A Research Paper By Andrea Fisk, Health Coach, UNITED STATES
Singing Bird Health Partners Podcast Notes for Uncovering Values
First Episode: Uncovering Values
How would you answer the question “What are your values?” It doesn’t sound that complicated, right? Or is it?
Are you the sort of person who follows the rules to a T or do you skirt them every chance you get? Wouldn’t you like to know why?
I’m Andrea Fisk, I’ve been practicing Chinese medicine for 24 years and I’m a Certified Professional Coach who likes to figure things out! I hope you’ll join me for this episode of Uncovering Values.
As a child growing up in the South, it felt like only ministers and politicians had permission to talk about values. It was also clear that your values had better be aligned with everyone else’s values. The term values was like a right hook for the righteous and so I just avoided it.
The subject of values came up again when I entered my thirties and became a healthcare practitioner, working one-on-one with people. Over the last twenty years, I’ve witnessed countless patients say with conviction that they valued their health and while they followed through on showing up for their appointments, showing up seemed to be the extent of their dedication.
These examples of contradiction in my life created a general level of discomfort around the term “values”. This became significant just a few months ago when values came up in my life coaching classes. Values felt slippery and uncertain, a little like walking on ice.
As a long-term seeker of self-discovery and improvement, I suddenly felt certain I should know what my own values were. What had factored into this lack of understanding on my part? Was it my unconventional upbringing? Was it because I was the daughter of divorced parents, raised in four different households? Or maybe because I was exposed to several different religions as a child? Did I miss out on some teaching that other people had received?
Curiosity and frustration led me to take online values assessments. If you google the term “values assessments”, several free online tests will come up. These multiple-choice tests are created by psychologists who study values and what types of qualities people find to be assets. Your end product is a list of values that the test has determined match you.
Three online tests and three different values lists later I sadly came away with more questions than clarity. Some of the values generated by these tests felt true to me as a quality that I think is important, like curiosity or love of learning. But others made almost no sense at all. Two of these online assessments listed beauty as a high value for me. And though it’s true that I find small details in nature to be the most exquisite beauty in the world, and also have an undergraduate art degree I wouldn’t say beauty is something I value. So what does it mean to value something?
So I set out to understand what is meant by the term values, why values are so important for us personally, as a human race, and what part they play in our world.
The term “values” has two definitions, the first being “what something is worth”, and the second being “principles or standards of behavior”. The second definition sounds a lot like a credo, which is a statement of beliefs, but after several months on this journey, I have started to understand that values are more subconscious than this.
In her groundbreaking book, The Values Compass, Dr. Mandeep Rai describes values as “something apparent yet unspoken” (Rai, 2020, 4). Dr. Rai traveled the world as an economist and journalist observing countries and how they lead their lives. She defines values as “A cultural language that you can see in everyday life as well as how a country responds to major events” (Rai, 2020, 4). As Rai travels the globe for her work she catalogs this language into values that define each of the 101 countries she visits. Her book divides the values into five sections reflecting “different areas of our lives in which values can help us to make decisions and find direction”(Rai, 2020, 7). In a nutshell, this system articulates how these countries use their values to continue their way of life.
If we dig deeper into The Value Compass, the chapters on the United States and Sweden illustrate how these countries use different values to advance their way of life and prosper. Just in case you are curious, I didn’t randomly select these two countries to juxtapose. The United States and Sweden share great success in innovation, despite being vastly different in size, economy, and most importantly values. The United States is known for entrepreneurial enterprises and innovation with more personal gain as the desired end result. Sweden is ranked as one of the world’s most innovative countries, but unlike the US their management style is based on flexibility rather than hierarchy. (Rai, 2020,186,188). So if they are both successful in innovation, what values do they use to help them achieve that success and keep going?
Entrepreneurship is the value Rai assigns to the United States. She describes entrepreneurship as a “change value” meaning the United States conditions its citizens to “pursue change and shift gears when circumstances require it” leading to innovation (Rai, 2020, 84). This idea of innovation that leads to “personal success and collective progress” helps the United States continue to move forward (Rai, 2020, 84). Cooperation is the value Dr. Rai assigns to Sweden and this shows up in her book as a “connection value, shaping relationships with friends, family, colleagues, neighbors, and strangers”(Rai, 2020, 8). Quite the opposite of the United States’ hyper-capitalist culture, “Sweden’s innovation economy is based on a deeply rooted culture of consensus and cooperation” (Rai, 2020, 187). It’s nice to see that both countries are known as innovators but due to cultural norms and history, they arrive there by applying different values.
One of the central tenets of values is that they hold up under pressure, and Dr. Rai’s best current example of this is Ukraine’s value of freedom. In an interview Dr. Rai had with the Ukrainian Minister of Finance, Oleksandr Danylyuk, he stated “We’ve been fighting for our freedom for centuries, it’s in our genes and that’s what drives us forward”(Rai, 2020, 78). Dr. Rai states later that “it is the absence of true liberty that makes freedom so central to the identity of Ukraine” (Rai, 2020,79). Given the last two years of struggle in Ukraine, I would have to agree with Dr. Rai that the value of freedom is holding up under pressure.
It was becoming clear to me that values are characteristics that show up repeatedly in action over time, are woven into the systems they come from, and most importantly, these values hold up under pressure.
I became curious, when and how do we develop an individual value system? And why couldn’t I articulate my own?
