Earlier this year, I was asked to choose my top five values from a list of 34. The list was in the format of stacked notecards, and the following describes my process and rationale in choosing my top five.
Faith, Compassion, Openness, Achievement, Responsibility
Determining my values started with a smattering of paper on my rug and ended in an hour-long conversation with my big sister. I have come to find that whenever I am faced with an introspective assignment, or any sort of self reflection, it almost always ends in a phone call to someone who knows me very well, both for affirmation and also for an ear to listen to me as I attempt to reason out my decisions and musings. Needless to say, the process was difficult, and required looking at places in my life and heart that I rarely stop and take the time to examine.
Within the first five minutes of staring at the cards, I noticed a few I could easily eliminate. They did not resonate with me in the slightest, and were therefore cleared from the floor. Next, I stared at what seemed like a daunting task and decided to start clumping together groups that looked like they matched. From here I could eliminate values that didn’t stand out near the tops of their respective groups. This is the part of the process where I began to feel overwhelmed and “phoned a friend,” i.e. my sister.
Talking through the process with her on the other end helped me realize some of the things that were holding me back. There were certain values that I felt I should have, honesty and accuracy being two that pained me to give up, because I felt that not having them in my top five was like not having them at all, which to me felt socially unacceptable. Others, such as faith, I knew instantly would be in my top five, but their descriptions, (namely, “surrounding myself with others who choose faith as a top value”) stopped me. However, I realized that the definitions of the values did not have to completely define what they meant to me. Faith, my guiding principle, has manifested itself in my journey thus far, both in growth and strength, but I have never been one to not accept someone else because their faith in whatever they believe does not match mine (an ideal that coincidentally led me to include openness). Eliminating other values, like family and knowledge, literally made me feel as though I was disappointing my mom and opening myself up to judgment from peers. However, I realized here that compassion included my family, and my love of learning can be attributed to my value of achievement and openness. The concept of including some values that were hard to eliminate under other, more far-reaching values is ultimately what made the decision process easier, and helped me to see that I value many things, but the list of many comes from an intrinsic set of a few.
As for which values are most important to me, I have already listed their “value” at the top of the paper. Faith is the thing I cling to most – it has been my guiding principle, my shelter, my rock, and my foundation my whole life. Next would be compassion. I believe that the Bible ultimately calls us to love one another, and I know first-hand the difference sharing that love can make in someone’s life. I ranked openness third because I believe a part of loving others is accepting them for who they are. I also think closed-mindedness leads to ignorance, and that one of the best ways to begin to know and understand the world is to learn new things about it and its people. Finally, I have achievement and responsibility. I believe that every challenge and blessing we receive are opportunities for growth, and I never want to waste an opportunity to be the absolute best version of myself I can be – which led me to choose responsibility as my fifth value. Coming from a single-parent household, I learned at an important age that actions have far-reaching consequences, and since then, I have made careful decisions about what and how I do things to ensure that my actions and speech create uplifting, positive, and compassionate environments for those around me. In all, I learned that my values are intertwined and deep, and while I might not stop and think about them often, I know them, and my heart knows them.