Want More out of Life? Write Down Your Personal Values

Here’s a step-by-step guide.

How do you decide what to pay attention to, how you spend your time, and what you use your energy for?

Right now, you made the decision to read this article — but how did you get there?

It all depends on what you value.

Right now, you value reading this article. But in a few minutes, you might be doing something completely different. You could be eating, sleeping, flirting with Jessica from HR, or cracking open a beer with your boys.

Your values don’t lie. When you check your phone instead of paying attention at a meeting, play Call of Duty instead of texting back your girlfriend, or sleep in instead of going to the gym, you value these things more.

The problem is sometimes you think you value something, but your behavior says something different.

You say you want to be fit but sleep in instead of lifting weights. You say you want to save money but then buy overpriced Starbucks coffee. You say you want to always be honest with your partner but then come up with little white lies to avoid confrontation.

Humans strive for consistency. When you act in accordance with your values, you feel great about yourself. But when you don’t, it makes you feel bad — like a lazy piece of shit, a hypocrite, or a fraud. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance.

It doesn’t only make you feel bad but also causes self-deception to keep the spotless image you have of yourself alive. I didn’t feel well this morning. The coffee wasn’t that expensive. It wasn’t the right time to start an argument.

The result? You’re inauthentic and self-delusional, often without even being aware of it.

If you want to be the best version of your true self and create the life you want, you have to be authentic and honest with yourself.

How? How can you experience fulfillment instead of beating yourself up about your behavior? How can you develop good values and act in accordance with them?

It all starts with knowing yourself. To be authentic, you first have to know who you are — and who you are ultimately comes down to your values.

What Exactly Are Your Personal Values?

Your values are like a personal code of conduct for your ideal self. They reflect what you hold dear, what’s important to you in life, and what you strive to be through your behavior.

Your self is the aggregation of all of these. Your behavior, attitudes, decisions, and thoughts all come down to what you value.

Bluntly speaking, your values are what you give a fuck about.

When you value the environment, you decide to take the bus instead of burning prehistoric plants and dinosaurs in a gas-guzzling SUV.

When you value an alternative lifestyle, you’ll show a more positive attitude towards someone who looks like a hippie.

When you value children, you’re more likely to give a struggling mother at the store a hand while she tries to juggle two infants and a bunch of groceries.

Values are the keystones of your life and identity. Exploring them will take a bit of work but once you understand who you are, you can shape your life path accordingly. You will attract people who share your values and reject the ones who don’t. You can make tough decisions like which job to choose or which city to move to by looking at what you value more — free time, more money, or beautiful surroundings. Things will fall into place because you act according to your values and what you want for your ideal life.

The problem is most of you have no clue about what your personal values are. If I asked you right now to name the ten things you value most, would you have a definitive answer? I don’t think so, else you wouldn’t be reading these words.

That doesn’t mean you have no values at all. Instead of coming up with your own, you adhere to the ones society, culture, media, and your immediate environment portray.

These are often very different from the ones you’d come up for yourself. If you thought about it, would you really say tons of casual sex, knowing about the latest trends and hashtags on social media, climbing the corporate ladder to the top, getting hammered with the boys every weekend, or having a huge flat-screen TV to watch porn and football games are what’s most important to your life?

Life’s demands and other external influences can impose these values on you and cause you to act differently from who you actually want to be. You’re inauthentic, and it makes you feel bad about yourself. It leaves you with a hole that can’t be filled, no matter how much fast food, shiny credit cards, or Tinder matches you throw into it.

You feel like you’re doing something that “isn’t you.” Your behavior doesn’t reflect your personal values. You’re inauthentic, which makes you feel bad about yourself.

Often, you compensate for this bad feeling through other unhealthy behaviors. You do drugs to numb the pain (yes, alcohol counts), distract yourself with casual sex, or blow money on things that are supposed to make you feel better about yourself.

Have you ever wondered why some people at one point quit their job, sell everything, and travel the world for half a year? They finally succumbed under the pressure. They realized they weren’t living a life true to themselves. They get out of their current environment and remove all the distractions so they can “find themselves”, which is just a fancy way of saying “getting clear about your values and what you want.”