In an online article from the website Mental Help, they state that “Part of the human journey involves the gradual rediscovery of these innate and highly personal desires, which get unconsciously hidden away when they are seen to conflict with society’s demands” (Self-Help Values And Morals Clarification: Value Changes, n.d.) It was starting to make sense to me that my values had been hidden away as a youth. The threat of judgment and disapproval societally was overwhelming to me as a young and inclusive individual who looked to welcome and accept rather than condemn. As a youth in the late 70s with low support, it was hard to call out judgmentalism in adult behavior and speak to the non-judgmental and inclusive values that felt true to me. I do remember hearing the terms discernment and non-judgmentalism as a person in my early 20s and understanding deeply that those terms described characteristics in me.
I realized that we are all experiencing layers of value sets created by our country, our religion, our schools, our companies, and our families that either layer well with us, or just don’t. The more unspoken, undocumented, unarticulated the values the harder it is to sort them from our own.
I felt clearer about why my values had been hidden but I was still left questioning those value assessment lists. Since looking at where we’ve been helps us understand where we are I wondered what were the family values from my youth that I had carried into adulthood. What had made it through this layering for me? After searching through the previously mentioned values assessment lists I found a few values I could associate with the individuals raising me: Love of learning, flexibility, compassionate communication, intentionality, and perfectionism to just name a few.
Which of these values stayed with me through growth and maturity, and which have been replaced or shifted?
Let’s start with a value that made the evolutionary cut. My father’s mother had a deep love of learning. She approached life with wonder and curiosity so the library, encyclopedias, and investigation were always a moment away. Her passion for the natural world was an endless place for understanding and she included me in it all even as a very young child. I would save up my questions or discoveries for her so that when we were together two days a week we could discuss these topics. She would be pleased to note that I spend quite a bit of my current life researching health-related issues for people and making connections simply out of curiosity related to learning. It is clear that we share this value. I went on to get a lot of higher education and married a person who also loves learning. There were very few challenges to this value throughout my lifetime, but I am certain if someone were to take away my ability to learn or access information the world would not be the same for me.
My example of a value that didn’t make the evolutionary cut is perfectionism. In my mother and stepfather’s home perfectionism underscored every engagement or interaction. And not the kind of perfectionism that drives people like Beethoven to excellence, but the kind of perfectionism that is about how you appear to others. If you liked a sports team, they needed to win. If you went to school, you better make A’s. If you were a child, you could look like a child, but you better act like an adult. It was hard to deviate from this directive and I definitely carried this into adulthood. I would currently describe myself as a recovering perfectionist, and I’ve worked hard to try to reduce this knee-jerk reaction in myself.
So why leave perfectionism behind? I mean making A’s and presenting as “perfect” will really get you ahead, right? As I read the online article by Mental Help I realized that perfectionism and my adoption of this value as a child were often in conflict with my need for self-exploration, learning, and creativity. It impacted how I felt about myself and being able to engage those other values. Most importantly, values like creativity and flexibility survived in spite of perfectionism. I actually laughed out loud when I saw perfectionism on the online values assessment lists, feeling that it was a somewhat destructive value in my life and wondering who might claim this as a core value. But it’s true that some people hold perfectionism above all else.
As I was starting to sort through the layers covering my own values I began to wonder what are other reasons a person might be out of touch with their values as an adult.
“Sometimes people don’t have the attention to wonder what their values are because they are too busy trying to survive. Values only become important as motivators when your basic needs are already met” (Self-Help Values And Morals Clarification: Value Changes, n.d.). It stands to reason that if people grow up worrying about their homes, food, income, or health it will greatly reduce their ability to sort through which of their “innate highly personal desires” are different from their families and which ones might help them move past their circumstances.
So as I looked at my list I could see that some of the values that were cultivated in my family made it through to adulthood, what if a person is in an environment where none of the values feel true to them? I imagined what it would have been like if I had only been exposed to the value of perfectionism, would I have discovered my creativity or my love of learning? In some situations, people may have a whole different set of personal values that they can’t live out due to the values of the larger community around them.
Now it’s becoming more clear how our circumstances and the values of those around us can layer over our own unique values, and that as we shift into adulthood we begin to establish the values that are truest to us. But what about as I age? I have only been studying this topic for a short time and already I can see that some values that felt set in stone in my 20s, 30s, and 40s are shifting now that I am in my 50s. Can I expect more changes?
In a Science Direct article about values and aging they say “The older the person(s), the more they favor conservation-related values, and the less they prioritize stimulation and change” (Borg, 2021). Honestly, as a liberal, I didn’t like the sound of this, but as I read further in the article it’s clear that they are still trying to create more accurate measurement tools within these online values assessment surveys.
The article also goes on to say that in older life we also favor passing on information to the younger generation whereas our own learning and development may have been a priority in the past. That doesn’t sound too bad to me, and kind of reminds me of my grandmother.
Now that we have explored a few of the ways that values are layered and shift throughout our lives we are ready to look at different types of personal values and how to determine yours. I hope you’ve enjoyed this segment. Join me next time on Uncovering Values.
References
Borg, I. (2021, April). Age and the subjective importance of Personal Values. Personality and Individual Differences, 173.
Rai, M. (2020). The Values Compass: What 101 Countries Teach Us About Purpose, Life, and Leadership. Simon & Schuster.
Self-help Values And Morals Clarification: Value Changes. (n.d.). MentalHelp.net. Retrieved May 2, 2023, from