Personal Values

How to assess personal values

Step 1: Identify a job or task (current or previous) that makes you most happy.

• What were you doing?
• Which part did you enjoy the most?
• Who were you with?
• Where were you?
• What was the environment like?
• What were your objectives?
• What did you accomplish?

Step 2: Repeat Step 1 thinking about a time when you felt least happy.

Step 3: Compare the two situations (from step 1 and 2). What patterns emerge? What are the similarities and differences?

Step 4: Focusing on the differences write down as many pieces of self-advice that you can distil about what makes you happiest at work. For example, two of mine are: “Ensure that your work is well researched and thorough” and “Seek variety of tasks and people”.

Step 5: Based on your advice sentences – pull out 10 single words. For example, using the two pieces of self-advice above, mine would be ‘Diligence’ and ‘Variety’.

Step 6: Finally, think about your current working environment. If you regularly adhered to your top 10 values what would the impact be on your behaviour? How closely would your decisions and actions be aligned to the expected norms of the firm? Where (if any) would there be areas of divergence?

Source: MindTools.com http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_85.htm