Have you ever wondered why some people — especially men — fall into a midlife crisis? They realize their hitherto life isn’t fulfilling and “isn’t them.” They competed in the rat race for years only to realize that even if they came out a winner, they still lost. It didn’t match their values, who they are at their core, and what they want from life. They need to break out and restart anew.

To sum it up, every time you feel like you lost yourself or feel like you want more out of life, it comes down to the same reason.

You’re either not clear about your personal values or don’t live in accordance with them.

How to Live an Authentic Life

Congratulations, you now understand what your values are and how they shape yourself and your life. You’re on step closer to becoming the best version of your true self and creating the life you want.

Now you need to understand yourself better and find out who you are at your core.

Once you become clear about your personal values, you can change your behavior so it’s in line with them. Some of it will happen subconsciously without you even noticing.

When you make a conscious decision to value your health more, it will be easier for you to incorporate more healthy behaviors, such as better eating habits, exercise, and sleep. When you make a conscious decision to value learning and growth, it will be easier for you to opt for books instead of Netflix series.

How do you find out what you value?

I asked myself the same question some years ago. I did tons of research and came up with a straightforward process that guides you through it, from start to finish.

Start with a beginner’s mind

Your life is about you, nobody else. Period. Other people may come and go, society will change, and what’s cool today won’t be cool tomorrow.

Clear your mind. Turn your phone off. Take a long walk in the forest or find another way to remove yourself from external influences. This isn’t about what society, your mum, your girlfriend, or Steve from the pub thinks you should do. This isn’t about what other people might think of you. This is about you.

What matters to you?

Take a sheet of paper and a pen and write down any values that come to your mind — what you think is important to you.

Because I’m a writer, I’m familiar with the struggles of staring at a blank page. I’ll give you some help. Think about the following situations in your life, and about what was important to you at that time.

• Peak experiences. What were meaningful and influential moments in your life? Like your first job, reaching a goal that took you a lot of time, a beautiful holiday, or making major decisions. Think about what happened, why you behaved the way you did, and what values you honored.
• Frustrations The downsides of your life can also show you who you are. Think about times when you got frustrated or upset, found yourself in a fight, or things didn’t go as planned. Think about what frustrated you and why. Your frustrations are born in the suppression of your values — when you get frustrated because your boss forces you to stay late, it shows you value your freedom or time with your family and friends.
• Code of conduct Ask yourself what you need to live a fulfilled life. There is more beyond your basic human needs. It could be creative expression, contributing to the world, adventure, learning, or health. What are the values you must honor for you to feel good about yourself?

If you’re still struggling to come up with enough items, you can also use this list to get some suggestions.

The goal of this phase is to come up with a lot of input — when I first did it, I ended up with a list of about 80 values, although you don’t need to find that many.

Now it’s time to bring some order into the chaos.

Create related groups

Congratulations, once you’ve put together your long list, you’ve already done most of the work.

But because pulling out a list of 50 values is a bit unpractical to say the least, you’ll have to put them together into related groups.

Courage, honor, and loyalty all relate to each other.

Critical thinking, rationality, and wisdom can be grouped together.

Growth, new experiences, and persistence are all related.

The goal is to come up with about five to ten groups of related values. Don’t worry if you have some values that don’t fit in anywhere — put them aside for now and focus on grouping the rest.

Find your core values

Once you have these groups, it’s time to find common themes. Look at an individual group and think of an overarching word or term that best summarizes it.

If a group consists of items like calmness, honesty, integrity, discipline, and authenticity, the overarching theme could be Strength of Character.

Find a theme for each group and write it down. Then, it’s time for one of the more difficult steps — ranking them.

Think about which of these are most important to you — which are essential to your life and the way you are? This step might require some thought and it’s a good idea to rank them, sleep over it, and see if the ranking still makes sense.

Once you’ve done that, congratulations — you just found and ranked your core values. You found out who you are!

Make your values actionable

“Knowledge without action is futile.”

