Interview with the Barrett Values Centre on how you identify your values

Values are the things that are important to us. They’re the things that guide us They’re the things that help us make choices in life. We have values which may change throughout life as our needs change throughout life, as we go through different stages of life but we also have core values. These tend to be formed very early in life. They may be themes that show up as our character thoughout life and they’re formed from what’s essential and unique about ourselves and our very early life experiences and so values on their own in purest essence are our motivation or your energetic aspirations if you will.

What makes them show up in the world is the behaviours that other people see is when we observe things in the world and we react to that based on our beliefs and the way we think things should be that then generates our feelings and our thoughts and turns into what we do, what we decide and the actions that we have in the world. How do values and ethics link together because obviously the focus of this course is around ethics, how will the two link together?

OK ethics is the study of what’s the rights and wrongs of a situation and we tend to have a set of, a code of practice or a body of knowledge that we use as a guide for ethical behaviour and what I would say about that is it’s a code and a right and wrong, it’s not necessarily what’s going to motivate behaviour so to illustrate my point we all know that smoking is bad for us but the choice to not do it comes from a different motivation. It comes from…

If we want to change behaviour and we’re talking about what’s ethical in an industry we want to change behaviour in line with those ethical guidelines we do need to get the conversation down to what are the values that we’re bringing to life? and then we’ll find from that the actual human motivation to act in line with the code of ethics. So I’ve got a simple question for you. How do you actually define what your own personal values are?

I may have a value to be hard working I may have a work ethic, a criminal may have a value to work as little as possible for most gain Right, so, but that’s their motivation, Yep, so that the values themselves are not necessarily always going to lead to a healthy workplace culture or an ethical decision in business. In business the question is; ‘What values matter most to the people who are here and are congruent with the business vision and mission that we can bring to life together so that the people can be most fulfilled in the workplace and and the organisation can be sustainable and resilient because it’s acting in a way that’s ethical?’

OK so there’s a dialogue to be had about what are the right values to bring to life in this community. OK how do you actually identify what your values are? Great question because we waltz through life reacting to things with emotion and passion and not necessarily being conscious of what the values are. that are really being triggered about what happens around us.

So things we can do to become more aware of our own values are to, if you’ve got access to it which people listening to this will have access to, surveys There are quite a few organisations in the world and I’m from one of them that offer surveys but there’s more than there’s the Barrett Values Centre, there’s Human Synergistics, there’s Minessence there’s other organisations where you can go to online and take a survey that will give you a report and will help you understand your values but if you don’t have access to that the other sorts of things I would suggest is either in a coaching conversation or in perhaps, writing a journal by yourself Ask exploring questions so either you’re listening to yourself through writing to yourself or you’re being listened to by someone who’s mirroring it back to you Ask questions such as; ‘What do I spend my time doing?’

and keep maybe a time diary for a week then to look at the proportion of activity that is spent on home and family or work and look for the themes in where you’re spending your time. and then ask, ‘What does that say I value? ‘What’s showing up as important to me because I give it time?’ and then interestingly to ask yourself ‘How do I feel about that?’ because sometimes you’re spending time on things on not your top values and actually you’re feeling unhappy in life because your balance is out. But a time journal can help you get to a point where you can witness for yourself ‘What am I doing?’ And then ‘how do I feel about that?’

and that will help you narrow it down what is important to you I think those are great ways of starting to think about what your values are. What we’re actually to do is just take a break from this interview now and we’re going to get people on the course to actually do the survey that’s online and actually look at identifying what their values are.