Rick Torresen walks through how to identify your core values in three to five words. He suggests reviewing a eulogy you've written, pulling out character words that matter, then writing one sentence for each value describing how it shows up in your life.
Hey, welcome back, my friends. I'm so excited you've chosen to be a part of this community. Today, I want to talk about core values or no values. Roy Disney said, it's not hard to make decisions once you know what your values are. Today's message is the second part, or continuation from our last message. When we talked about knowing who you are, it was really about creating a life statement that will act as our North Star. If you remember, life statements don't define what we do. They define who we are and who we're becoming. Life statements are all about the impact we desire our life to have on the lives of people around us, our work, family, friends, and even strangers. Today, I want to briefly challenge you to begin to identify three to five core values, or words with a short descriptive statement that will guide and influence every decision you make. When we live our lives around our core values, we will accomplish our vision. Our vision and values are inseparable. You can't have one without the other. I want to start with a question. When you think about core values, what comes to mind If I was to define a core value? They are those fundamental beliefs of a person or an organization. These guiding principles dictate behavior, impact decisions, and influence relationships. Now, I look at core values like those bumpers in the bowling alley when you were a kid, or maybe for some of you as adults that kept the ball out of the gutter. Our core values, if rightly applied in our lives, will keep us out of the gutters of life. They'll save us from a lot of bad decisions and avoidable mistakes. Now, here's what core values aren't. They're not descriptions of work we do or the strategies we employ to accomplish our mission. They're not suggestions for living or dependent upon other people. Now, here's what I know. When we can't define our own core values, someone else is going to define them for us. Now, good core values, here's what they should do. They should govern personal relationships and guide business processes. They should clarify who we are, our life statement, and articulate what we stand for. They should explain why we do business the way we do, be the filter for all our decisions, and they require no external justification or explanation. Our core values anchor us in the storms of life. Now, I do a lot of executive coaching, and my passion is to help individuals and organizations and teams build roadmaps to help them get from where they are to where they want to be. Fundamental to my coaching is the development of, or in some cases, the refinement of personal value statements and corporate vision statements, as well as tangible, actionable core values. These two things are foundational for everything else we do in our lives. Now, like I've already said, if you don't know and live your vision and values, you will live your life around someone else's as a gift to you for being part of our community. You're going to find a Core Value worksheet to walk you through the details on how to establish and refine your values. It's attached to this episode and if you want some personal coaching, let me know. As we wrap up today's message, let me leave you with three things you can begin to do today to help you define your personal core values. Now, if you watched the last episode titled who Are youe? You've already done the first thing, which is to write youe Eulogy. I know I'm not gonna ask you to do it again. It wasn't easy. The second thing I want you to do is to go back and read through that eulogy. Take a highlighter and highlight all the descriptive words that identify a character trait or describe an impact you had on others. These words should reflect those values that are most important to you. Now, they may be words like honest and loving, compassionate, dependable, humble, and so on. Choose three to five words as starting place, and finally, you want to write one descriptive sentence for each word. That sentence should define what it looks like to actually live into that value or that word. From that statement, you should be able to immediately tell if your life is reflecting that word or that value or not. If it doesn't, you may need to adjust the statement or clarify the word. Now, put your life statement and your values together on the same page. Read through it out loud and ask yourself a final question. If I live my values, will I accomplish my vision? My friends, this is an extremely simplified process of coming up with your core values that guide your life. But the worksheet that we're including with this message will walk you through a more detailed and thoughtful process. Now, I believe so much in the importance of everyone knowing and living into their vision and values. And I want to offer you, for being a part of our community, a free 30 minute vision and value coaching session. There'll be a link in with this message that you can follow to find out how to claim your free 30 minute coaching session with me. So my friends, until next time, thank you for being a part of this community. I'm Rick Torresen and I'm believing your best is yet to come.
