Value Driven Actions

I recently read a book that touched on the idea of value driven decisions, and it stuck with me. It seemed so obvious. Everyone has values, so of course they should act according to those values. But that naturally led to a storm of questions. Was I acting according to my values? What exactly are my values? What does acting according to them even look like?

What is a value?

A value is a quality or objective that is an end in itself. In other words, a value is something that is worth pursuing for its own sake. It does not need to have any supporting reasons or secondary effects. In other words, any action that needs to produce something else to be worth pursuing is not a value. If a secondary effect is not a value, it will need to affect one of your values to be worth the effort. Taking this one step further, all actions need the justification of one or more values (however tentative their connection).

How to identify your values

Focus on the things that irritate you. Especially the things that bother you more than other people. And then dig into why it affects you. Did you start yelling at that person who cut you off? Why are you mad about it? Is it because that person is disregarding the safety of others? Or disrespecting their fellow drivers? Do you get frustrated when you spend all day watching TV? Is it because you don’t feel in control of yourself? Or are you upset because you are setting a bad example for those closest to you? Continue asking why until you struggle to come up with an answer. That’s when you’ve hit a value. Once you get a list of these things that bother you, you can flip them around to see what things you value.

Alternatively, you can directly list the things that are important to you, or try to understand events that made you happy. While this can be used to collect a list of values, people generally remember negative events more clearly, so I’d recommend starting that way.

Connect your actions to your values

Now that you have your list of values, take a look at your previous actions over the last week or so. For each action, you should be able to point to at least one value that justifies it. If you can’t find a value behind a given action, don’t start beating yourself up just yet. It’s more likely that you missed one of your values (joy and self care tend to be criminally underrated). Take a few minutes to consider what values someone (not necessarily you) might use to justify that action. Once you have ten or so, think back to how you felt taking that action and see if any of them stick.

Now that you’ve connected your actions to your values, you’ll be able to judge your actions more easily. Some of your values will be missing (oops!). And some of your actions won’t be very helpful for the values that stand behind them. This has a rather unfortunate tendency to be painful, especially if you haven’t done it before. You’ll see values that are barren of actions, and values where your actions are laughably ineffectual. That’s good. If you have big, obvious, and painful problems, then you’ll likely have big, obvious, and effective ways to improve.

What about you?

Do you have any values that surprised you? Did you notice any values that were missing from your actions? What did you do to more closely align your actions with your values?