Recognizing the living values that guide your life

Are you aware of what values are guiding your decisions? What is your experience working with your personal values or your organization´s values? Are you one of the jewels who knows what their values are and actually are guided by them? 

A person on the "autopilot" is not aware of their values and it can be perceived in their behavior. Decision-making is in general hard for them, they don't realize the causes and effects of their behavior and they often project the responsibility towards others rather than take charge themselves. Often they lack a sense of direction in their lives. 

A values-driven person appears to be in charge of their lives and they are grounded in themselves. They are not ruled from the outside, and they are able to communicate their insights and inner truth in a constructive way. Often these people are interested in developing themselves into better human beings and they have a larger sense of being of service or fulfilling a purpose. 

During our self explorations and client work we have understood that until one is firstly able to become conscious of the actual living values (as opposed to idealistic, wanna-be values) and integrating them as embodied values that truly can be seen and felt in your behavior, values are just words or concepts for the mind. This is the reason why e.g at workplaces there are so much cynicism towards values-work. 

We ended up with the following, simple but essential, exercise: 
1. Become fully present by using any kind of mindfulness practice that works for you
2. Feel the word (for example family, which comes up in most people´s top five values), say it out loud, and sense whether it moves anything in you. What do you feel when you sense the word? Do you feel any positive resonance or do you feel a push away revealing a new perspective to the word?
3. Is there a clear connection to how you live it out in every day life? When you are challenged are you able to stick with your values, or is your value easily compromised? How do you deal with criticism towards a behavior linked with this value?

The exercise works best with a coach or an aware companion to honestly mirror you and help you see your gap between what is anchored in reality and what is idealized behavior. Every now and then it is healthy to stop and re-evaluate what you are guided by. Right now there is time for inner contemplation if we wish.