How to Find Your Core Values

If you are on a journey of self discovery or feel like you don't know what you care about in life, this exercise might help. Hi, I'm Rachel Havocost. I'm a writer and mental health advocate, and I am on a mission to help one person feel less alone. So values are core beliefs about ourselves and the world, and they inform our actions, our relationships, and perceptions of the world. So a value is usually one word, and it can encompass several other beliefs, kind of like an umbrella. So, for example, one of my core values is relationships.

So the core value is relationship. But that can. That can encompass a lot of different things, like friendships, romantic relationships, relationships with family members, relationships to self. Inherently, that word is just a way for me to encapsulate a category of things that I highly value and prioritize over other types of values in the world. So where this might come into play is when I'm making a decision in life. m. meeting, and around 845, my partner calls me and says, hey, I've just fallen over.

Can you drive me to the urgent care? Because I think I might have broken a bone. If my one of my core values is relationships, I'm likely in that moment, going to choose to go pick up my partner and take them to urgent care over my meeting. But if one of my core values is success or achievement or career or financials, then I might prioritize my meeting. So values are not about what's right or wrong. It's about how we can begin to build an internal compass to guide us in hard moments and a way for us to figure out how we are aligned with other people in our lives.

So five core values are things like peace, relationships, love, and freedom. I might not have a great relationship or friendship or partnership with someone who values success or independence or wealth. And that's not to say that one is right or wrong. It can just help us, inform us in times when we might feel confused or lost about what we care about or what's important to us. So when thinking of core values, it's good to try and name four to five values total. So I like to visit this practice every year because oftentimes my values will change over the course of a year.

So it's important to check in with myself on what those are today versus what they were a year ago. To find out what your core values are, you can find a list of value words online. Just search for value words or core values on Google, and then from there, you can just literally circle each value that feels like it matters to you, and then once you've gone through the whole list, you can start to categorize them. So you can start to group things into categories. So if you started to circle things like freedom, independence, autonomy, those might all go into one value that you can then name with one word that seems to strongly represent that entire category.

I also have an entire write up of how to find out what your core values are on my website, so you can just head to the link listed in the description of this video, or you can Google Rachel Havocost core values and it should be the first thing that pops up. I hope you found this helpful and I will see you next time.