Values are deeply held beliefs that path our daily decisions.  Living by these values personally and professional can stabilize your life in many ways. Reduced stress and respect by others for staying your path will be achieved. Overall this will improve your daily life personally and professionally. Developed values can change over time. Having an open mind and allowing new life lessons to penetrate your mind can alter these rule sets. This will allow you to be an adaptable person with the capability for change. The only down side to this change is many quick changes to the facts being presented to you on a daily basis from friends, media and advertisements.  The term "values" means different things in many different contexts.  It is pretty obvious that it is not clear to everyone what the term "values" means.  These terms can have different meanings to different people. Having a clear set of personal values will help us build the credibility and trust that facilitate leadership.  The most challenging times for leaders are times when they must lead others into unchartered territory, leading innovation, and managing challenges as they arise. 

Abstract

Values are deeply held beliefs that path our daily decisions.  Living by these values personally and professional can stabilize your life in many ways. Reduced stress and respect by others for staying your path will be achieved. Overall this will improve your daily life personally and professionally. Developed values can change over time. Having an open mind and allowing new life lessons to penetrate your mind can alter these rule sets. This will allow you to be an adaptable person with the capability for change. The only down side to this change is many quick changes to the facts being presented to you on a daily basis from friends, media and advertisements.  The term "values" means different things in many different contexts.  It is pretty obvious that it is not clear to everyone what the term "values" means.  These terms can have different meanings to different people. Having a clear set of personal values will help us build the credibility and trust that facilitate leadership.  The most challenging times for leaders are times when they must lead others into unchartered territory, leading innovation, and managing challenges as they arise. 

Introduction

Values are deeply held beliefs that path our daily decisions. They are found within the subconscious and are tightly woven into the fabric of everyday life. We make decisions and choose our behaviors, close friends, professional employment, and entertainment based on our values. We follow this code to live our lives and we raise our children with these values hoping they will follow in our footsteps.

“Your personal codes of values are what are important to you; not something you want or would like to have, but something you literally need in your life to be happy. A value is a principle or quality intrinsically valuable or desirable to you. Values are personal. They are your convictions, your beliefs, and your ethics rolled into one. Your personal code of values may be identical to your family's values. Or they may be dramatically different.” (suite101.com)  Jerry Lopper (Website, March 10, 2007).

Living by these values personally and professional can stabilize your life in many ways. Reduced stress and respect by others for staying your path will be achieved. Overall this will improve your daily life personally and professionally.

Developing Values

Values can be developed though life lessons and the people you are around. Your family can affect your values in two ways. You can take the values as your where raised or in many cases young people have open minds causing a full circle in beliefs. This could be a result of the current educational system and what the main stream media pounds into impressionable minds on a daily basis. This is not always a bad thing. Different generations have different value sets. For example your parents might not have recycled but today there is a huge environmental sway in personal beliefs. This is caused by new information given to us, economy and personal experiences.

Developed values can change over time. Having an open mind and allowing new life lessons to penetrate your mind can alter these rule sets. This will allow you to be an adaptable person with the capability for change. The only down side to this change is many quick changes to the facts being presented to you on a daily basis from friends, media and advertisements. This can lead to a corrupt set of personal values. One example of this is the need to max out credit cards every holiday season because you think that is a requirement due to marketing ventures brain washing the people as a whole.

Values can be summarized in a list format. Start with a long list of general values. You can also build the list based on personal life lessons. A combination of both I feel would allow personal growth. An open mind allowing research and possible changes to your value system as time goes on is a strong trait to posses.

To build your own list from personal experiences follow this process:

• Think of a brief moment in your experience when life was especially satisfying and rewarding.
• What were you doing?
• Who was present?
• What qualities or values were you displaying?

“If life feels out of balance and you feel guilty that you're shortchanging family, fun, and your own health, you're not alone. In these days of business mergers, workforce reductions, and more work for less pay, many people are feeling a lack of balance in their lives.” (suite101.com)  Jerry Lopper (Website, September 13, 2006).

