What is a personal value? Here are 25 examples to you help identify yours
What are your personal values, and how do they guide you through your life and career? We take a closer look at the importance of personal values, and how you can identify which ones are the most significant to you.
What are personal values?
Your personal values (or personal life values) are the beliefs that guide your actions, thoughts and feelings. Most of us learn them from our family, schools and community during our early years, then these values continue to evolve as we develop, change and gain experience. Our values are a central part of who we are.
When our values and our lives align, we feel more fulfilled. We make a lot of our life decisions based on our personal values, although it’s rare to sit down and actually take stock of what these values are. Knowing and understanding the values that shape us is a key part of self-awareness: consciously identifying your values is a valuable way to lead a fulfilling life.
Examples of personal values
Exactly what are values and why are they important? To better understand how our personal values shape and guide us, let’s look at some examples.
- Adventure – do you value exploration and trying new things? Someone who values adventure needs to be able to access new and different experiences to thrive.
- Courage – is consciously facing fear something you admire in others and try to act on yourself? While bravery tends to be a one-off act in response to a certain situation, courage is a value that underpins how you behave.
- Creativity – this doesn’t mean that you have to love painting or writing or performing (although it often does!), but that you value mental stimulation.
- Dignity – how you hold yourself in all manner of situations matters to you.
- Family – many of us share this personal value, which comes from a place of kindness and generosity as well as personal happiness.
- Flexibility – the ability to adapt, try new things or change course can be an important value in all aspects of our ever-changing lives.
- Generosity – this can be as literal as altruistic charity donations or volunteering, but it can also be a generosity of spirit: giving people time, laughing at their jokes, sharing your food.
- Happiness – wanting to be happy is not a selfish act, and learning what puts a smile on your own face can lead to a wonderfully fulfilling life.
- Honesty – this part of the personal value system has a great bearing on our behaviour and how we make decisions.
- Humility – being free from pride or overt self-confidence doesn’t have to equate with low self-esteem: in fact, we’re often impressed when we meet someone who demonstrates humility.
- Independence – is having a dash of self-reliance important to you? Do you like to have control or do things your own way?
- Integrity – like honesty, this personal value is reflected in how we behave. It’s a value we often want to see reflected in others, especially those in positions of power and decision-making
- Kindness – is part of our moral value system, and how we treat others matters to us.
- Leadership – this is more than just a skill: it’s about thriving when you’re in a position to direct and inspire others.
- Loyalty – this value can be found in so many walks of life, from our love for our families to our feelings of patriotism.
- Mastery – do you value having a skill, qualification or expertise? If you enjoy becoming good at any discipline and are impressed by this in others, then mastery is one of your personal values.
- Open-mindedness – is an essential part of developing a growth mindset. It’s an emotional flexibility that you can apply to both yourself and others.
- Pragmatism – this is the ability to adapt or make decisions following a realistic appraisal of a situation.
- Reliability – you value meeting deadlines, remembering birthdays and always keeping a pinkie promise to the kids.
- Success – and yes, many successful people do uphold this value as a central part of their personal belief system. Whether you hold this value all your life depends on where things take you (see also: pragmatism!).
- Resilience – again, this value is about how you respond to situations. While resilience can be a sign that our lives are out-of-kilter, the ability to “make the best of things” is a core value for a lot of people.
- Tolerance – is another value that forms our moral belief system, and stems from how we feel others should be treated.
- Tradition – this value gives us a framework for living and decision-making that upholds certain cultural beliefs and practices.
- Uniqueness – for some, striving to be a counter-cultural, free-from-the-flock individual isn’t a social construct, but actually comes from a deep-seated value in personal freedom and creativity.
- Wellbeing – placing importance on physical, emotional and mental health can be a deeply fulfilling way of living for many.
This is not an exhaustive list, and when you start defining your own core values, you’ll find that some will lead to others (valuing success can lead you to realise that you also value hard work and dependability). There’s no cap on personal values, and as you can see, many are interlinked (tolerance with kindness and open-mindedness, for example).
Our values can change with time: we may start out as very success driven but as life changes, become more family-orientated. Life experience may lead us to give greater weight to things like resilience and pragmatism, while reliability may overtake creativity as a career-based value.
How to define your core values
We all have values, and identifying them clearly can help us live by them. If we’re not living within our personal framework of values, we can feel uncomfortable. For example, if we value independence but end up in a very prescriptive job, there’ll always be a feeling of dissonance. Identifying our personal values can help us make decisions that will lead to a more satisfying life.
How do we define our own personal value system? Grab a pen and paper…
- Think about personal values. Use a list like ours as a springboard for your thoughts and make a note of the ones that resonate the most with you.
- A good way to start pinpointing our values is by reflecting on past experiences and feelings. Ask yourself when did you feel A) the happiest, B) the most proud and C) the most satisfied. Can you ascribe any of these values to these feelings?
- Now think about the future. What are your goals and aspirations? What values would help you achieve these? Think carefully – a success mindset may not be as helpful as courage if you’re switching career, for example.
- Next move onto your role models, real and fictional. What values do you think these people have that win your approval?
- By now, you should have quite a list of words written down. How do you choose your core values from these notes? While there’s no set amount of values we should follow, a too-long list is tricky to apply to everyday life.
If you need help whittling down your list, try applying the Paired Comparison Analysis technique, which helps you prioritise by breaking the list into pairs. When given a choice of just two values, which is the most important to you? This can help you really think about what matters the most.
- When you have a shortlist of whatever feels manageable (try to keep it under eight if possible), write the values down or print them out. Stick them above your desk or in something like your morning pages notebook, so you’re always aware of them.
This may sound a bit trivial after all that thought; however, it’s a really good way to make your values feel more real and to always have them to hand. If you need to make a tricky choice, glance at your values list: do the options sit comfortably with your core values?
We all have these values, but we don’t often pause to reflect on what they are and how they affect our lives. Take some time to define your own core values: by focusing on these, you can make more conscious decisions that sit comfortably with your personal value system.
Discover more about how to lead a fulfilling life from writer Oliver Burkeman. In his BBC Maestro course about Time Management, he takes us through techniques and thought-processes that make us question our perspectives and priorities.
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