What are your Values?

Someone who grew up in an abusive home may strongly value honesty and have a deep need for clarify in relationships.

Someone who grew up with over-sharing and intrusive parents may strongly value privacy and time alone more than others.

Someone who grew up in a conservative environment might come to strongly value open minded-ness.

They might be more willing to learn how to cultivate holding space for multiple and even opposing perspectives.

Our choices and behaviors can often consciously and (unconsciously) stem from what we need and have come to place high value upon.

We often move towards and slowly embody the collections of values we pick up and choose to keep around over time.

With that said, many of our values are endlessly evolving within us.

We may value different things at different developmental stages of our life.

We may even value things that keep us safe but also get in the way is the very things we want.

Something we value at 20 may actually get in the way of the life we want to live at 60.

Sometimes values give us what we need at the cost of what we want.

Our values can help orient us.

They can give us a sense of grounding when we fall off track or when we feel like we are losing our way.

They can give us the ability to intellectually cultivate what matters to (us) even if we are immersed in a crowd of thousands of people and opinions.

I think a big part of exploring and unpacking our values has to do with figuring out which ones are genuinely important to us.

And simultaneously keeping ourselves open to adopting newly discovered, and better-fitting ones over time.

We get to hold strong to our values, our opinions, and our internal sense of morality of what feels true for us.

We get to pick the values that give us roots to what’s meaningful.

We get to do this without making other people’s versions wrong or less than.

And we can allow the gift of time and self-reflection to help us recognize which values come to matter to us the most.

What are some of your core values?

Have any of your core values changed, or softened, or become more rigid over time?

What impacts your desire to shift or re-define your values?

What helps you choose the values you want to keep and build upon?


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