49. Discerning My Personal Values
February 20, 2026
I have written a few essays about our own individual values, and about the relationship between values and good decision making: see Building a life, Knowing your Values and Core Values to read those. I found this source from Robin Gregory, a decision analyst, that describes values simply as “something that matters to me.” This is different from our language’s common, more economic-focused definition of value that can be expressed in terms of dollars and perhaps in terms of relative performance, reliability, etc. For example, we might say – “that car is a good value,” meaning that for the cost of the car, relative to other cars of the same price, it gets good gas mileage, or has great reliability, or some other factor that makes it more worth buying. When we are talking about our personal individual values that ideally would drive our decision making, the meaning is very different. This is yet another example of how our language does not contain the richness we need to fully explore these ideas. I’m seeing more and more how important it is for us to know our own values to live our intended life. Our aligned life. Our own life. Since we don’t have many conversations like this in our daily lives, I’m going to start this one here.
In our culture, we don’t talk about our personal individual values. There are many important things in the world to be done and to focus on. It doesn’t make any sense to all focus on the same things. In fact, that leads to an imbalance that impacts us all. Rather, our natural diversity of values and skills and interests enable us to thrive and create a rich society and culture with art and technology and well-run services. From my observations, people care deeply about different things. And that is a good thing. To help us to better understand our priorities, we can work to discern what our own personal values are, distinct and perhaps complimentary to the values of our family, friends, partner, workplace, community. This balance allows us to live as our authentic self and create all the things that a community and a society need to grow and thrive.
As I’ve noted before, there is an assumption, I think, that we all have the same values, or at least that we *should* have the same values. If that is the case, we would not need to talk about them, that would be like talking about the fact that we have one head and two legs. But in this phase of my life, I am ready to question the “shoulds.” So, let’s figure out our own values.
Because we don’t have any cultural expectations of discerning our own values, we may not easily be able to identify them. We do have them, and for the most part, they are the underlying rationale behind why people make different decisions about – everything. For example, decisions about what to eat, where to shop, how much to exercise, what to do for work, where to work, where to live, who to hang out with, how to spend your free time. Therefore, the first step is to look at these things in your life to try to observe your values.
Choose those things in your life that you look forward to, that feel like things you don’t want to let go of, that really feel like you. What are their common characteristics? There is no one definitive list of values to choose from, but here are some examples from my perspective, using the alphabet as an organizer:
Attractive, Bold, Calm, Dependable, Efficient, Fairn, Generous, Healthy, Independent, Joyful, Kind, Loyal, Mellow, Natural, Ordered, Productive, Quiet, Relaxed, Silly, Trustworthy, etc.
I suggest you spend some time over a few days making a list of the things that really feel like you, and then review that list to look for commonalities. See if you can find 3-4 characteristics that describe what you care about, based on these activities. Next week, I’ll write more about how thinking through the perspective of values can help us to make decisions, and help us to understand why people make decisions differently than we do.
