319 - What are My Values?
What are values?
Broadly, there are a few definitions of values or personal values, from "a set of beliefs or opinions that influence how you live your life” to “the things that you believe are important in the way you live and work” and “broad, trans-situational, desirable goals that serve as guiding principles in people’s lives.” We can also have social or cultural values from the community we grew up in, and although values stay fairly stable throughout our lives, they’re not rigid by any means and can absolutely change sometimes.
Research on values
Although surveys and research done on values is extensive, we can’t go into detail about all of its findings, so these are the important ones to know:
We tend to hold values both as being very desirable and very important. People see their personal values as closer to their ideal selves than their personality traits and wish to modify them to a lesser extent than they wish to modify their own personality traits.
Humans tend to order our values in hierarchies. Some are extremely important, others less so. The higher a value in the hierarchy, the more motivated the person is to rely on it as a guiding principle in life.
Most people have similarities between value hierarchies.
Developing values
The research takes two perspectives into consideration to address the forces that shape our values.
Phylogenetic perspective: The idea that there are cross-cultural similarities in values because of humans needing to survive together.
Empirical research shows widespread pan-cultural agreement on the most important values. Scientists discovered in a value hierarchy study of 63 societies that benevolence and self-direction were almost always at the top.
Benevolence helps maintain in-group cooperation, solidarity, and stability.
Self-direction is prioritized “likely due to its importance for encouraging and supporting plasticity by motivating independent initiatives and novel ideas and solutions.”
Ontogenetic perspective: This perspective has to do with how we develop our individual value hierarchies. The process starts as early as age five, but one’s values change and stabilize during adolescence, and then often do not shift majorly in adulthood because they become an integral part of our identity.
What are my values?
There are a myriad of exercises to figure out your values, but one of our favorites is from MindTools.com:
Identify some times in your life that you were the happiest. What were you doing? Were you with other people? Who? What factors contributed to your happiness?
Identify some times in your life when you felt proud. Why? Did other people share your pride?
Identify the times when you were the most fulfilled and satisfied. What need or desire was fulfilled? How and why did this contribute meaning to your life?
Looking over the things you wrote, are there common themes? What has been most important to you? During this step, it can be helpful to look at lists of value words, like empathy, independence, freedom, etc. and pick out the ones that make sense, then condense into a list or hierarchy from there.
Reaffirming: When you look at the list of values, do they make you feel good about yourself? Are you proud of your top three values? Would you be comfortable and proud to tell these values to people who you respect and admire? Do these values represent things you would support, even if your choice isn’t popular?
An alternate approach could be looking forward instead of backwards in time, since the MindTools exercise relies on one’s already lived experiences. For some, looking forward towards things you aspire for may be more helpful than looking back. The things that you’re yearning for can have clues as to what motivates you, what is important to you, and what guides you.
Another exercise is about dreams, not values, but the two overlap to an extent.
Think about your life dreams (not necessarily tangible ones), such as having more freedom, experiencing peace, going on a spiritual journey, etc.
Discuss with a partner. Take turns asking each other open-ended questions about each dream. Is this connected to your childhood? What would happen if you couldn’t fulfill this dream? Is there a deeper purpose in this for you?
Transcript
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Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we are talking about values. Our personal values and our relationship values are what help us to know what's important to make the best choices in challenging situations. Today, we're going to talk about the research on personal values, how we develop our values, and some exercises for figuring out exactly what your values are.
Dedeker: Why would one wish to talk about values, other than this has been an episode idea that we've had at Multiamory for no less than three years? Actually, we really have. It's been on our Trello board for a long time. I don't even know what the initial impetus was for putting that as a potential topic but it's been there for a long time. However, if we think back to episode 312, not too long ago, that was on psychological flexibility. If you recall, part of the psychological flexibility triangle is, do what matters which boils down to, essentially, taking committed action based on your personal values. I remember in the research, I specifically found this phrase that, "Lacking clarity of one's values may entail a more rigid, rule-governed or avoidant behavior." I remember reading that and being like, "Oh, gosh. It's important. I don't want to have a rigid, rule-governed, or avoidant life. God, I know my values, but how do I know my values?" Hence there was more of a fire under my ass to be like, "I've got to figure this out."
Jase: I've got to figure out how to find values.
Emily: Exactly. I'm interested, also, to know what even that means. It's an amorphous idea. "What are your values?" "Well, I don't know. What do you mean?" What do I value in life? What are my values globally? What are my values for the trajectory of where I'm going? What does that mean?
Dedeker: Yes, sometimes I think, we confuse it also with what are my goals? What's most important to me? What do I like? What are my preferences? What are my boundaries? It can all end up in the soup.
