A Good Use for Core Values
Using Core Values to Guide Decision Making
Part 3: Using Core Values as a Decision-Making Tool
The “Core Values” perspective is a popular decision-making approach used by personal and business coaches as a tool for their clients to explore the why behind decision-making.
Core Values, also known as personal values, described by Adriana Girdler, are “...a description of your character, how you behave and what you like.” The idea is that a core value is something innate within each of us, which drives our behaviors by the way we make choices. They are, something our minds use to weigh our actions against. These values are not just an idea of how we aspire towards being or feel we should act, but they seem to express themselves naturally. These values are not something that have been taught to us, although the vocabulary around describing them and understanding how they drive us certainly can be understood through reflection and trial-and-error. A core value is part of the essence of an individual, always has been, and always will be. This core value doesn’t change throughout a person’s life even though the circumstances around how we define them may. However, I have noticed that each time I visit a core values list, I question a couple of those that I have chosen, wondering if they are wants instead of absolutes.
Something interesting to me about a core value is that if I listen, I can hear it speak, well maybe yell, at me when I am moving in a direction that isn’t a good fit for me. It’s really an interesting concept.
Hypothetically, a simple example of a core value is “honesty.” This can take different forms for different people, but could perhaps be described as “respectfully voicing how they feel about something.” So, this person is innately aware that they are equipped to navigate their world with the drive to not let things fester when they feel there is something that needs to be said. However, an example of how the person knows they are straying from their core value could be in a work situation. Perhaps they are holding their tongue and not letting their ideas be heard for fear of not advancing. Over time, a gnawing feeling of frustration or disappointment in oneself could fester and be reflected in attitudes and poor decisions that get a person off course.
So, how do we learn what our core values are?
There are multitudes of core values discovery exercises out there. Some are geared toward an organization or business, while others are geared toward personal awareness and growth. Referenced are a few sources for both. They are similar, however, in that there is a step-by-step process of discovery.
The first step is to examine a list of words provided with the exercise. Those words that evoke curiosity and the idea of “perhaps that’s an idea I often bring to the table of my life”, can be highlighted. Examples: friendship, knowledge, teamwork, reflection, generosity, and spirituality.
Next, if you have identified more than five words/terms, then try to narrow your list to 3-5 (max) ideas. Perhaps you’ll sort, categorize, and analyze for commonalities or duplicate ideas with some words. Ask yourself, “Is this something I have learned that seems to work for me or is it something that I have always done naturally? For example, the word “reflection.” Perhaps you realize that you are good at reflection, and evoking reflection in clients, but it is a tool that you learned along the way. Being reflective wasn’t something that you did as a 12-year-old naturally. Friendship, on the other hand, was always something that drove you. Relying on your friends, being there for your friends, was always a priority for you and something you adjusted your life around to accommodate. So Friendship could be a value word, whereas reflection is more of a tool for you.
Second step once you have an idea of what your core values are or may be, you will define these values. Make your elevator pitch, one to two sentences of what the value represents to you and how it manifests for you. Make an honest statement about your intention when you’ve used a value. It’s an important step. In the process of writing your definition you may find that this word, “friendship” for example, may actually be better described by the word “connection”. From my experience,
According to Girdler, the “Litmus Test” is step three of this technique, where you compare your experience of how strongly you keep a grip on your different values under different scenarios. This is an interesting perspective that she explains in her video Adriana Girdler Core Values.
A culminating step in this process is to reflect on how you have used your values or not used your values to guide your actions in the past. Elena Aguilar has some excellent reflections in her Core Values exercise in her workbook The Onward Workbook: Daily Activities to Cultivate Your Emotional Resilience and Thrive (Aguilar, 2018).
James Clear, the author of “Atomic Habits,” took reflection a step further to create a Business Values and Integrity report to keep his business on track with his values. This is such an interesting concept and may make a great journal prompt for end-of-the-quarter, end-of-the-year planning.
Link to Clear’s Integrity Report:
https://jamesclear.com/2014-integrity-report
Putting Your Core Values To Work
How do we use them to guide our decisions?
It is my understanding that one’s values represent who you are as well as how far you are willing to go, like a bright line in the sand, when you are faced with a decision or compelled to action. So, when you have a larger than jam or honey on my toast decision or action to take, you can look at your core values and their definitions to better understand the moves that might be the best fit for you. Compare your ideas of your values to the big idea or decision you need to make. You can ask yourself if making such and such decision matches your intention for the value. If so, then perhaps it’s the action to take. If not, then can you tweak the idea or situation to fit your values? If not, perhaps it’s a no go.
For example with the friendship/connections idea, perhaps you are looking for a new job. Between two, they both use a lot of your learned skills but one job is people-facing and one is not. The non-people-facing job is a higher paying situation. Knowing yourself, upon reflection, you see that you will tend to burn out quickly and get unfocused easily without having the accountability that connections with others gives. You know that the higher paying job will likely be a burnout situation, whereas the lower paying job you may be able to sustain long enough to advance to that higher pay and more. Therefore you take the job with the connections because it better meets your longer-term goals and fits more with the way you operate.
Again, life is fluid. Some decisions we take with full confidence but they don’t work out the way we planned. Sometimes a behavior we thought was a value didn’t pass the Girdler’s “Litmus Test”. Does that mean we throw the whole process out? No. We reflect, we revise, and we try again. That’s life.
How does this relate to ADHD?
An ADHD person typically has challenges in the brain functions called executive functions (or functioning), of which planning, prioritizing, organizing, regulating emotions, and initiating action may be impaired. Putting systems in place to support these various functions is a helpful tool for ADHD people. . However, not all ADHD people have issues in the same areas. Using the Core Values system of decision making is one tool that is useful to some.
An ADHD Coach, who has life coaching training plus additional trining about ADHD, will often use the idea of Core Values as a support system for their clients. Having an idea of one’s core values can serve as a framework to be referenced when a client is being coached through a challenges. The coach will hopefully be able to help evoke in the client reflection and awareness about the how and why of past decisions to affirm present and future actions.
I am experimenting with using a Core Values decision making process to help me consolidate my zillions of ideas and motivations and inertia for some moves I want to make for my future. I definitely process visually so I see a system as a “decision tree”. It’s not the if/then, if/then type of analytical tree, but just a tree that is rooted in my values which gives my multitude of ideas a solid foundation. I’ll share the visual, a values list, and some reflection questions with you if you’d like to try out this process for yourself.
From my ADHD brain to you. Hope it makes sense to you too! Enjoy.
An interesting essay about the history of core values:
https://startwithvalues.com/a-history-of-research-into-core-values/