Your values are important and they affect the way you live and work. They tend to determine your priorities, and, they impact on the relationships you develop in the workplace and personal situations. They are likely to indicate if your life is turning out the way you want it to.
Life can feel good when the circles you socialise and work in align to your values, but when they don’t, that’s when things feel wrong. This can be a real source of unhappiness. This is why making a conscious effort to identify your values is important.
Once you fully understand what your values are it makes it easier to make good decisions, although one of my values is to recognise diversity and understand that not everyone will prioritise the same values. While it is good to have a match in values because we tend to prefer people with similar values, it isn’t always a problem if there are differences. It is how we deal with internal stress and conflict when we come across people with different priorities. There will be occasions where we accept the differences but in some cases there will be times where there is too much stress and internal conflict.
There is a good chance that people already known what their values are but if not, or if people want to explore their values further there are various tools that can be used to help them decide/confirm. The tools are particularly good in prioritising, but can also identify values people didn’t realise were important to them.
Values of GT Management Services
After using a tool, and already understanding what my values were I came up with the following that I have added to my website. I feel it is important for anyone I am to work with to understand me, and my values.
- Honesty and Authenticity – To be recognised as someone of integrity that inspires trust. Knowing and living strong values, that challenge and empower others to be the best they can be.
- Creativity, Vision and Drive – To view different perspectives, create opportunities and discover new ways of generating solutions that will drive forward ideas into reality.
- Achievement – To focus on the process that delivers high performance through continuous improvement in ways of working.
- Ownership and People Development – To take responsibility for own actions & interactions, being able to use intiative to be decisive and solve problems. To continually learn & grow, and to encourage & support that in other people.
- Collaboration and Diversity – To build excellent relationships and networking with others, that add value through working in partnership, and also recognise & respect that people can have a different set of values, practices, traditions or beliefs due to age, race or ethnicity, religion or gender.
- Community Impact – To consider the impact I have on local communities, whether that be directly or indirectly impacting on the quality of life people can lead.
Hopefully this gets you thinking about what is important to you, and helps you with work and personal life decisions.