Emily: Yes, totally.
Jase: Yes, for sure. Then even outside of psychological flexibility, knowing what your values are is important to helping us make good choices when we're in new, unknown, or confusing situations in life. Something that I've talked about on the show before is this concept of buoys. I was thinking, before starting this episode, what would be a good example of this. Essentially, the idea of buoys floating out in the water. It's that even if the water's real choppy or you're exploring a part you haven't seen before, as long as you can see, "Okay. There's a buoy over there, and there's one over there," you can roughly know where you are in relation to those, how far you are toward safety versus if you're going into danger. This would maybe be something like if I have a value, one of my buoys, would be something like-- it's a value of mine that I would never ask a partner to stop seeing someone else. I wouldn't try to cut off their relationship with someone else.
Dedeker: Autonomy of yourself and others? If we were going to try to put a label on it?
Emily: I like that.
Jase: Sure. I was just thinking of that as a buoy. That's an example of something that I believe in that's based on values and stuff like that. Then if I'm in a situation that's a little more gray, where I have a partner who's being really hurtful to me because of something having to do with another partner, that I have that buoy to go, "Well, okay. I know that's a limit of I don't want to cross that. That's where my values are." I've over here in this choppy water close to that, but if I start thinking, "Well, what if I do this," it's like, "That's a little too close to that buoy that I've marked as dangerous or outside of my values." Versus over here, maybe I can find something that is a better way of communicating that more directly with my partner and exercising more autonomy of myself and my boundaries rather than trying to exert power over their other relationships. Just as a rough example of how the buoy idea works. It gives you this touchpoint of that's something I want to stay away from or this is something that I am comfortable with.
Dedeker: Your guideposts as it were?
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: I'm surprised that this is the metaphor that you've come up with, even though I love it because you're someone who hates being on water.
Jase: On water is fine. You're misunderstanding this.
Emily: Just not in it. He hates being in it.
Jase: Right. I'm fine being on water, being on boats, being at the beach, totally fine. Drinking water, having water inside me, also totally fine. Me being inside the water is the one that I don't love as much.
Dedeker: Okay. Got you.
Emily: Knowing your values can help with things like tricky situations or tough questions, big decisions, things like, "Should I stay in this relationship? Should I put my foot down or is it okay to compromise here? Should I switch my job or my career completely? Should I stick with what's tried and true or should I branch out and try something completely new and different? How do I do the right thing even when it's super hard, super challenging?" Yes. These are a lot of tough questions that really come up a lot in life, and especially at those very pivotal moments in our lives. Having an idea of what one's values are, what your personal values are, can really help you in determining these questions.
Jase: I love it. Do you know true values? I'll put it another way. What does values even mean?
Emily: What are values?
Dedeker: I laughed. I feel like I have to explain the true values thing. Basically, there's a store in Japan that Jase and I went into. There's a chain of stores and their tagline is in English, not in Japanese, their tagline is, "To you who know true values."
Emily: Got it.
Dedeker: So when I was writing this episode, it just came out in my brain so many times, to the point where I even Googled it on the Japanese site of Google to be like, "Can I find which store it was?" Yes, I found the store. They have even an FAQ on their site in Japanese for people being like, "What does this English phrase mean?" To explain it.
Emily: What do they think it means?
Dedeker: Just that. The Japanese translation is pretty on the nose. "To you who know true values." When I read it in Japanese, I'm like, "Oh yes, that makes sense." It doesn't sound weird. In English-
Jase: It sounds weird.
Dedeker: -it sounds a little odd.
Jase: Those are more values or deals. We switched that a little bit. Let's talk about knowing true definitions of personal values or relationship values or whatever you want to call it.
Dedeker: I know these terms get bandied about a lot, personal values or relationship values or ethical non-monogamy values for instance. When I hear it, the first place my mind goes to is thinking about what's important? What are the pillars? What are the tenets of a particular philosophy or faith or community? What are the pillars of the earth as it were?
Emily: That's interesting because that's community-oriented, versus personal oriented, which yes, when I think about somebody who's in more traditional relationships talking about their values, maybe they're fairly religious and it's like, "My values with God or religion are very important to me." I feel like I've heard that from people that I've spoken to.
Dedeker: I guess we also have Christian values, family values.
Emily: Yes, family values. What does family values even mean?
Dedeker: That's a good question.
Emily: Is it, "I value having kids hence I am moving my line forward or something?"
Jase: It's also an interesting question because when I think about values, usually what comes to mind is just like I value honesty or I value following through on what you say you're going to do but then it could also be something much more specific and precise if it's your relationship values of like, "I value communicating in this particular way or doing or not doing this certain thing in my relationships." Then how that might change if you were to transition from monogamy to non-monogamy or vice versa of, okay, now what, which values might be changing versus which ones stay the same. Maybe I had these values all along and I found a way that fits them better. It's interesting because it really can cover this broad range from these very general things to very specific things.
