How to determine a person's values? Psychologist's advice

A common mistake in defining values is confusing them with limiting beliefs.
All our lives, authorities (parents, teachers, idols) tell us about “reasonable, good, eternal,” and sometimes we feel very bad when we realize that we do not meet these standards. As for this “good and eternal”, we have nothing to do with it, at least in the understanding in which it is expected of us. Because in fact, life values are not some generally accepted things, but what is valuable in the life of a particular person. In this article, I'll tell you how I defined them for myself (and how it made me happier).

What are values?

Each person has his own values - important, worthwhile, useful things and principles for him. These are beliefs about what are the highest goods or most meaningful ideals. They give meaning to life, help overcome difficulties, motivate people and determine their behavior. A person who values kindness generously spends time and resources to help people and animals. A connoisseur of honesty, he considers it necessary to tell the truth and does not allow lies.

Values are important because they help make decisions that have a profound impact on a person’s well-being, mental and psychological health. By living in accordance with values, a person feels better and is more focused on important things. And vice versa - he feels uncertainty and disappointment when life does not live up to ideals. This applies to everyday and global life decisions.

Features of the formation of a system of life values

What is an adult’s value system and how was it formed? There are so many influencing factors that it is impossible to predict how a person’s worldview will change in a year or ten years.

For example, a child grew up in a religious family. From childhood he was taught that the main thing is not to offend a person. But, growing up, these prohibitions were erased. His easy-going nature caused him to be ridiculed by other children. I had to defend myself. Under this influence, values changed, the child put honor and respect among friends first. Now he can offend a person in order to avoid ridicule. This is protection.

An example of how priorities change dramatically. This is not uncommon. Often the most popular children at school cannot realize themselves in adulthood. Quiet people become criminals. The principle of the pendulum applies here: how kind you are now, you can be just as rude and cruel. This is your range. That’s why they say: “Fear the wrath of a calm person.”

A person's life values change over time. This same child grows up and falls in love. His world is turned upside down under the influence of hormones and the natural need to be loved, to give love. Relationships come first. But time will pass, passions will subside, and providing for the family will become the primary task. Money will come first. Or a career. Sometimes a career destroys a family.

Time will pass, making money will give way to an eternal, basic value: health. With age, everyone develops some kind of ailment, chronic ailments. And everything will change again. Work isn't that important when your life is at stake. And by the word “health” we always mean exactly this: life, the opportunity to be here, in this world.

Taking care of our body is what is necessary. And for older people, this always comes first. Maybe they're right? But can we put health first when we're young? Will we achieve anything then? Every age should have its own values.

This theory explains why it is so important to go out with friends and have fun during your youth. If fun has never been a priority, an adult girl may want it when she is married and leave her family. It’s just that in her youth she was forbidden too much, or she was passionate about studying, or she was sick, and her health came first. Changing the terms changes a person’s picture of the world.

What are the values?

Values can be completely different. What brings happiness to one person may cause anxiety or detachment to another. Some people value constant travel around the world, while others prefer a secure environment - a stable office job and a settled family life.

The general classification of values is their division into material and spiritual. The first are goods bought with money, the second are moral.

Material values usually include material independence, wealth and its attendants: the desire for a prosperous life, buying a car, house, clothes, etc. Moral benefits are achieved at the spiritual, intellectual level and include the following varieties:

health;
beauty;
friendship;
Love;
family Children;
originality;
knowledge;
professionalism;
career growth;
honesty;
independence;
sincerity;
reliability;
positivity, etc.

Most intangible values represent moral qualities that a person strives to achieve and maintain throughout his life. America was founded on the values of freedom and justice for all.

The main values of life according to the author

You cannot keep the same things as a priority since childhood. Sometimes you have to put love first. Sometimes it’s health. Sometimes it’s money. We must not forget about career and entertainment. But all this must exist harmoniously within a person’s personality.