— Abu Bakr

The last step you need to take is to make these values actionable. Coming up with them is all fine and dandy, but if the whole process doesn’t translate to a real, measurable change in your life, you might as well have spent your time counting rice grains.

You need to find some way to make your values present in your everyday life — the good thing is that you get to be creative if you want.

I wrote them down on a sheet of paper. Every morning, I look at it and commit to living my day according to these.

You could also create a value statement for yourself that consists of a few short sentences you read through every day. I value physical health because I want to be full of energy and vitality every day.

Until you know your core values by heart, I advise you to write them down on a small piece of paper and carry this little cheat sheet with you. Whenever you have to make a decision, you can consult your own values — aka your true self.

This will lead you to better decisions and behaviors that are in line with who you are — and in turn, you’ll create the life you truly want.

How to Become Better: Good and Bad Values

There’s one thing we haven’t touched upon yet.

Although you have found your core values, you haven’t stopped to ask yourself if they benefit you — if they are good or bad.

The thing is, most people stop here, say “this is who I am”, and never think about if this attitude serves them well.

Having personal values isn’t a guarantee for living an awesome life and being a great human being. Hitler had values, too — they were just shitty ones.

But what is the difference between good and bad values? It all comes down to three important characteristics.

Good and healthy values are

• Rational instead of emotional A lot of what you do and how you make decisions is based on your feelings instead of rational thought. You eat ice cream because you crave it although you are on a diet and should rather chew on a carrot. You scream at your significant other when they do something that upsets you, although staying calm and talking out the issue would be the better alternative. Your emotions are great feedback mechanisms to tell you how you feel about something. But since they are short-term oriented and fleeting, they are terrible advisors for how you should act. Emotional values will cause you to constantly chase more and more and harm yourself in the process. Rational ones are based on evidence instead of emotions and make your life better long-term. To adopt good values, you’ll have to let go of your feelings and be rational. If you chase happiness and joy, you’ll only act according to what matters in the moment, even though you’d benefit more in the long run by choosing growth and improvement.
• Constructive instead of destructive This one is obvious, but not as easy to apply as you think. The reason is pain and growth are often two sides of the same coin. You learn most from your mistakes. The same action can be constructive as well as destructive. Casual sex can be great to increase your confidence and practice interacting with the other sex. But it can also be a compensating behavior to avoid intimacy and making yourself vulnerable. Strength and physical fitness is an awesome value if you want to live a long life or be healthy and able to protect your loved ones. But it’s a shitty value if you enjoy hurting others. Hitler valued growth, improvement, and hard work — but clearly for the wrong reasons. To differentiate between constructive and destructive values, you have to ask yourself why you value something.
• Controllable instead of uncontrollable You can’t control everything and you’ll never be able to. Choosing values you can’t control has you bound for misery because you are literally putting your life and happiness in someone else’s hands. Always differentiate between what you can and what you can’t control. You can’t control if people like you — they decide who they want to be friends with. But you can control if you are a likable, respectful, and considerate human being. You can’t control how much money you have — you might get fired, the economy can take a hit, or your stocks collapse. But you can control your work ethic, money mindset, and spending habits. Always focus on what you can control, and leave the rest be.

If you want to grow as a man and human being, you have to check if your values fulfill the above criteria. If they don’t, find better ones and live according to them.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Everybody wants to live a great life but very few have ever stopped to ask themselves what that actually means to them.

You live in a world of almost endless possibilities. You have infinite amounts of things you can choose to care about. Money, family, friends, being smart, love, great Guacamole, or waking up on a beach every day.

You have the power to create a great life for yourself but you also have the responsibility to first become clear about what exactly that means to you. You have to find out what you value and hold dear in life.

And by you, I mean you — not your girlfriend, not your mum, not your best friend, not your boss, and nobody else.

It’s your life. And from today on, you will decide what it is going to be about.

Once you found out what your personal values are and start living in accordance with them, you’ll inevitably piss some people off who don’t agree. Funny enough, that’s the way to go and a sign you’re on the right track.

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