Dedeker: It was initially a little hard to research this topic because the act of determining your values or being told, which values, somebody else thinks that you should have. That's the basis for a lot of religion, for a lot of self-help stuff for new age-ey stuff for gurus out there. The definition of values and also people's opinions on the best way to determine your values or the best values to have is pretty subjective but what I did is we pulled a couple of different definitions that I really liked, and I don't think that we can necessarily come up with like one solid definition, but I think between these three, we will probably cover our basis. This first one is from indeed.com. "The most basic definition of values is that they're a set of beliefs or opinions that influence how you live your life. They are ideas that are important to you and personally characterize who you are as an individual, values play an important role in shaping how you respond to situations and how you set goals."
Emily: Here's another one from mindtools.com, "Your values are the things that you believe are important in the way that you live and work. They should determine your priorities and deep down. They're probably the measures you use to tell if your life is turning out the way you want it to." That's an interesting one.
Jase: It's interesting because-
Dedeker: I don't think it's wrong
Jase: -well, that first one too is a little more focused on inside out how you make decisions. That second one also is then how do you evaluate your own life to coming back around the other way? This last definition is from a meta-analysis of many, many studies published in the research journal, Nature Human Behavior, which we'll be diving into a lot more in-depth later in the episode. That is personal values are defined as broad trans situational desirable goals that serve as guiding principles in people's lives, values refer to what is good and worthy.
Dedeker: I really liked that last bit but really condensing it, it refers to that just like what's good and worthy and how the things that we find good and worthy motivate us to live our lives and who we want to be as human beings.
Jase: I love that. Some other facets of values is that we can have social or cultural values associated with small or large communities that we grew up in or religious organizations, or even just like the workplace values that we might have where we work. There can be values that are held within the mini culture of a family or a relationship, just a little, two-person mini culture there as well. That values generally stay stable throughout our lives. That doesn't mean that they don't ever change or that they're entirely rigid, but they tend to be pretty stable throughout our lives. Similar to boundaries, which we've talked about before, where maybe those could change a little bit but it tends to be something a little more static as opposed to goals, which could be changing much more rapidly all the time.
Emily: I do like this idea of figuring out your values so that life isn't happening to you, but you are creating the life that you want to live, which is really interesting because I definitely, sometimes I'm like, well, I'm just along for the ride, but if you determine your values, then maybe you can take ownership to a degree in your life in a certain way. I don't know.
Dedeker: A little bit of both because I think in life there's a certain amount of just being along for the ride that we can--
Emily: We.
Dedeker: Yes, just kind of a we that we can't control but then our values help us out in situations where we do have more control or more decision-making power or I guess maybe when we're in a position of more empowerment.
Emily: All right. We're going to talk about some research, AKA, the circus of values. You wrote that down, Dedeker.
Dedeker: That's a Bioshock reference for all y'all out there.
Jase: This was a funny one, one where I said this to Dedeker at some point that like my friend, Steve and I used to often say to each other, "Welcome to the circus of values." Which is the line from Bioshock from the game. I told that to Dedeker and she was like, "Oh my God, Alex says that all the time too."
Emily: Oh, that's great.
Jase: Apparently, Dedeker is surrounded by a circus of values all the time.
Dedeker: It springs upon me.
Emily: There's a gentleman that loved the circus of values. All right. We're going to dive into this research study that was published in 2017 in the scientific journal Nature Human Behavior.
Jase: Oh, that's the one from before.
Emily: Yes.
Dedeker: It's the same one . Yes.
Emily: In this survey, the researchers compiled and organize the findings from over 100 different studies on values conducted within the last 20 years. Then they also attempted to take a cross-cultural perspective to try to focus on what were the universal traits in social and individual value.
Jase: They found a lot of interesting stuff far more than we will cover in this episode, but here are some important ones that we picked out. First. We tend to hold values as both being very desirable and very important. People see their values as closer to their ideal self than they see their personality traits and they generally wish to modify values to a lesser extent than they wish to modify their own personality traits, to fit the values. A sense of like the values are the ones we value the most.
Emily: Got it.
Jase: Welcome to the circus of values.
The next one is as humans, we tend to order our values into hierarchies. Some values are extremely important. Others, moderately important, some only a little bit important, and that a higher value in the hierarchy or the higher of value is in the hierarchy. The more motivated the person is to rely on this value as one of those signposts or a buoy or a guiding principle in their life.
