What are your core values?
This is an excerpt of a module from Post-Grad Pathfinders - a self-paced course on launching your post-PhD career.
I talk about core values a lot around here, and for good reason. I firmly believe that they’re foundational to finding happiness and fulfillment in your life and career.
No, I promise I’m not overselling it. Core values aren’t some magical, “woo woo” thing - they’re essentially just deeply held principles that are important to you. But knowing what yours are can be seriously transformational for figuring out understanding yourself better and making decisions with intention.
What are core values?
Core values are principles or standards that are deeply important to you. Some examples would include things like achievement, care, exploration, and authenticity.
Core values tend to emerge in many different areas of your life, such as work, relationships, and family life. They also tend to be relatively stable over time, though there may be times when they evolve or become secondary to other more important values.
One thing that’s important to note is that some things might be important to you, but not necessarily a core value. Many people care about things like authenticity, but those things might not emerge as core values. It could be that authenticity is subsumed by another value (e.g., connection) or that other values just feel more important.
What are the benefits of knowing your core values?
Knowing and understanding your core values can help you:
Better understand what you want
Set and achieve goals
Identify priorities
Set and maintain boundaries
Make decisions intentionally
Have a shorthand to understand yourself
One of the biggest benefits that I’ve found is that core values can help you pinpoint why you’re feeling some complex emotions like frustration and dissatisfaction, things that can sometimes be hard to understand.
Before I understood my core values, I felt frustrated with aspects of my career, but didn’t fully understand why. At face value, I had many of the things I wanted in my career, but I still felt frustrated and dissatisfied. Understanding my core values helped me see the reason for my frustration: my values and the values of my workplace were not aligned. Knowing this helped me act with intention to better align my career with my values (and feel less frustration!).
Identifying your core values
So how can you identify your own core values? When I work with coaching clients, I often use a longer version of this exercise to help them identify their values. Try this version out for yourself below:
Review this list of values words. Note down which values words stand out to you, selecting as many as you want. Once you’ve reviewed them all, go through the list that you made and narrow it down to the top 3-5 values that are most important to you.
Know that many people struggle with this! It’s okay if it’s hard. One strategy that can help you narrow things down is to match two values words together (e.g., calm vs. order) and select the one that feels more important between the two. Another strategy is to find the overlap amongst the values - for instance, maybe calm and order can both be subsumed under the value of control.
Once you’ve narrowed your list down to only a few values, you’ve identified your core values! You can return to these values throughout your week as a way to ground yourself, use them in weekly/monthly planning, or reflect on how they may be present or missing from your current career.
Did you find this useful? Check out Post-Grad Pathfinders for more support on using values to launch your post-PhD career!
