Our values are whatever is important to us, and whatever has meaning to us. We may value freedom, wealth, security, love, happiness, vitality, friendship, pleasure, success, excitement, family, power, health, fun, knowledge, or another aspect of life. We all have values. If we say that someone has no values, the person simply has values that differ from ours.
-Values provide a default during our development of intuition. In any situation, the mind must decide what to do, and so it employs various systems to make that decision. Those systems include logic, intuition, emotion, habit, charged elements in our designs, lessons from past experience, and values. Our value system is one of the defaults that the mind uses when we are not aware of messages from intuition. The value system gives standardized guidance such as "I value my health, therefore, I will order a low calorie dessert." When we are guided by values, our decisions are simple, consistent, and directed toward a meaningful goal. Without the integrating theme of values, our lives become a potpourri of unrelated actions leading in one direction and then another, and we are unduly influenced by other people's values, either defying them or conforming to them, rather than being firm and secure in our own values.
-Values provide a default during our general psychological growth particularly in childhood. Psychologists have mapped the developmental process by which children become capable of understanding morality and ethics. Some psychologists and parents reject value free education as an inappropriate type of freedom that is offered when children's minds are not yet ready for this responsibility. Instead, the children need to learn traditional values such as honesty, kindness, and contribution to society. As children wrestle with society's demanding values, they learn about the challenges, rewards, and rationale related to those values. In contrast, they also examine their own values, and they explore their innate wisdom and intuition by which they can create better values. Through the stages of psychological development, children gain the experience and maturity by which they can make values that allow both their individuality and a productive place in the world.
-Values provide the basis for healthy guilt.
Techniques for discovering and selecting our values
Design-work. With design-work, we can affirm productive values. We generate the energy tones that correspond to the new values such as friendliness or happiness.
--Affirmations. "My family is important to me." "I care about my health".
--Directed imagination. We can visualize scenarios in which we are enacting our new values.
--Modeling We can enhance our awareness of intuition. Intuition can guide us in our selection of values. Intuition is based on the dynamics of spirit thus, the values that we discern via intuition will always enhance life, prosperity, joy, and other favorable conditions for everyone who is involved in the situation. We can discover our values by making lists of things that are important to us and things that we like to do. These things are our values. We can examine the effectiveness of our values. If our life is not moving in a productive direction, we may discover that the problem lies in our values. If we value impulsiveness, this trait can be causing problems in areas such as our relationships or job. We explore the origin of our values. As children, we generally accepted our parents' values. If they placed a value on success, so did we. We have adopted values from others such as peers, clergy, or the media. In our process of individuation, we develop our own system of values. We examine our hierarchy of values. We rank our values so that one value prevails over another in a situation where there is a choice. We may have to choose between our values of freedom and pleasure, if we enjoy the pleasure of a friend's company but the person restricts our freedom. This type of value ranking is depicted in Maslow's Hierarchy.