Dedeker: They also found that there are similarities between the value hierarchies of most people. That, generally, our personal values are similar to each other much more than they are different between individuals. They found that values that particularly express a motivation to care for people close to us, those are usually held among the most important values to most people in most societies. Across the board, fairly universal, most people value guiding principles that lead us towards caring for people who are close to us, which is really interesting. Then in contrast values that express a motivation to dominate or control others are among the least important values to most people in most societies. There are some evolutionary theories behind this that we're going to get into later, but I thought that was interesting and helps to restore my faith in humanity, at least a tiny bit to know that generally across the board, we're more motivated by wanting to help others and care for others than we are by wanting to dominate others.
Emily: That's good. I'm glad to hear that. This is a continuation of the same research, but it basically is going to go into how people develop their values. In this research, there are two perspectives that it takes to look at the forces that shape our values. The first is phylogenetic perspective, which is basically just evolutionary perspective. There are cross-cultural similarities and values because of our human need to survive and to survive together. Empirical research shows widespread pan-cultural agreements on the most important values and one set of value hierarchies in 63 societies researchers found that the two values that were almost always at the top of the hierarchy were benevolence and self-direction and benevolence helps to maintain in-group cooperation, solidarity, and stability. That makes sense that it does.
Dedeker: Yes, but then the self-direction is a surprising one.
Jase: That surprises me to hear that that's such a common one.
Emily: Well, people want to be empathetic towards others but also they want to have their own lives.
Jase: Their own autonomy.
Emily: Life decision for themselves. Exactly.
Dedeker: I'm just going to directly quote from the study because I think they said it best, "The high priority of self-direction is likely due to its importance for encouraging and supporting plasticity by motivating independent initiatives and novel ideas and solutions because groups require both stability and plasticity in order to survive. These same two values are the most important in most cultures that have been studied." That's really, really fascinating because I think that when I think about cultural values or cultural IQ or things like that, I often think about more individualistic cultures versus collectivist cultures. In my brain, sometimes it's a little bit of a black and white it's either one or the other, but it's so interesting to see that actually it's a little bit of both that are very, very important to human beings because like they said, this need for caring for others, for the group to have cohesion, for us to feel like we can trust each other, and we're benevolent to each other, but also this need that we're not like the Borg or the high vine, where we only think as a group and we're only motivated as a group that actually having that individual ability to be autonomous and self-direct means there are opportunities for unique ideas, new things to try like independent initiatives that don't require the entire group behind it in order to survive and be as flexible as possible
Jase: That makes a lot of sense too if you think about human evolution on that grand scale of using tools and developing new techniques and technologies and things like that, that if we all just did exactly the same thing as each other, we would never learn those things that have that freedom to experiment and be creative. That's cool. I like that.
Dedeker: You need at least one person who's self-directed enough to chip their rock in the right way to have a hand ax. Then everybody has a hand ax and it's great. Here we are today human beings.
Jase: Human beings, ladies, and gentlemen.
Emily: That's interesting that the good of or an understanding of one person can help all but sometimes like that self-direction or self-efficacy is needed in order for someone to go that extra distance extra mile.
Dedeker: I think this is relevant in relationships as well because I know what I think of as the healthiest relationships both require that sense of benevolence between partners, that sense of trust and care, as well as the ability to make independent decisions. I think that we've seen relationships that maybe go a little too far in one direction, a little too far in the other direction of either it only becomes about caring for each other and not having any kind of independence. Maybe it's a more toxic codependent relationship versus there's no cohesion in the relationship and we're all just completely at cross purposes potentially. That's really exciting.
Jase: Okay. That was the phylogenetic perspective, which is more about that evolutionary biology stuff. The other perspective is ontogenetic or ontogeny. Ontogenetic.
Dedeker: On to genetic.
Jase: Ontogenetic, this has to do with basically the process of how we grow up. Technically, on ontogeny, I think is how you say it, it refers to like from the first cells joining all the way through the rest of our lives but generally, basically, it's--
Dedeker: Oh, did you just know that?
Jase: I had to look it up to make sure I was correct, but I do. The ontogeny begets phylogeny or whatever. There's some--
Dedeker: What are you talking about? Do you have this cross dish on a pillow and I just didn't know?
Emily: That's awesome. I love that.
Jase: I wish I did though.
Dedeker: Ontogenesis, the development of an individual organism or anatomical or behavioral feature from the earliest stage to maturity. Wow, amazing.
Jase: Ontogeny iss also the word for that. I guess I'm not quite sure how the two different forms of that word are used separately.
Dedeker: According, to Google word usage, it really peaked, I would say, where would I put this at? Maybe 1970 or so. It has dropped off since then so it's time to bring Ontogenesis back.
Emily: Yes.
Dedeker: Well, I think that it probably spiked around then, which is probably when that expression that I talked about the ontogeny begets phylogeny or, indicates phylogeny, that's when everybody exactly when the Etsy shop was selling all the pillows with that cross-stitched on it. Basically, it's the idea that if you look at the way a human embryo grows in the womb, that that mirrors the way that we evolved over time, the tail being there and then disappearing, and the idea that our evolutionary history may be stored in our ontogeny and the way that we actually like form and divide ourselves in the womb, which is pretty wild. I don't know if that's what scientists think of that now, but anyway, that's why I know the word ontogeny.
Dedeker: Wow, okay.
Jase: Bring it back to values. The point here though is that that first one was more of like evolutionary biology. This is more about your upbringing, how do you grow up to develop your own unique individual values as a person? The process of building values starts as early as five, according to the research, but they change and they stabilized during our adolescents. Then don't majorly shift much once we reach adulthood because often our values become such a core part of our identity that to change them would be, I guess, somewhat traumatic to our sense of self and our identity.
Researchers have found that there is some biological and genetic basis to what shapes our values since sometimes our values are shaped by personality and temperament but the biggest factor is the environment that we're born into. Our parents, our primary caregivers are our main influence, I would say, based on some other research, just about child psychology, also our peer groups, especially early on once we're in school, more of the time than we're at home. Then as children, we assess those values. We assess our parents' values. Sometimes inaccurately, sometimes we get values from them that are not actually their values, same with our friends or our teachers or other role models. Then we choose to either adopt these or reject these based on how we feel about how those values work out for them.
Dedeker: Let me just testify this whole judging our parents' values and sometimes we judge them inaccurately as children because I'm currently going to joint therapy with my mother. That's a whole thing. I could probably record six episodes just about that.
Emily: I wish you would.
Dedeker: Literally, just in the last therapy session, this came up where I had this realization moment when mom was sharing some stuff about, me when I was little and her stance on certain things where I was like, "Wow, I think I interpreted some very different messages about what my mom thought was important regarding a particular topic versus what she was actually trying to convey, or give to me." It really blew the doors off my reality.
Emily: Wow. I remember her saying something about you to me at one point about you as a young person. I was just like, that's not at all how I view Dedeker at all.
Jase: Oh, I see.
Dedeker: Well, that's also the wild thing is I think sometimes parents inaccurately assess their own kids.
Emily: Yes. Oh, for sure. Well, they have their own cognitive biases about what to expect or wants us to be versus who we actually are.
Dedeker: That's been another interesting thing about therapy is also my hearing, my mother's assessment of what she thinks my values are. Sometimes it's accurate. Sometimes it's not, sometimes grossly inaccurate, sometimes just a little bit. Man, human beings, the way see each other, we don't understand crap.
Emily: No, exactly. We're terrible at it. All right. Let's try to answer the age-old question, do values ever change? Many people assume that it's easy to change your values. Isn't it just as easy as changing your priorities or your goals or whatever, stuff like that, but it's not that simple? Research shows that adults really struggle with changing values and they find it even more challenging than trying to change something like a personality trait like introversion or extroversion. Research also shows that our values stay remarkably stable over time, but major life changes can shift them. I'm thinking about if you become polyamorous and you know, when you were a kid, you thought I'm going to grow up and have a kid and have a husband and have a whatever. Then you become polyamorous and maybe I don't want those things anymore.
Dedeker: Well, I would call that a shift in goal rather than a shifting value, because--
Emily: Interesting. I think that some people see it just when I think of somebody talking about family values, that it is initially this idea like going to grow up like my parents did, they stayed together forever, they had a beautiful family and that's what I value in life. I want the same thing that they had. Then ultimately that might change based on your relationship style changing.
Jase: Well, so I would argue Dedeker that it's not just changing a goal or a priority.
Emily: It's like changing life trajectory.
Jase: Well, and if we're looking at that second definition that we read that's about what you use to evaluate how well your life is going or how successful it is? I think for a lot of us, we were really brought up with those things like monogamy and parenting and certain types of relationships, being married, whatever, as a value of we evaluate the success of our own lives based on those. I actually would say that those things do cross from just a goal into being a value. I wonder if that's part of why we talk about the unlearning process when switching to non-monogamy can sometimes be really difficult. I wonder if this would be a future study, how much of that could be, how much is based on it challenging and forcing you to re-examine values versus just your goals or priorities.
Dedeker: That is interesting. There was a line in this meta-analysis that I didn't include because it was a little bit like a co-on, like its own co-on, a little confusing, but I'm going to try to recreate it where they said something to the effect of all values can potentially be linked to goals, but not all goals equal values. It's something.
Jase: It's like an SAT question.
Dedeker: Yes.
Emily: I want to write a book as a goal, isn't necessarily a value.
Dedeker: The way that I think about this, let's take that family example, I think that two people could have the same-- No, I'm confusing myself. Two people could have the same value. Let's say we both value stability. That's what motivates me in life, that's the most important thing for me, is I want to make a life where stability is key. One person could do that by recreating the life that they grew up with. I really want to do exactly what my parents did and have the 2.5 kids and the house and do all those things, because that means stability to me. Or person B could be like, "I want to have multiple relationships, but all of which are not dramatic and not a lot of chaos, good communication. Stability motivates me toward that goal." These two people can have the same value, but a very different goal. Does that make sense?
Emily: Yes.
Jase: Yes, different ways of achieving those values.
Dedeker: Versus maybe someone has a value of traditionalism where it's "I want to carry on the tradition that I get from my culture, from my parents, from my religion, whatever. Therefore, if I find myself in a life situation where I'm having to really switch up tradition, if it is, I thought I was on this trajectory of the classic monogamous marriage and 2.5 kids and now I'm finding wait, actually, maybe this other format for my life is different." That maybe that would be a little bit more jarring if your value was traditionalism. Either it would be maybe something that caused a lot of unhappiness for you if you found yourself not heading in that direction, or maybe it would be something where there would have to be much more of that unlearning process, like you said, of a shift in values based on a life change, something like that.
Jase: Yes, or finding a different way to honor your traditions, a different facet for that rather than just in your relationships. I don't know, that is an interesting question. I think it really varies based on what your value is around that and maybe reevaluating how you measure the value rather than just changing the value outright, that maybe it's looking at that of what are other ways I might be able to satisfy this value or evaluate it differently.
Dedeker: Yes, definitely.
Jase: Wow.
Dedeker: I know, right? That's why I love this topic.
Emily: I feel like we're just convoluting it, but we'll do a better job in the second half.
Dedeker: To get back to what the research says about people changing their values is that, yes, most of the research shows that they stay stable but there can be major life changes that do shift them for people. The most striking example of this can be found in the research of immigrants, actually. People who move from their country of origin to a country that has different cultural values, either drastically different cultural values from their country of origin, or maybe just slightly different cultural values. In several studies, there was a high correlation between an individual's values shifting before and after immigrating.
Just for one example out of many studies, there was a study of immigrants who went from Russia to Finland and it revealed changes in the personal values of these immigrants. After about 19 months in Finland, in particular, the importance of the value of universalism and security increased for people, and the importance of power and achievement decreased. This isn't necessarily a perfect metric. Again, this is correlation, not necessarily causation.
There have been other studies where they found that sometimes people who immigrate to another country already have some of the values of their target country, and that's maybe why they chose to immigrate, and there's maybe a little bit of a self-selection process there, but I think it is interesting that this life change, a big move into a different culture or even on a smaller level, maybe a big move of corporate cultures of your workplace or a big move in the microculture of your family could possibly correlate to a shift in your personal values.
Jase: I wonder if there's a value of being able to change your values versus a value of being rigid in your values.
Dedeker: There is. No, there is. In the research, they call it openness.
Jase: Okay, interesting. Another thing that they found in these studies is basically studies have shown that deliberately trying to change the values of someone else basically is futile. It's not going to happen, despite that being something that so many people try to do. We try to do it with our partners or our friends or our families, religions try to do it to large groups of people, but basically, trying to directly change the values of one other person, it's just not going to happen. You're probably going to end up in a lot of frustration if that's what you're trying to do.
Dedeker: In the second half of the episode, we're going to start to get into the nitty-gritty of some actual practical applications of this knowledge and some exercises that you can do to help determine what actually are your values. Before we do that, we're going to take a quick break to talk about our sponsors for this week's episode.
Jase: We're back to talk about what the heck are my values, though? I understand the circus of values and I know true values, but what are my values?
Emily: What the heck are my values, though?
Dedeker: Yes, nobody knows.
Emily: That's a really good question. How do we determine?
Dedeker: There are a billion, kajillion exercises out there for figuring out your values. If you just type into Google, "What are my values? Or values exercise or values worksheet," literally billion, kajillion. You're going to be spoilt for choice. I found a lot of them are not exactly robust. Some of them just amount to being presented with a long list of words, value words. Then you're told to just circle the ones that stand out to you.
Emily: Like in drama school, exactly.
Dedeker: Almost, yes.
Emily: Yes, like those sheets of paper, "What's your motivation? What are you trying to do?"
