Example Exercises

There are a variety of ways suggested in the guidance notes that come with the cards. What follows are examples linked mainly to helping your clients to elicit their values.

Exercise 1: What are your values?

What is most important to you in your: career / workfinances (include material wealth, physical environment and possessions)‘significant other’ relationshipfamily and friendsleisure / travel / funpersonal developmenthealth

For each area that you wish to cover, sort out the cards that have the values which most resonate with you, jump out and call to you and you feel “yes, this value is really important to me”.

Write these values down for each area. You may notice some values are found in all areas. These are likely to be your core values. If you find you have more than 10 values written for any area you may find it worth finding out which are the most important ones. The more important they are to you, the more they are likely to impact your feeling of well-being.

Exercise 2: what are your values?

Rather than use the categories suggested in exercise 1, you may wish to use other types of categories: eg
communicationa particular objectivea teamleadership

Sort the cards into 3 piles: ‘yes, this is important’, ‘mmm, not quite sure’ and ‘definitely not important or of interest’. Sort quickly as dwelling on each card will probably make it more difficult to decide. When prioritising use the ‘yes, this is important’ pile. You are likely to have enough cards in it as you want to find out your core values.

Exercise 3: Prioritising values

To work out the order of priority your values have, use the cards that you have placed in the 'yes, this is important' pile. You usually find you have plenty to work with form this pile. There are a variety of approaches, which can be taken. However, I recommend that you use the follow approach that integrates all the values, rather than put them aside or 'discard'. So here it is.

Spread the cards out that come from the 'yes, this is important' pile so you can see them all. Look at them and find values that include or encompass other values within them. For example, one client of mine selected 'frankness' as core, with values such as 'integrity', 'honesty', 'trust' and 'respect' included within it.

You want to find between 4 and 6 core values. Any more and you are unlikely to remember them.

What's great about this approach is that you are already getting a fuller understanding of what the core values means to you.

Apart from ideas on how to use the cards that are supplied on the cards, I imagine you will come up with some too that will fit the circumstances you find yourself in.