How can you clearly identify your values? A few weeks ago, I talked about the importance of values and how they fuel the things they do. Now, let’s see what the process looks like how to set those values!
Garrett Westerwell talks about New Year's resolutions and goal setting. As someone who's trained in sport and performance psychology, goal setting is a huge topic. He'll focus on it over the month of December moving forward.
values are important because they serve as the foundation for goals. They live with us and are always manifested in our actions. They can be, they can manifest in work, relationships, health and fitness. Rather than going out and setting lofty goals, you first want to identify those values.
The activity is kind of like a card sorting task to determine your values. You sort the cards into things that you hold dearly and things that maybe you don't. There's no such thing as a right or wrong value. Stay tuned for more content related to goal setting moving forward.
What's up, Cadre? Happy Monday. My name is Garrett Westerwell. Hopefully you're coming in with a sense of appreciation and gratitude and hopefully some rejuvenation getting back into the swing of things after the Thanksgiving holiday. And today, I think is relevant for the holidays ahead, specifically New Year's. And what a lot of people think of when they associate with New Year's is what New Year's resolutions and goal setting. And it's really a good timing to talk about that. As someone who's trained in sport and performance psychology, goal setting is a huge topic, and that's something I'm going to really hone in on and focus over the month of December moving forward so you all can go out and set and achieve some hopefully lofty, realistic, and just amazing goals for yourself.
So before that, though, I want to talk about the foundation of goals, which is values. And values is something that I talked about a few weeks ago on a live stream, so feel free to check that out. Just a few minutes of content explaining the what behind values, what they are, why they're important, and how they fuel our actions and behavior. And I'll touch on that a little bit again today. But I'm also going to get into the how of values. In other words, how do we go about finding our values and identifying them so we can live our life according to those values?
So values are important because they serve as the foundation for goals. The difference being goals are things that we can kind of check off. We can kind of just set those outcome driven goals, and they're things that can be checked off and accomplished, and then they're kind of done. Whereas values, they can never be checked off. They live with us and are always manifested in our actions. They're kind of, I like to call them our compass, our internal compass or mission. And they can be, they can manifest in work, relationships, health and fitness, really anything in your daily life.
And so that's why they're really important as a foundation for our goals. So rather than going out and setting a bunch of lofty goals, you first want to identify those values and that'll help you later on with that goal setting process. So as an example, they just inform our goals differently. So, for example, again, I work in sports psychology, so a lot of the athletes that I work with set tons of different goals. As you might imagine, being athletes. One of them that I think is relevant for us is wanting to be a leader.
Maybe the specific goal could be I want to be a team captain when the season comes around. And be elected by my peers and coaches as captains. That's great. That's a good goal. And we can get in the weeds of how to set process goals for that. But the values that you have within you can inform that goal differently. For example, someone might value discipline. If you value discipline, which I do as well, then you might go about being a more authoritarian leader. Maybe you'll hold your teammates accountable, and that might be the focus of your leadership.
Whereas someone who values, maybe relationships or they value a sense of humor, as you can imagine, they might go about leadership a little bit differently. So it's interesting, the same exact goal is, you know, manifest in different ways based on your values. And that's why it's important to identify those values. Values are important just because they give us that compass analogy, so they give us that guidance. They also give us motivation because they're what we hold dearest to ourselves and help us go throughout life, and they also give us more fulfillment and satisfaction overall.
So living a more satisfying, fulfilling life, living a more motivated life, living a life full of guidance, that sounds pretty great to me. And that's why values are important. And so that's the what of values. Now let's dive into the how so I want to, or I have an activity for you all that you can complete. I'm going to drop it a link in the comments right after this live stream is done. And I'm also going to post it in the community feed, which is a great feature of our Cadre app that if you haven't checked out, I encourage you to do so.
Feel free to post and be part of that community. So again, I'm going to post that link for a website that has this activity. I don't have any affiliation with them, to be honest with you. I found it through a random search a while ago when trying to, you know, do virtual sessions with athletes that I work with. And this is a good one. And obviously with this virtual format, it's a good one for you as well. So the link I'll post, and it's just, it's kind of like a card sorting task to determine your values.
Long story short, as you'll see when you do it is you start off, I think they have about 50 50 cards on there with every value you can possibly think of. They have a big gamut of stuff there. And you kind of sort the cards into things that you hold dearly and things that maybe you, they're still important, but maybe not as important as the others. And through this process, you gradually start to filter down from maybe your top ten or twelve into your top eight, and then you end up with your top five values that you hold near and dear to your heart.
Again, it's a really fun, it's a quick activity just sorting through the cards and eventually discover those top five. There's no such thing as a right or wrong value. Maybe you hold all 50 cards, you think they're all values. That's great. But it's all about finding the most important ones for you as an individual. It's kind of like everybody loves pizza, but everybody likes different styles of pizza. Well, you might hold values that are different from your peers or your loved ones, and it's really important to identify those because like I mentioned at the beginning, it informs a lot of what we do.
So like I said, I'll post that link for you all in the, in the comments in this live stream after I'm done, and then in the community feed as well. So feel free. Check it out. I have no affiliation with the website. I just think it's a great tool and hopefully you can use that and get guided through to find your values. All right? And like I said, I'm going to be discussing more content related to goal setting moving forward, so stay tuned for that. I know it's a big, big topic for us all and something that we're going to be thinking about in the month ahead.
So go ahead, check out that link and appreciate you all for joining me. Happy Monday.
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