning, and purpose.”
As a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, I can’t tell you how many times I have worked with individuals to help define their values in an effort to improve their awareness of who they are, how the interact with the world and why they prioritize the things that they do. Be it helping a student recognize how their high-risk drinking conflicts with their values, helping a survivor of assault move towards healing by understanding the impact of trauma on their core values, or in supporting a recent graduate in identifying sources of energy during times of feeling lost by fueling their values. Values provide an incredibly powerful foundation for self-awareness and accomplishing goals we set for ourselves.
If you’re forever coming up short when it comes to achieving your dreams, your values might be at odds with your goals.
Below are a few techniques to set goals that support your values:
List your current values. Have you ever taken the time to examine your values? Most people have never given their values a second thought. This is a shame, because a person’s values guide their thinking, decisions, and actions.
● Take 30 minutes and list your values. Put them in order of their priority to you. Below is a list that I have used before, but feel free to create your own!
● Ask yourself if your behavior is aligned with your values. If there’s a mismatch, what set of values would actually represent your behavior?
● Most of us have an idealized impression of our intentions, values, and qualities.
What are you trying to accomplish? What are your goals in life? What do you want to accomplish? Do you want to be wealthy? Get a six-pack? Write a screenplay? Save the whales? Build a real estate empire? The first step to any great success is to identify your objectives.
How do your current values impact your goals? If your values and goals don’t match, the odds of success are dismal without something changing.
● For example, if you believe that wealthy people are fundamentally bad, you’ll never accumulate a significant amount of wealth.
● If comfort is a high priority for you, that six-pack will never materialize.
● Do you value having a lot of leisure time? A goal that requires a lot of work isn’t going to happen.
● Look at your goals and look at your values. Do your goals support those values? Do your values support your goals?
What would be the perfect set of values to support your goals? Imagine you could build a person from scratch that would be perfect for accomplishing your goals. What values and qualities would they possess? How would you be different if you had these values?
● Think about the people you know that have accomplished what you want to accomplish. How would you describe them?
How close can you come to matching those values? How well can you rearrange your values to match that ideal set of values? The closer you’re able to come, the greater the odds of your success.
“Core values serve as a lighthouse when the fog of life seems to leave you wandering in circles; when you encounter that moment where every decision is a tough one and no choice seems to clearly be the better choice.”
Are your goals and values a good match? It’s important that they are. When a mismatch exists, it’s important to either alter your values or your goals. There’s only so much resistance a person can overcome. Success is much easier when your values and your intentions are highly compatible.
