Discovering Your Core Values to Create an Intentional Career, Pt. 2

Welcome to the latest installment of my series on creating an intentional career! We’ve already done a lot so far. In the first week, we reviewed what it means to create an intentional career and why it might be important for you. Then, we looked at how and why you can discover the core feelings in your heart that can guide you toward your intentional career. Then, I explained how time tracking is a critical part of discovering what your intentional career might be. Most recently, we looked at how and why clearing space is important to draw more intention into your life.

Last week, we started part one of something I think is so critical to creating an intentional career: discovering your core values.

In today’s post, we’ll be building on the work we did from last week to begin to create our list of five core intentional values.

Ready? Let’s go.

Last week, you did three heavy activities: wrote down 10 people you admire; wrote down 20 emotional decisions and the reason behind making them; and asked three to five people what motivates you, and what your blind spots are.

Using the results of last week’s activities, we’re going to spend this week doing some exercises that will reveal your core values to you.

There are two steps to this process:

1. Review everything you have journaled, all of the phrases and words that have been written down as the result of all of this reflection, and pick 10 words that jump out to you the most. These words will give you some sort of emotional charge: hope, excitement, fear, shame, joy, or just plain making sense. Note – do you see any themes? Underlying similarities? Words that essentially mean the same thing? Connect the dots amongst these 10 words.

From there, gird your loins again, and pick the top five. These will be the first draft of your core values list. Again, I must re-emphasize: it is okay if you don’t feel 100% certain about this list of five. For some of you, this will be the very first time you’ve ever done a core values list. This is a starting point for understanding your inner values compass. You will refine and explore this list for the rest of your life. But you must start somewhere! So go for it, take a deep breath, and pick five words that are your values.

My themes from my 10 words were quite clear: ambition, success, money, helping, improving, exploring, freedom, learning and understanding. I currently have this list of my own five values:

Success (to me this means financial and professional success and continued ambition)
Independence (I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, I’m not tied down to corporate expectations or somebody else’s schedule)
Understanding/exploration (I know and explore myself, I know and explore others, I know and explore what makes processes tick)
Continuous improvement (self-betterment and situational improvement. I love efficiencies for myself and others and doing things to their maximum value or potential)
Beauty: (Kind of the dark horse here but I thought a lot about it. I’m obsessed with interior design, beautiful locations, nature, art, clothing. Being visually inspired by and surrounded by beauty is critical for me.)

Look at how this matters in my own life and why I was so unfulfilled and blah five years ago. I never would have considered myself ambitious or motivated by money. I thought I was a total do-gooder, following all rules set out for me. I never questioned anything. But at heart, I am an ambitious rebel who wants to understand how things work, improve those things that aren’t working, and do it according to my own interests and timelines and make my own money doing it how I see fit. When you think about it it makes total sense that I’ve finally moved into entrepreneurship and self-employment.

2. Finally, for each of your five values, journal on these: Your personal definition of the value; What are three behaviors that support this value?; What is an example of a time that you fully embodied this value?; And on a scale of 1-10, how present is this value in your life right now?

This journaling will merely allow you to go deeper into each value and give you deep insights of how it is or isn’t playing out in your life. And defining each value according to you is important; two people could have the value of “community” on their lists with wildly different interpretations of what it means to each of them.

For each of these five values, fill out the reflections below:

1. VALUE _________________

Definition: