Does your career correlate with your values

Question: I found it very useful to really think about and identify the values I have in my life – and then to compare them against what I do and how I actually live. It has highlighted that I am not doing a job that correlates with my values. Could that be why I’ve never really enjoyed my work?

Answer: It’s great that you’ve been able to not only find the VALUE ELICITATION exercise useful but be able to view them in relation to your work and life. And yes, it’s very likely the reason why you’ve never really enjoyed or felt in ‘synch’ with your work is that your Career does not Correlate with your Values?. Career coaches – whose use and popularity has soared in our current economic climate – use VALUE ELICITATION as an essential part of evaluating the type of career their clients are most suited to.

What are values?

To quote a colleague, a value is something that we want and desire because it adds value to our life in a non-material way. Values include personal standards which include ethics, morals and principles that are standards of behaviour that are driven by our personal beliefs, opinions and convictions. Values are personal emotional needs that we want and desire because they raise our personal feeling of emotional power.

Then there is what is termed in Coaching as True Values or Core Values. True Values are the actions that we take that have true value and worth to our Self. True Values are what we truly love to do in our life, once we have overcome the limiting beliefs that create our tolerations in life and drive us to get our emotional needs met. Our True Values lie beyond our emotional needs and may not be recognisable or acknowledged as achievable until we have learned the ability to meet our emotional needs consciously.

With that in mind, how do your Values look to you now? Ask yourself, what is it about this value that makes it important to me? Write that down and ask again – and again until you run dry of answers. Do the same with all the values you have listed. When this is completed, we can move on to your GOALS.