At the same time, there must be clear basic values and moral qualities:

Regardless of your mood, you won't kick the cat.
Don't offend a loved one, friend, neighbor or stranger on the bus.
Do not respond to aggression with aggression.
Give up your seat in transport.
You won't kill, you won't steal.
Don't take away your friend's girlfriend (friend's husband).

Everyone has their own values. But the basics our parents give us must sometimes change our priorities.

Life and health are the most important. But did the soldiers think about this during the war? They died for their homeland, for their loved ones.

Also, a husband who supports a wife and three children will not primarily think about health, not about relationships, not about entertainment. He will earn money to raise his children and provide for his wife.

The most important thing is people. The ones we love. And our values will always revolve around them, change their location depending on what they need now. And their values will also change to suit us. This is the most important thing in life.

It is equally important to remain human in any situation. You can shout at a friend for an hour, but you must help him and not turn away in difficult times. You can be as irritated as you like, but not offend your colleague. And if someone yells at you, do not respond with aggression, but get into the situation, calm the person down, try to help. This is humanity. This is what distinguishes us from animals.

How to determine your values?

People learn values from parents, teachers, friends, society. Growing up, they discard some of these benefits in favor of their own ideals. Otherwise, they will live by someone else's principles, as a result of which life may seem meaningless and unsatisfactory. This is clearly illustrated by the quote from David Foster Wallace: “If you don’t choose your values, society, culture, and the media will impose theirs on you.” Therefore, it is important for each person to determine personal values where he will invest time, energy, and resources. Here are 7 simple steps to understanding them:

Make a list of values. First, try writing down the 10 things that are most important to you. If this turns out to be difficult, remember a time when you felt truly happy, confident, satisfied: what you did, who was there, what exactly made you happy or made you feel proud. This will indicate what brings positive emotions and gives purpose to life. Once you have completed your list of core values, set it aside and come back in the morning.
Select the most significant things from the list. Having created a list of 10 values, select the most important 3-4 of them. One way is to write down each benefit on a separate sheet of paper, and then set aside the less significant ones. Group benefits from the same category. Learning, growth, development, wisdom are connected by the theme of “knowledge”.
Set priorities. Place the benefits in the stack in order of importance. This is often the hardest part. In the end, one most important value will remain. If you find this difficult, try rating them on a scale of 1 to 10 and then sort the list in order. Prioritization can help with identifying ideals.
Save list. Once you've prioritized your list of core values, don't just put it in a drawer and forget about it. Post the list in a visible place, then regularly review how your behavior and decisions align with your highest values. You can also use images that remind you of ideals - a vision board with pictures or a screensaver on your phone.
Set goals based on values. Once you have identified your core values, turn them into goals. Consider what actions you need to take daily to live the principles. By putting “health” at the top of the list, you know daily exercise and avoiding junk food should be a priority. And if “adventure” is at the top, then perhaps planning a trip to Africa will come first.
Review the list. Values may change. While some beliefs will remain the same throughout your life, others may become less relevant as your life circumstances change or you get older. Even if the benefits remain the same, their priority may change. Therefore, clarifying values is a lifelong task. You should constantly return to this, especially if you no longer feel happy for unknown reasons. When starting out in your career, success—measured by high income, status—may become a top priority. But with the advent of a family, personal life may become more important than work. Values may change as different goals are achieved. When the desired level of financial well-being is achieved, it may fade into the background, and other priorities may take its place. Therefore, it is recommended to review your values at least once a year and when faced with major changes in life.
Be inspired by loved ones. Values can be embodied in loved ones. Think about them to uncover related ideals. The list may include: “my grandfather for recognition and love,” “my wife for honesty,” “my colleague for listening skills,” “my friend for loyalty.”

Behavior changes if you know personal values

In Stephen Covey's self-development book The 7 Habits, the main points are the discovery of personal values. The author formulated the principles that underlie the solution of various problems for people, and built them into a consistent system.