The term "values" means different things in many different contexts.  It is pretty obvious that it is not clear to everyone what the term "values" means.  These terms can have different meanings to different people.

Our personal values are our convictions regarding what we believe are important and desirable.  Each of us has a set of values.  A code is the set of values that we hold and the conflict, compatibility, and hierarchical relationships among them.  Personal values come in two varieties; terminal and instrumental.  Terminal values are the desired end-states that a person strongly wants to achieve like a comfortable life style.  Each individual has a different set of terminal values in his or her values complex.  Instrumental values are convictions about a person's desired characteristics or ways of behaving such as being polite.

Conclusion

Attention to our values helps us become more self-aware, make ethical decisions, prioritize our tasks, and develop credibility as a leader.  First, understanding one's own core values is integral to becoming self-aware.  Self-awareness, in turn, helps us understand how people perceive us and allows us to identify the personal qualities that we would like to change.  Values influence our choices, but our choices also influence our values over time.  If we neglect to examine the congruence of our actions with our values, our actions may be guided by immediate concerns and instant gratification rather than our values.  Change in values is a slow process, but it often begins with changes in behavior.  Over time, we come to take for granted the choices that we repeatedly make even if they are initially incongruent with our values, and our values begin to sway.  Clarification and refactoring of our personal values will stabilize this affect.

Values are important to managers for the simple fact that these are the people who internalize and act on standards of justice and human rights achieve a high level of moral development, and they make ethical decisions.  During our lifetimes, we pass through various stages of moral development.  Small children, at the beginning level of moral development, make choices on the basis of the immediate consequences of their decisions.  People who have not developed beyond the beginning level of moral development only choose an ethical alternative if it's in their immediate personal interests.  People who progress to the conventional level of moral development make decisions on the basis of the formal rules and informal norms of their social context, and will choose ethical alternatives even at the cost of forgoing their self-interests.  The small percentages of people who progress to the highest level of moral development make decisions on the basis of human rights, fairness and justice.  Such people are willing to ignore their self-interests and may even fight against society's current rules in order to act with their code.  People who achieve the level of moral development are trustworthy.  They cannot be bribed and they are not swayed by peer pressure.

Values are important to managers because an understanding of one's personal values is useful for time management.  Most of us have the opportunity to be more productive but a lack of personal values and organization skills hold them back.  Consequently, we need to wisely select the tasks that we'll work on.  A clear picture of our personal values allows us to rank the tasks on our "to do" lists according to how closely each task is associated with what's really important to us.  I have personally found the lessons found in “ 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Covey is a great place to start. This will not only make you more productive but help you achieve your personal goals and aspirations. More information on this topic can be found at www. franklincovey.com. Buying everything on their site will not be the answer but getting some guidance from these easy to read publications can help get people on the right track.

Having a clear set of personal values will help us build the credibility and trust that facilitate leadership.  The most challenging times for leaders are times when they must lead others into unchartered territory, leading innovation, and managing challenges as they arise.  Transformational leaders are able to persuade their followers to take a leap of faith and follow them into the unknown.  In other words, transformational leaders build trust.  Trust is a willingness to take a risk and make one vulnerable.  We are more inclined to trust people when we understand their values, and observe that their actions are congruent with those values, because we can reliably predict how they will act.
 

References

Gallozzi, C. (n.d.). Personal Values. Retrieved December 12, 2008, from Personal Development: http://www.personal-development.com/chuck/values.htm
Lopper, J. (2007, March 10). A Personal Code of Values: What Are Values & How Do You Find Them? Retrieved December 12, 2008, from suite101: http://self-awareness.suite101.com/article.cfm/a_personal_code_of_values
Lopper, J. (2006, September 13). Five Steps to a Balanced Life. Retrieved December 12, 2008, from suite101: http://personaldevelopment.suite101.com/article.cfm/five_steps_to_a_balanced_life