Coaching Tool: Values Exercise

Find your Values and use them as a Life Compass to navigate you in Life.

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Values Exercise is a coaching tool for creating clarity. Here is a simple guide to help you do this exercise on your own.

Why is knowing your Values important?

• In life, we focus on the things that are important. What we focus on expands. If we dont’t have the clarity on what is a important, we will be living into reactive way of living. If we have clarity, we manifest things faster. Speed is a function of clarity.
• Your Core Values is your decision-making framework. Life is a chain of choices. Being grounded in your Core Values ensures that whatever you are choosing every given moment is aligned with what is important to you the most.
• For example, in your career, you can use this exercise to make sure that the opportunity in front of you is aligned with your Core Values (e.g. the Values of the organizations are aligned with yours).
• Your Core Values rarely change throughout your life. You deepen your understanding about your life and yourself as a human but the things that are important the most to you remain constant. Your Values are your Life Compass 🧭

Ok, I got it. How should I do the Values exercise?

Step 0. Free writing

Before even reading further, stop right here. Open a notebook and write down everything everything that matters to you the most in life.

No order. No editing. Just stream of consciousness. Write until there is nothing to write. Write until you are empty.

Highlight the words that resonate with you the most.

Step 1. Elimination

1. I put a list of Values in the Attachment section at the bottom of this article. Print it out. (I removed it from here, so that you could first complete your free writing exercise without being distracted by prompts).
2. Grab a pen and start elimination. Scratch off everything that doesn’t resonate with you (you don’t see it as your core driver).
3. Continue elimination until you land on a set of 4–8 Core Values.
4. If you can’t remove the Value from your list, keep it.
5. Proceed with the next step.

Step 2. Organizing/Grouping

(I have a deck of Values cards, that I use with my coaching clients, but you don’t need to buy cards to do the exercise, simply use the instructions above).

My core Values are:

Source: Chengeer Lee

You can see that I have 2 core Values — Success and Spirituality have 4 “sub-Values”. This is what grouping is.

Step 2. 👉 See if you can find one Core Value that encapsulates some other values that you have left after your Elimination step.

For example, Success for me is 4 things:

• Growth — constantly expanding my mind, building specific knowledge, increasing my intelligence
• Service — I am successful when my work helps other people to succeed in life
• Career — there are certain career experiences that I want to create and a reputation that I want to build (becoming the best at what I do)
• Money — being successful means getting rich on the way by doing the first three

Now, we proceed with Step 3.

Step 3. Definitions.

Take each one of your Core Values and work through these self-coaching questions:

• What exactly does this Value mean to you?
• Why is it important to you?
• How are your Values connected?

Example. This is how I define my Values:

• Purpose — to dedicate my life to something bigger than me. To live my Life’s Mission. To elevate planetary consciousness through individual spiritual awakening.
• Family — to build a house full of love
• Health — longevity, strength, endurance. To build a body that can maximize my human experience.
• Independence — to be my own man. Self-reliance. Autonomy. Freedom. To do the work that I want whenever I want with whomever I want.
• Success — to be the best at being me, to serve others, to constantly grow, to build a career, to build a reputation, to achieve financial confidence on the way, to leave my legacy.
• Spirituality — to be grounded in truth, to stay as love, to be balanced and centered, to lead others with wisdom, to have time for myself.

Write down your own system of definitions for each Value. See the interconnectedness i.e. see how Values work with each other and enable each other.

After you finish this step you should have a feeling of completeness. There is nothing to add and nothing to remove. A complete Values Framework.

Step 4. Define Guiding Principles.

A Guiding Principle is a catchy phrase that will serve as a reminder of your Value.

It should be something that truly resonates with you and anchors your mind on the set of Truths that you have established for yourself.

Companies do the same thing. Once they land on a certain set of Company Values, they create a simple set of catchphrases that would ground the users in memorizing and then eventually embodying the Values.

For example, let’s say your Value is Authenticity, a guiding principle might be “Authenticity over everything”.

• Discipline: Discipline is Freedom
• Health: Running is Energy
• Work Ethic: The way you do anything is the way you do everything
• Stillness: To the mind that is still the whole Universe surrenders
• Reputation: Reputation is the Ultimate Currency
• Peace: Tension is what you think you should be. Relaxation is what you are.
• Common sense: Sensible people get paid for doing what they enjoy doing.
• etc.

You get the point. Create your own set of quotes that will help ground yourself in your Values.

Now your Values are not an abstract concept that is “nice to have”. If it is not a practical model, it is useless.

So how do we now implement this?

Step 5. Build Systems that will let you live your Values.

This part will require some self-reflection work.

1. Look at your past and identify the situations in which you have lived your Values. How did it serve you?
2. Look at past situations when you have compromised your Values. How did that serve you? What have you learned from this lesson?
3. Based on these 2, identify the behaviour that will let you live your Values.
4. Design a daily routine that will contain blocks of time when you live your Values.

Let me give you an example.

Health: Running is Energy. This is the Value/Guiding principle of one of my clients.

Before coaching, my client was inconsistent with running. He had a history of starting running multiple times but the practice of running never stuck. He was failing to remain consistent and since the practice never became a habit he failed to integrate the program “I am a runner” into his identity.

After we completed the Values exercise we landed on the set of his Core Values: Love, Freedom, Discipline.

• Love — as the Ultimate WHY behind all the things that he is doing in life.
• Freedom — is WHAT he was manifesting (autonomy, personal business, ambition, financial independence) and WHERE he was going (the desired reality that he wanted to create for himself)
• And Discipline — is HOW he was going to achieve it.

This is the guiding principle that united all three:

“I am DISCIPLINED to BUILD the things that will lead to my FREEDOM that will help me to create more LOVE”

Now, Health and Running practice fell under the Core Value of Discipline.

His realizations were:

• I need to be healthy to fulfill my Vision
• To be healthy I need to be disciplined with my Health
• For me, Health is generating Energy
• I need Energy to fulfill my Ambition
• The more Energy I generate the faster I will get to my Freedom

Boom. All dots are connected.

The system itself that my client implemented is super simple. 12 pm — alarm goes off. He is out the door running. The time block on his calendar says: “Running is Energy.”

He is running with no purpose no more. He is running knowing that every step he takes gets him closer to his Freedom.

Create your own Tactical Solutions for Execution

• If Clarity is important to you, block the time to write.
• If Happiness is important to you, start your day with meditation.
• If Money is important to you, work on your business.

Your Values will dictate your Systems.

Understand what exactly it means to you to live your Values and why those things are important to you.

Use your Values as a framework. Realign and connect all your daily activities to that framework.

Watch closely the negative emotions or tension that you might have in your mind. Very often a negative emotion is an indication that something in your life experience is in direct conflict with one of your Values. Investigate.

Attachment

(source: Scott Jeffrey)

Update (November 2023)

Now you can use ChatGPT as a Self-Coaching assistant.

🤖 Four simple steps:

1. Open ChatGPT.
2. Ask yourself a question:
3. What is Truly Important to Me?
4. Write.

Release a stream of consciousness. No particular order. No editing. Just vomit your mind into one long message about all the things that are important to you in life.

Before you hit “Send” insert a prompt: Based on the following text, generate the list of my Core Values.

ChatGPT will bring your chaos into order and create a list of your Values. It won’t be perfect but it will be a solid place to start.

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