treechangingme Living and learning. Changing from the inside out. One day at a time.

Week 2 of the Simplify Your Life Challenge run by Deb Dane is all about values. Personal ones. My own.

I have been painting my house the past few days and with my childcare centre re-opening for 2012 this week, I have had lots of extra time inside my head. Identifying my top 5 values was not really that difficult. I have previously given this issue lots of thought (personally and professionally) and I know what they are. I narrowed down from around 9 to get to my final list of 5 for this weeks challenge. Ranking them didn’t take any time at all. What tripped me up was over-thinking thinking about the subtle differences between personal values, core beliefs (sometimes known as schema), personality traits and temperament. It got a little tricky and convoluted in my head for a while there!

Basically the way I sorted it out was to think of these concepts on a kind of hierarchy. Behaviour is what you see on the surface, below that are personality traits/temperament, below those are personal values and at the bottom, truly driving all of a persons behaviour, are core beliefs (or schemas). For most people, most of the time, core beliefs are below conscious thought but I spend a lot of my professional life identifying them with clients. For a general outline of schemas, what they are and how they form, the Wikipedia page is worth checking out. Core beliefs are pretty fixed, since they originate in childhood and they tend to be reinforced by life experience as we get older (People tend to pay more attention to things that ‘fit’ with their beliefs and ignore or minimise contradictory information).

So the way I see it, my core beliefs are reasonably permanent (not totally set in stone, but it’s difficult to truly change those initial responses and interpretation of situations). My values on the other hand, can and do shift around depending on the situation I am in. If I am trying to get my son organised and out the door in the morning so I can get to work at a reasonable hour, I am valuing organisation, control, efficiency, achieving set tasks like teeth brushing and being persuasive! If I have no time limit and no other demands on where I am supposed to be, my morning would be spent with greater emphasis on valuing playfulness, connection, fun and learning with my son.

I also Googled for value words and definitions and I came across a massive list of 374 values at Steve Pavlina’s webpage.

All of that background over thinking aside, my primary 5 personal values are:

1. Self Sacrifice – including service to others, usefulness, giving, helping and caring.

2. Autonomy – including independence, strength, control, determination and freedom.

3. Achievement – including accomplishment, hardwork, success, drive, perseverence and correctness.

4. Authenticity – including honesty, credibility, trustworthiness, reliability and being genuine.

5. Knowledge – including learning, wisdom, experience, expertise, research, curiosity and insight.

I did find it tricky to define each one using a single word so I have a parent word with a bunch of similar, sub-words.  I am not going to get into the details of how each of them apply to who I am. That might be another post for another time. I think that most of these values are actually reflected in how I have gone about the task of this weeks blog topic. I will mention that Health, Non-Violence, Security and Belonging (Family)* were in the original group of 9.

I think that any value (or belief) taken to the extreme can cause problems or issues in a person’s life. For example, Self Sacrifice can be a noble and admirable way to live. But when I put other people’s needs ahead of my own, at the expense of my own for too long it is not healthy (for me or them) and I suffer. Usually the relationship suffers as well to some degree, even if only temporarily. Even things such as Honesty can be taken too far and I have left myself wide open and vulnerable many times in the past through being too transparent.

One of the questions Deb asked in the Week 2 Challenge post was to think about who the future me looks like when I imagine her. I came up with 5 values fairly quickly:

1. Flexible – Adaptable;

2. Healthy – in my physical/lifestyle and emotional/personal relationships;

3. Fun – Playful/Relaxed/Spontaneous;

4. Positive – Cheerful/Carefree/Happy; and

5. Acceptance – Mindfulness.

These are areas I have started working on recently and I hope to continue this year. Not to push my other values aside. They will always be there and I view them as part of who I am. But I need to balance them out a little. My current Top 5 can be a little overwhelming, serious and make me prone to unrealistically unrelenting high standards that can be impossible to attain. It’s time to calm down and B.R.E.A.T.H.E in more of this wonderful life I have.

* Just a quick note about my interpretation of Family. Obviously I value my family and I have seen that lots of other people do too and Family made it into many Top 5 lists in the SYL12 challenge. That’s totally cool. I came at the issue of values more from the point of view of what drives my behaviour and decision making. From my core beliefs and schemas. For me, these things developed from my family of origin and my experiences growing up within that family and they are currently played out in my behaviour in my current family with my partner and son. But my family does not form my beliefs any longer. My beliefs just are. So although I do value my family, (the way I value my health, my friends, the opportunities I have as an educated female in a developed country and so on), I have not included it in my Top 5 list. Family for me, would probably be included down the list under a parent value of Belonging.

Image credit: Breathe