Dedeker: Yes, like, "What's your verb?" You're action-driven, what you're doing in the scene. It's kind of like that. You get presented with this long list of value words and then you're told, "Just circle the ones that stand out to you, and then those are your values. Great. Well done." I don't think that's necessarily a terrible exercise. This could be a good place to start, a fairly low-impact place to start but after reading and trying out several different exercises, the one that I liked the most was this exercise from mindtools.com, which I'm condensing and modifying a tiny bit here. You can do this exercise alone. You might consider doing this exercise with a partner as well if you're wanting to determine what your shared relationship values are. I highly recommend getting a writing instrument and just taking a little bit of time to think about these questions.
Emily: All right, here we go. Everyone, grab your pencils. Step number one, identify some times in your life where you were the happiest. What were you doing? Were you with other people? Who were you with and what factors were contributing to your happiness? It's number one.
Dedeker: The first thing that came to mind for me was when I first started traveling back in 2015.
Emily: I figured you were going to say that.
Dedeker: Yes. I spent a month by myself in Athens.
Emily: Your values are be a nomad, away from everyone? No, I'm kidding.
Dedeker: I don't know if I'd point it out as the happiest moment of my life necessarily, but there was something about that time where I just had a lot of free time and also had some good savings in the bank. I was able to have a lot of free time, just working on writing and going to the café and taking a nap in the middle of the day. Just floating around and petting stray cats and stray tortoises all over Athens. It was great. We can interpret what that means later.
Emily: Let's go to number two. Identify some times in your life where you felt proud. Why were you proud? Did other people share your pride? This is an interesting one.
Jase: I feel like what comes to mind for me is times when I feel like I did something that helped someone, that someone said later, "Wow, this thing that you did really helped me." For me, a couple of years ago, a friend of mine told me in a birthday message, there was this cute video thing that Dedeker and another partner of mine put together where they interviewed a lot of people in my life about what I meant to them. It was very sweet. In one of them, one my friends talked about something from 10-11 years ago that didn't even really occur to me so much as I was doing some big thing but to him, that was really meaningful at the time. That was something that I felt very proud of, I guess, and very happy that I had done something that helped someone I cared about and made their life better, in a way that to him was really profound and wasn't about me just accomplishing something, but really having that impact on someone. I guess that's what comes to mind for me there.
Emily: All right, number three, identify the times when you were the most fulfilled and satisfied. What need or desire was fulfilled? How and why did this contribute meaning to your life? For all of these, I'm just like, "Performing, performing." Really, though.
Jase: What about that for you? How and why did this contribute meaning to your life?
Emily: That's a good question. It just felt fulfilling in a way that so many other things don't quite check that box for me for whatever reason. Working on something and getting to be on stage specifically when I was in Shanghai like doing that, and really like meaningfully having performance in some fashion, like even this to a degree kind of fulfills that, which is really nice for me. Thanks, everyone for listening for like, I appreciate it because it is nice to get to be expressive in that way. I'm a very expressive person, with my body and with my voice and stuff like that. Whereas my mom is an artist, and I can't frickin do that for the life of me or even my partner super good at decorating. He is and I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just like, throwing shit on the walls but the visual arts are not my thing, but performative very much. All right and number four, looking over the things you wrote, are there any common themes? What has been the most important to you? This is the stage where it can be helpful to consult a list of value words-- oh, there it is, for example, empathy, independence, freedom, consistency, love, joy.
Dedeker: There's a billion lists out there. If you just look for a list of value words, you'll find many.
Emily: Pick out as many or as few make sense and then condense into a list or hierarchy from there.
Jase: Yes, hierarchy to kind of then which ones do you underline and which ones are you like, maybe not?
Dedeker: Oh, gosh, okay, I forgot about the hierarchy part. From the stuff that I quickly wrote down and jotted down, the recurring themes for me were freedom, and then achievement/accomplishments, and then I also wrote down play. I actually really resonated with what you shared Emily, about performing because I thought about when I was dancing professionally, and much of that wasn't necessarily about expression but it was about play, like play for myself and also playing with others. That kind of surprised me, actually.
Emily: I like that very much.
Dedeker: If I had to put them in a hierarchy, I guess it probably freedom first, play second, and then maybe achievement, but I think I got to sleep on.
Emily: I like that. That's great.
Jase: It's interesting too because I find myself that one of the example words here is consistency and I find for me, I'm like, "No, that's really not." Consistency as a regular pattern of life is not high for me but then when I look at my brother, I know that that's huge for him of like, having the consistency and having a routine and that for him, when things break that up, it's more stressful and for me, if they stick to the same, it can be stressful. That's really interesting. I was kind of noticing where that might fit for me versus other people that I am close to.
