What Are Your Core Values? Find Them, Find Purpose in Life

When you know your core values you know:

• your heart
• who you long to be
• and the life you want to live

It’s the first step in setting goals that you can keep because they add purpose to your life and bring you closer to the life you desire.

Step #1: Go through the whole list of core values and write down every one that strikes a chord. This is who you’d like to be.

Step #2: Now look over the words you wrote. You’ll notice that some words have a similar meaning, so create a group for those words. Bundle all the words into groups that you can. Give each word grouping a name that encompasses the meaning of the words in the bundle.

Step #3: Narrow the groups down to the 10 most important to you and remove the rest. Now look at the ten titles and number them in importance from 1-10.

When you’re finished you’ll have a clear snapshot of who you want to be and what’s important to you.

“Your values become your destiny.”

Ghandi

Our list of core values was created years ago, before we knew about Paul McKenna’s Living Your Values program. But when we discovered his self-hypnosis on living your values for the perfect day, we knew it would be a great companion to this exercise. He uses the top 5 values.

To learn how to use your list of core values to set goals, see our article The Insiders Guide to Effective Resolutions