On almost every person's list, the most important things will be health, vitality and energy. Each of us can, at a young age, create a strong foundation of well-being and physical health for later years.

When you understand the essence of this value, be sure to clarify your main priorities. This will affect what you eat and drink. You will consume different habits, explore them, experiment with them.

If you value and strengthen the health that is given to you by nature, you will not have to constantly control your impulsive actions. When you know that these products are harmful to you or the activity leads to a worsening of the condition, then you do not want it.

Make it a rule to evaluate your condition every time you eat different foods. What do you feel, what sensations? What drains your energy and affects your sleep? Take note of such moments. Create for yourself a lifestyle that maintains your health, energy, and creates your mood.

Many of us like to live comfortably and value comfort. There is a trap here: when we value comfort more than growth, we put in minimal effort to grow further. When we overcome resistance to growth, it should not cause discomfort.

What happens when we value comfort more than our health? We develop bad eating habits when we eat what we think is best for us, rather than healthy and healthy. When we eat to feel good, we eat problems and troubles. And this is fundamentally wrong, it undermines our health.

The influence of values on life

As Mahatma Gandhi said, a person's actions become his values, and his values become his destiny. Values are very important because they act as a set of rules, guidelines for life events.

Knowing your core values and their priorities helps you make the right decisions with confidence. If it is difficult to choose between two possible actions, try to imagine what the results will mean in terms of ideals - will they compromise or strengthen them? Strive to make decisions that align with your values rather than work against them. It affects the kind of person you are or want to be. When choosing between two actions that comply with the principles, it is necessary to choose the higher priority. Life decisions truly determine what you value most. If you decide to create a post for a new blog instead of hanging out with friends, it means that creativity is more important than communication.

Knowing your values is the best path to self-knowledge, because choosing the highest goods reveals and shapes character. British psychologist Russ Harris, author of the best-selling book “The Happiness Trap,” emphasizes: “Values are even more important than goals, because you may not achieve your goals, but you can always live by your values, which is true success.”

Identifying the main directions in life

Identifying your values allows you to wisely use life's most depleted resource—time. For example, you have a dream to build a brilliant career. But it may remain in your head because in reality you are not doing anything, even for a small promotion. Instead of living a healthy lifestyle, you strive to spend a free minute with friends over a glass of wine (after all, you are tired of such a life and just want to relax), instead of improving your work skills, by all means refuse to do overtime or difficult work (because workaholism is bad), instead of concentration on important issues, you become immersed in everyday problems (because you inevitably transfer problems from one area of life to another).

In other words, you are wasting your time, which could be used for something important. But you don't know that this is important. So, life passes, many of your comrades have achieved success, colleagues have long been promoted, but you have no significant changes - the dream of a career remains a dream. It is worth identifying and understanding the values in your life, if only in order to save the period of life given to you for important things that bring benefit and joy, so as not to regret the years that fly by aimlessly. A clearly visible personal value system will allow you to give up unnecessary actions - bad habits, weaknesses, vanity, boredom.

Most often, a person cannot achieve what he wants only because he independently distances himself from the main goal in life.

Identifying values makes life orderly, devoid of many little things that can be easily abandoned. Such trivial matters include communicating with like-minded or quarrelsome people, sitting for hours watching TV, and doing unnecessary work.

Often, an incorrectly formed personal value system forces us to take on many things at the same time. This leads to a burnout of interest in the very construction of the pyramid of values and improper waste of energy.

For example, you have two main goals - career and family. Naturally, achieving success in the workplace and having a bunch of kids will not happen at the same time. That is why one’s own system of values must contain a certain sequential list, bringing something to the fore, but relegating others in importance. By deciding what is more important at the moment - family or career, you are more likely to achieve personal success. And it is not at all necessary to categorically refuse family for the sake of a good position. You just have to correctly distribute your time and your actions, direct them in the right direction. It is quite possible to be a happy family man and a good worker if you set your priorities correctly in a timely manner.

Be prepared to be surprised

When I first learned my values, I was surprised. I didn't realize how important adventure was to me. It was as if my life flashed before my eyes: “Accomplish a feat, fighter”, “go on an epic adventure”, “special forces operation”, car trips across the country, my Jeep, my motorcycle, the dream of going to Australia... etc. .

I remember when I came to work at Microsoft, my first thought was “perform a feat, fighter!” For no reason, I imagined it as an adventure. I realized that working at Microsoft would be my adventure. When I manage a project, I'm trying to build the best team and have an epic adventure solving a difficult problem. I communicate in the team in special forces terms and take on the most difficult tasks. Most of my metaphors involve adventure.

It is very useful to know your values. You can spend time on them every day, even if it all comes down to using metaphors. You can live your values in many different ways, some complex and some simple.

Self-esteem. Can people adequately evaluate themselves, and how to learn this?

Realizing your true value is the key to success. Judge for yourself! If a girl on a date constantly repeats that she is ridiculous, strange, awkward, then at some point her boyfriend will begin to believe it - and hello to the relationship. If an employee does not value himself and accepts a low salary, he is unlikely to be paid more. Of their own free will, few business owners promote a specialist to a career pedestal. You need to really distinguish yourself and prove your value and importance to the enterprise. And in order to prove something, you need to at least assume this “something”.

As a writer and popularizer of psychology, readers who devalue themselves, or at least underestimate themselves, often turn to me for recommendations and help. And if they don’t value themselves, then those around them do the same. A person of no value is not valued; he is easily replaced by someone else. He's not valuable! An unvalued woman or an unvalued man in a personal relationship can easily be replaced by another woman or another man. I’m generally silent about the employees! Ruthlessly fire or demote an unvalued specialist - how to get rid of ballast! He doesn’t demonstrate self-respect and awareness of his worth! And he is unlikely to defend himself.

But criticizing people for low self-esteem and saying “value yourself more” is pointless. After all, devaluing oneself is not a whim or a whim, but the result of something that happened a long time ago, at an unconscious age. I suggest you talk about why many people are faced with the problem of self-esteem; they cannot evaluate themselves adequately, and therefore do not achieve success either in their personal lives or in their careers.

How self-esteem is formed

Self-esteem is a set of knowledge about yourself. The larger a person’s collection of more or less objective information about his own personality, the more accurate his self-esteem. But where does this knowledge come from?

A person is born with a consciousness as pure as a white sheet of paper. But from the first minute of life, this sheet begins to be filled with entries. These records are information that a small child picks up from the surrounding space. The very first information is the mother’s reaction at the moment of the first meeting with the newborn baby. If mom smiles, it means she is happy. And if she’s happy, it means the child brought her joy. And if he can bring joy, then he is good. I hope the chain of perception is clear, and there is no need to build similar chains in case of other mother’s reactions.

This is the first brick in the foundation of self-esteem as knowledge about oneself. And then the foundation begins to grow and strengthen. Everything that parents tell a child about himself becomes basic information for self-esteem.

“You're a slob! You're a bad student! You're not trying! You are lazy!" — brick by brick, self-esteem is built into a solid foundation of personality. If a child is not praised, he will never be able to have adequate self-esteem. How does he know that he is not only lazy, but, for example, talented or handsome? How can a little person know what is considered beauty and talent? How can he know whether he has these qualities? Only from mom and dad! It is dad and mom who form self-esteem. And as an adult, a person lives with this inheritance. He looks at himself in the mirror, but he sees not what exists objectively, but what was put into his consciousness by his father and mother. That is, he sees himself through the filter of parental imposed beliefs. And getting rid of this filter is very difficult.

Is it possible to convince a person that he is more valuable than he thinks?

It would seem that if someone has put one piece of information into a person’s consciousness, it means that another can be put there as well. For example, mom and dad constantly devalued the child, but friends will appreciate him. And then, for example, a child will grow up, meet love, and a loved one will tell him so many wonderful things about himself that his self-esteem will change. Yes, it would be nice if it worked like that. But it was not there! If the foundation contains the parent bricks of depreciation, nothing else can be built on them. Parental messages are the most powerful and strongest.