Emily: Yes, that's really cool. Okay, and finally, number five, this step number five is reaffirming. When I look at this list of values, do they make me feel good about myself? Am I proud of my top three values? Would I be comfortable and proud to tell these values to people that I respect and admire? Do these values represent things I would support? Even if my choice isn't popular, and it puts me in the minority? Oh, that's really interesting. That's like my mom saying, like, have some fucking conviction. Like, that's exactly to me what that entails to a degree because I think a lot of people are worried about saying what really makes them tick, and what's really important to them but if you have conviction about it, then you should be proud. Proud of what matters to you.
Jase: I also think about this idea of is this value something that you would make that decision even if everyone around you told you that was the wrong decision? That's interesting, too. How much do you believe in this thing? Maybe that would help sort of in determining the hierarchy too. Then the part of this that it doesn't talk about that I feel like this reaffirming step is getting out a little bit is maybe starting to ask that question of are these values that I have, actually, something that I value or more, is there perhaps a mismatch, have I may be just kind of kept some values around that don't truly resonate for me that aren't, that they don't fall into that category of like, this is a fundamental core part of my being and how I evaluate my life?
Maybe this is just a value that I've been told is good, but it's not something that I value for its own sake. I think that's the question this all kind of gets to when we talk about defining your own values is also looking at that. One other thing we wanted to talk about here is an alternate approach to this. This tool relies on looking back on the past, remembering these experiences that you've already lived to mine it for information, and that can be very helpful and very fruitful for some but maybe for others, that's not as helpful depending on where you are in your life.
Dedeker: Yes, I know, some people might be like, I don't think I've ever felt really fulfilled and satisfied.
Emily: That's an interesting point.
Dedeker: It's hard to look back on that and say and point at something in particular. I have a pet theory. This is not an exercise or a tool or whatever that I found like this is just kind of a little bit based on some Gottman stuff, but mostly from my own brain head theory, a little research lab that's bouncing around in my brain. The Gottman Institute has an existing exercise that they recommend for couples, and it's not about values, they don't really talk a lot about values in any of their materials. It's about dreams.
Jase: Not like nighttime dreams but dreams that heart makes.
Dedeker: No, no, no. Disneyland. A dream is what's your heart makes, exactly. They put a lot of emphasis on dreams, life dreams, things like that. The exercise that they have, it boils down to, essentially, each person thinks about their life dreams, not necessarily the tangible stuff, like goals, but the more deeper existential stuff and they do include a list of examples to get people started.
Just a few examples from their list are things like a dream to have more freedom, to experience peace, to go on a spiritual journey, to be powerful and influential, to build something important, so on, so on, kind of, again, getting to these deeper things. What the couple does is, is each person picks out a few of these, or they come up with their own, and then you and your partner, take turns asking each other open-ended questions about these things? Is this connected to your childhood?
Is there a story behind this? What would happen if you couldn't fulfill this dream? Is there a deeper purpose in this for you and this is an exercise that I do frequently with my clients, particularly with couples who are in some kind of gridlocked conflict with each other because this is a good way of just getting people to have dialogue, even if it's not about decision making, or coming up with an agreement or a boundary or something like that? It is literally just an open-ended dialogue and when I was doing research for this episode, I started to realize that a lot of the sample dreams that Gottman give and also a lot of the conversations that I see my clients have, it sounds a lot like talking about personal values. I started to kind of crystallize this theory that there's a personal value life dreams continuum connection, something or other there.
Jase: I see. you're saying, someday we'll find it the personal value life dreams continuum connection.
Dedeker: Yes, the Gottman Multiamory?
Emily: All right, for some people, instead of looking back on the past, it can be more insightful to instead look ahead to the future, and all of the things that you're aspiring to be, to get to. The things that you're yearning for can contain clues as to what motivates you, what is most important, and what guides you.
Dedeker: Yes, I think even if you haven't realized that dream yet, or you're not even sure how that dream gets realized. I think that's some juicy information.
Emily: Yes, for sure. Absolutely.
Jase: It reminds me a little bit of an exercise that a friend of mine taught me about years ago, that he does every New Year's like in place of New Year's resolutions, is he makes a list that to have, to do, and to be. You write down in the next year, these are the things I want to have, these are the things I want to do and these are the things I want to be. I think that's also another interesting way of just kind of breaking you out of the box. If you think dreams, maybe you just go to all like, I want to do this thing, do this thing, do this thing. Rather than also thinking about, well, what I want to have? I want to have a stable relationship, or I want to have, more friendships, or what do I want to be? It's like, I want to be a more compassionate person, or I want to be a more independent person, whatever it is. I like those prompts because it helps you kind of get out of just one way of thinking about dreams or goals, and expands it. That's also something you could add to this to help you think of some things.