Personal Values Discovery

Discover you and your team's top personal values using the personal values cards developed out of the University of New Mexico.

Personal Values Discovery Instructions

The following exercise asks you to focus introspectively and identify the top five values that you hold most dear. Because we start with a list of 82 values, this is a harder activity than most people realize. We start by separating the list of values into two piles: The first will consist of the values that are important to you, while the second pile will contain the values that you don’t think are as important. This should only take you about five minutes.

Once you have the two piles, you'll go through the stack of values you identified as important and create a new stack by pulling out the values that are very important to you. Again, this should take about five minutes.

You will repeat this step of filtering out the values that are most significant until you’re left with only a small pile of 15 or fewer values from which you will select your top five. For example, if you still have a large pile of value cards after separating out into a very important pile, create a new, very, very important pile.

Each round presents increasingly difficult decisions about which values to filter out, but keep going until you’ve narrowed down your top five. You might be tempted to stop before you’ve narrowed down to five, but don’t. Keep going until you’re only left with five. This forces you to ask yourself tough questions about your value system. Once you’re finished, you’ll be left with the values that are most important to you