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As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’ll be posting a series of activities to help you what I referred to as the three happiness questions in my talk at the Authentic Happiness Summit. So get out your notebook or journal, where you can record your observations and answers to the upcoming activities. Some things might be easier to print out and just paste in, as with this one.
One of the most basic steps to looking at who we are is to examine our values, and yesterday we did a quick values exercise. So what are values? Values are those things that really matter to each of us: the ideas and beliefs we hold as special. A value is something which is intrinsic to what somebody feels to be fundamentally important in THEIR life. It drives their actions and their decisions, their feelings of satisfaction about where they are in life, and their relationship with others. Values essentially define who a person is. Values are neither good nor bad, they simply are. And they’re different for each and every one of us.
Yesterday at the Summit we did a quick version of this exercise, with a reduced list of values. Here I’m providing a slightly more extensive list that you can print out. We’re going to do this a bit differently from how we did it yesterday, because we’ve got more time.
- Check all the values that resonate with you.
- If you feel any are missing, add them at the bottom of the list.
- Next, review the list of values that you already selected, and choose your top 5 values. Some people find this part challenging, but if you were with me yesterday, you got it down to three, so it shouldn’t be too difficult.
- Then, review the list of five values, and choose your top 2 values.
- Finally, choose which of those two is your number one value.
How was that? Were you surprised by your answers at any of the steps?
Glue or staple this values sheet into your notebook or journal, and record what you learned from this exercise.
