What Are Your 5 Values?

What Are Your 5 Values?

Mike’s blog 171

Wrapping things up here in Saigon and one big takeaway is defining your own values. For yourself and then your  business- which hopefully align. John Logar is an amazing speaker and giver in general – have seen him speak a few times now and he just never fails to put a ton of energy and passion into having those listening take something away from it. In his full morning session at dcxsgn he had a session on defining your core values.

Listing out about 50 values on the projector, he had us pick 5 of them that meant the most to us. Then we paired up with someone near us and I was lucky enough to get Dana – a very positive minded individual. Each take turns to listen to the other person explain each of their 5 values and why they are important to them.

After explaining these values, you need to rank them from most important to least – which is pretty tough as you already picked these 5 out of the 50+ values on the board.

And here is where it gets really wild – the other person reads them back to you, and what you said that made them important.

Dana wrote out most of what I said, and I want to share them with you today – here are my top 5:

1) Authority – it is the foundation, to be an authority. Makes you different and special. Shows leadership and knowledgeable and encompasses trust for people to follow you.

2) Influence – Turning content to sales. Getting people to take action. Influence gets people to take action. Positively improve someone’s life.

3) Contribution – hate to keep knowledge. Contribute to the world. Stoicism – in death still contributing. Loves online content as it reaches people.

4) Growth – not growing then we are dying. Make incremental improvement. Track things. Go positive in the right direction. If not, learn why not.

5) Knowledge – knowledge is power, to make a better life. Freedom. Give people the opportunity if they are willing to grow their knowledge. Not protected knowledge. Give opportunity to people to improve their life. As currency, to make yourself between. Giving.

Pretty wild when I read that back, and again as I typed this out for today’s blog post.

Quite a few others had different values, such as inner harmony, love, honesty, leadership, freedom, adventure, fun.

I used to have different values – even just remembering what I blogged about. One being adventure. That has slowed down as I am older, as I have traveled quite a bit, as I have a wife and kids and am more content.

John explained how values do change over time and that is normal. The time I am in right now I am pretty “comfortable in my own skin” type feeling. It takes quite some time to see who you are, and where you want to go.

I plan to be in Asia long term, I see what I am doing in my work with Global From Asia and the cross border e-commerce community as something I can do for quite some time. So much work to do there, and going to these values I have outlined, so much more authority, so much more influence, knowledge, contributions, and growth to go.

Strongly encourage you to practice this. Search online about values, see a list, pick a few – and if you can – grab a friend or an “ear” to listen to what you say about each of those 5 values and why you think they are important.

The goal then is to remember these, and help you better direct the direction of your “life ship” and understand why you are making the decisions you are making.