Values Exercise
An exploration of how your finances can support what you value.
Shrewsbury Financial Collaborative
Table of content
Values Exercise
Completing a values exercise helps you ensure that your financial life is in alignment with how you want to live your life. Make your way through the process presented below and write down the answers to each question. It is important that any values that you identify are those that are personally important to you rather than values imposed on you by others. Revisiting this exercise from time to time is useful to see if anything has changed in your thinking and to measure progress.
The Process
Think About What Matters Most
- What makes life meaningful life to me?
- In the past, when has life felt particularly meaningful?
- Who/what/where were the circumstances that made it meaningful?
- What kind of person do I strive to be in what I do and the relationships I have with other people?
Identify Values
- What are the values that show up in my previous answers?
- What are the 3 values that especially resonate right now? (See the example values list below if you need help getting started with ideas.)
- What exactly do those 3 values mean to me? How do they apply to who I am and what I do?
(Make sure you are choosing values that matter to you personally rather than something you think you "should" do.)
Expressing Your Values
- How am I currently expressing these values in my life?
- Give each value a rating of 0 to 10 based on how well your life currently reflects that value.
- What am I doing that is causing low ratings for my values?
- For each value, what is a small change I can make to better express that value in my life?
Your Values and Your Finances
- How do my finances currently support each value?
- What could I change financially to better support each value?
- What are the obstacles getting in the way of financially supporting each value in the way I would like to?
A First Financial Step
- Choosing one value to move forward on first, what might that change look like financially?
- How would it feel or what would I be thinking if I were to take that action? Would that make me not want to do it?
- What is a small step I would be willing to try?
Example Values
The following is a list of example value to stimulate brainstorming ideas. While some of these might be an exact match for your values, they should generally be considered as a starting point for deeper reflection in identifying your own values:
- Achievement
- Adventure
- Authority
- Beauty
- Belonging
- Caring
- Challenge
- Comfort
- Commitment
- Compassion
- Contribution
- Cooperation
- Courage
- Creativity
- Curiosity
- Dependability
- Duty
- Environment
- Excitement
- Fame
- Family
- Fitness
- Flexibility
- Forgiveness
- Freedom
- Friendship
- Fun
- Generosity
- Gratitude
- Growth
- Health
- Humility
- Humor
- Imagination
- Industry
- Intimacy
- Justice
- Knowledge
- Leadership
- Leisure
- Mastery
- Mindfulness
- Moderation
- Music
- Nonconformity
- Novelty
- Order
- Passion
- Patriotism
- Pleasure
- Popularity
- Purpose
- Religion
- Romance
- Safety
- Self-Control
- Self-Esteem
- Service
- Sexuality
- Simplicity
- Solitude
- Spirituality
- Stability
- Tradition
- Virtue
- Wealth
Acknowledgment
This exercise was based largely on material created by Cody Garrett.