Core Values

Core values are a major basis of meaning and purpose in our lives. As part of this vision quest you will identify your passion/work to build a better world, either as a difficult problem or a challenging opportunity to pursue. It may be something new or something already in you. Hopefully, this problem/opportunity will be a passion that you will work on for years. But for you to choose your passion well, you need to have a solid understanding of your core values.

A simple definition of values is that they are our concepts of how we think things ought to be. This means that when a choice arises we decide in favor of our idea of how we think it ought to be, if at all possible. In this way we shape our own future and the future of our community and society.  

Meg Selig in "6 Ways to Discover and Choose Your Core Values" in Psychology Today  wrote:

Values “are the principles that give our lives meaning and allow us to persevere through adversity,” according to psychologist Barb Markway and Celia Ampel in The Self-Confidence Workbook. I love both parts of this definition—that values stand for our most meaningful ideals and also that they inspire us to keep going when the going gets tough.

Values are the basis of our discernment ability, which is the basis of resilience. To identify and then act on our core values, as in steps 5 and 6 in Selig's article in Psychology Today, is how we develop resilience that transforms us.

It is often difficult to identify our personal values because they are so intertwined with larger cultural values, which we also must understand. It is useful to work through the six steps in the article and perhaps some of the other suggested resources below. However we identify and/or develop our values, it is essential to understand them, particularly to work out conflicts between values, because they are the drivers of our individual and social decisions and actions.  

See Brené Brown list of values and North American Cultural Values from Boston University.

In her book Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-based Change, the Native American writer Sherri Mitchell compares Native American and Euro-American values. She is a member of the Penobscot Nation. Her name is She Who Brings the Light. 

Native -- European 

communal -- individual 

elders -- youth 

cooperation -- competition 

   patience -- aggression

listen -- speak

harmony -- conquest

  humility -- arrogance

sharing -- saving

inclusive -- exclusive

wholeness -- fragmentation

collaborating -- winning

Based on the sources above, describe your core values in your journal.