If a person suddenly realizes that mom and dad misjudged him, he may want to reset his consciousness and update information about himself. But in this case, the conscious part of the personality and the subconscious will inevitably collide. Consciousness may want to increase the value, but the unconscious part may urge: “Where are you going with a pig’s snout in a Kalash row! Take off your crown, don’t disgrace yourself!” Although, of course, long-term work with oneself can give results and correct the set of knowledge about oneself, but it will no longer be possible to remove the bricks of mom and dad from the foundation on their own. You can simply learn to live with this. The good news is that you can adapt to this quite successfully!

What if a person values himself too highly?

The other extreme of awareness of value is inflating the significance, inflating the real “price”. You might think that such people were told too many good things by their parents about their personalities. But in fact, everything is exactly the opposite. People with high self-esteem are usually formed in families where devaluation was especially severe, and emotional rejection was added to it.

If the child was not pitied, not caressed, did not share his childhood sorrows, did not give him support, did not try to understand him, did not protect him from his childhood enemies, did not show him love, did not tell him how valuable he was to his parents, the child grows up with feelings huge emptiness inside. And he needs to fill this emptiness with something. And if there was no initial data about one’s value received from parents, the void begins to be filled with fantasies.

Usually there are two types of such fantasies: “I am insignificant” and “I am perfect.” It seems to such people that they are worthless and untalented, and this inferiority needs to be hidden under beautiful tinsel. They begin to attribute to themselves qualities that they actually do not have. After all, you need to have at least something in the foundation of knowledge about yourself! And then fabulous golden bricks are laid into the foundation! But this does not help to be truly loved and successful. After all, these people have no real knowledge about themselves, which means they become like mirage personalities. It seems that there is a picture, but there is no real confirmation. Fake personalities are very uncomfortable in communication. It's difficult to get close to them because it's unclear who you're really getting close to.

How to determine your true value?

“I am value” is when I am honest with myself. When I know the real me, without embellishment, but with merits. To form adequate self-esteem, you need to know yourself or yourself. And this happens in contact with other people. And if adequate self-esteem is not formed by parents, the help of a specialist, psychologist or psychotherapist is important. It is necessary to correct what happened at an unconscious age in the child-parent relationship.

There are different qualities in the foundation of self-esteem of an emotionally healthy person, but they are not divided into good and bad. They can be divided into qualities that help to realize oneself in society and receive maximum satisfaction, and qualities that hinder development at the moment. And at another moment these same qualities can become valuable and useful.

Take, for example, spiritual generosity. If I'm generous, I attract people, they feel comfortable around me, I have a lot of friends, men like me. But if my generosity has no limits and is not supported by self-esteem, I can give without receiving anything in return. And then they will use me as a useful thing, and then throw me in the trash. Therefore, I know that I can not only be generous, but also very greedy. It all depends on the feedback, on my understanding of why I am generous, and what goals my generosity allows me to get closer to.

I am often called aggressive. This perception arises when readers, instead of discussing the topic of publication, move on to discussing my personal qualities and attach value judgments to my work. Because I have healthy self-esteem, which my therapist helped me build, I do not allow myself to be insulted and defend my beliefs. Opponents, apparently, are not accustomed to the fact that their victim guards his personal psychological boundaries, so they confuse self-respect and aggression. But even in the very concept of aggression there is nothing negative for me. Aggression is the will to live, an active life position, the ability to conquer the heights of success, the desire for various achievements. And if I have adequate information about my personality, I will not allow things to be labeled on me that are not my real qualities. I am not inclined to idealize myself, but I will not allow myself to be devalued either. This is healthy self-esteem based on psychological maturity and self-esteem.

If the topic aroused your thoughts and emotions, I would be glad to see your response here: