What is your core value in life?
We all have things in our life that are fundamentally important to us. This can be our career, our family or even material possessions that have a special meaning. When we take this a step further, we very often realize, that things that are very important to us, are often associated with certain values. It is therefore important that we firstly know what is important to us, question it regularly and ideally in the end find this one underlying value for our lives that follows through like a red line.
To go deeper into the topic, we need to clarify what values are in the first place. Values are fundamental beliefs or attitudes we build our life on that define how happy and content we are every day. If the values we live by and the values we desire are in alignment, we feel content, authentic and at ease. With our surrounding. Very often however, we are lost for what our true values really are, and we need to go on a long journey to find them. Our values define our personality, when we therefore find them, we often also find ourselves and who we truly want to be, which provides a strong sense of direction for us.
To find values and even the one core value in our lives, the first step is to reflect. What is important for us in live? Where do we see our future? What are our political as well as other fundamental beliefs? Very often those already start to build up in our childhood and are very heavily influenced by our surroundings such as friends or family or the place where we grew up. We need to take our time to reflect on and answer those above question for ourselves, as it will lay the foundation to find our values and core building blocks that make us the human being we are or ideally want to be.
Once we took our time to reflect, we know what is important to us. Now, we need to pack this into values. Values can be things like sustainability, liberty which are more political related or personality related attributes such as honesty, loyalty, or authenticity. To find our values takes time and is not always easy, especially in period of our lives where we do not 100% know what we want or where we should go next. Also, values change and adopt over time. They are not constant, and they should change in different phases in our life. Once we find a collection of values for us, those will form our personality, influence our decision making and act as our underlying guide for making decisions and choices.
From our collection of values, ideally, we can then go even one step further and find the one value, that is the red line of our life and overall existence, the one thing we could kill for. Very often, we see this value connected to finding or having found our purpose in life. What is it that we are here for? What gets up going? Those are not easy questions to answer and very often take a lot of time and effort to find. It is the one value that will be the red line in our life, the one value where we say this is what all the others first into and what connect the overall puzzle of our personality. When we manage to find this, which not many of us do, we are unstoppable, as we have found the one thing that gives our life purpose and meaning.
An example for this one value could be collaboration – if we are a person that is a real team player, open to discover other countries and cultures as well as involve our children and family or business partner in every decision we make, we are a truly collaborative person at all levels in our life. This is therefore the red line that all our other values fit under.
To find this one value however is a gift and a challenge at the same time. I would invite you on a reflective journey to start finding it as the rewards will be tremendous.
