What Are Values?

If someone asked you what made your life meaningful or important, would you have an answer? What things or people do you find personally important in life? What makes life worth living? What inspires you to get out of bed in the morning and progress with your day? What ways of living and behaving influence your plans, thoughts, actions and interactions with others? What provides you with motivation and resilience when times are tough?

Something that often underpins the answer to all of these questions is our values. If we struggle to think of an answer to these questions, then we might benefit from taking the time to explore our values.

How we choose to live in order to live more meaningfully

Values can be described as our chosen directions in life. They are how we choose to live in order to live more meaningfully. Therefore, if our life feels meaningful, then it is likely a result of us living our values. Values are what we want our life to stand for and what a well-lived life would be for us personally. Our personal set of values will combine and direct us to be the kind of person we want to be as we move through this world. 

Values are behaviours 

Values are less about traits or specific words e.g. “compassion”, and more about actions and behaviours, and how we would choose to live to bring greater meaning to our lives. When reflecting on what we value, it can help if we try not to get bogged down with identifying specific, perfect words. Instead, it can be better to focus on capturing the essence of what we feel we value, and if acted out in that moment, would make our life feel more meaningful. If we can find the exact words to describe it then that’s great. If instead we prefer a metaphor, a sentence or two or even a picture that best represents what we personally value, then we can go with that.

Our values are freely chosen 

Our values reflect what we personally find meaningful and important in life. Not what anyone else, such as religion, society, government, business, family or friends find important. Our values can often be reduced to a gut feeling. Given this, our values can lack any sound logic or reasoning, and our justification for holding them might not stand up to debate. However, just because we struggle to put it into words and make a winning argument, does that mean that we don’t find them personally important and meaningful?

Values are directions, not goals

Values as a compass 

A good metaphor to help us understand how values can provide us with direction, is to think of them as a compass. Let's pretend that heading east is our value. If we head east, no matter how far east we go we will never reach a specific, final destination. We cannot complete our direction of east. All we know is that if we want to continue heading in our valued direction, we would simply keep heading east. Armed with this knowledge of what we value, we might then create goals that keep us moving in our valued direction.

The benefit of a value never being completed means that we never have to be without them. We never run out of inspiration on what direction we want to be heading in. If we derive tremendous purpose in life from pursuing a specific goal, then the completion of that goal might leave us feeling lost. Whereas the pursuit of a value will never be achieved, and therefore, our sense of purpose and meaning in life can be sustained no matter how many goals we achieve. 

Values are flexible 

Another advantage of values over goals is that they are flexible. Goals can be easily interrupted due to their often specific nature. Sometimes we feel a change is necessary, or simply bad luck gets in the way. 

Values on the other hand, due to their flexibility, can be easily adapted. If we continue the compass metaphor - if heading east required us to cross a river but the bridge had collapsed, we might have to momentarily change course before we find ourselves travelling east again. We might suddenly be in a totally different position to what we had planned, however since we are still travelling in our valued direction, we don’t mind.

Values are what we want to move towards, not away from 

Knowledge of what we value in life will indicate to us a direction we can choose to head in or a behaviour to engage in now that excites and energises us. It is something we want to do and move toward. A good value won't, on the other hand, indicate to us what we should try our best to avoid, such as being unhappy or experiencing discomfort. 

LeJeune & Luoma (2019), two authorities on the subject of values, have provided a great metaphor for understanding this notion. They encourage us to think of values as a really stinky block of cheese. Picture a mouse at the start of a maze and a scientist lurking above trying to determine the best way to motivate the mouse to move from one end to the other. The scientist starts out by shocking the mouse. This then motivates it to move away from the pain and discomfort as it no longer wants to experience it. The mouse might then eventually find its way out. 

The second option the scientist tries is to put a block of really stinky cheese at the other end of the maze. The mouse smells this cheese and then eagerly works its way through the maze, over and around any obstacles that sit in its path, slowly moving towards its prize - the stinky cheese. 

Although in both tests the mouse completed the maze, which would you rather be, the one moving away from the shock, or the one moving towards the stinky cheese? We can therefore think of the process of identifying our values as an attempt to identify our version of the stinky cheese. Our stinky cheese is what we want to energetically and excitedly move towards in life.

References

1. LeJeune, J., & Luoma, J. B. (2019). Values in Therapy: A Clinician's Guide to Helping Clients Explore Values, Increase Psychological Flexibility, and Live a More Meaningful Life. Context Press.