Listed above are what I find to be my top priorities.

I do many activities throughout the day that may reflect my values while I hardly even notice it. Today for example, I went to class (where we worked on a group assignment), had a conversation on the phone with a friend, caught up on some reading from class/did homework, went to the store, and then went to work. My group assignments and social work aspect represent my values of community, leadership, personal development, and service. My various activities such as talking on the phone with a friend, correspond to my values of friendship, loyalty, and also wisdom. My classwork and homework shows my values of personal accomplishment, personal development, independence, and creativity.

Some belief patterns that I learned from my family I have carried over and applied in my own life. My parents have always emphasized the importance of family and also good relationships in general. I have made this a high priority in my life to not only keep relationships stable, but also find appropriate social situations to get involved in throughout my life. A value I also attribute to relationships is loyalty. I find it important to stay committed and trustworthy to people who share my beliefs and values. My parents have also modeled for me the importance of wisdom. Within this value is the topic of religion. I have grown up in a very spiritually connected family and personal growth as well as growth in my faith and beliefs are of very high importance to me. While I have taken many belief patterns from my role models, there are some belief patterns that are no longer valid, but still have a hold on my thinking. These difficulties are ones, which trouble me when it comes to finding a career pattern/ lifestyle that is both enjoyable, but also financial beneficial. Although my parents have never emphasized wealth over happiness, they have displayed a successful lifestyle, which I admire very much. The way that I have been raised and the people I have been privileged enough to surround myself with, have given me extreme motivation for my future. I not only want success for myself, but I also want a fulfilling life in many aspects (enjoyment in my career, involvement relationships, and a stability through income to provide). I hope to complete my graduate program and pursue a job in my field of study. Fortunately, after my Master’s degree, I will have a wide range of job opportunities and fields in which I can practice. The difficulties I may face with my goals in the future are the location of my graduate program, the cost and duration of my program, and the location of where I will want to work after. Through these different stages and choices in my life, I will need to rely on my values and beliefs to reach my goals.

For this week, Our first reading was, “A Question of Values” by H. Lewis.

This article caught my attention in many ways, as well as it made me think about what values truly are. Within the reading, Lewis describes how we may choose our values. It is explained that one way our values may come about is through our inherited instincts rather than values we freely choose. It is stated, “But do values, in the sense of freely chosen values, truly exist? Are human beings instead driven by the inherited instincts, instincts that we like to dress up within the term values, so that we can pretend there is a measure of choice in the process, when it is really all programmed into our genes?” I disagree with this idea. While values can be very complicated and the meaning/term may be used more loosely, they are still a part of our individuality. I believe that the values of an individual can be shaped and chosen through time and are not a quality that is inherited. Some characteristics may be inherited, which then may alter one’s values. Although this may be true, values are not necessarily something inherited in a directly specific form such as eye color or a gene for height. The inherited characteristics that may influence our values could be, personality traits, social activity, and also the way we mature and develop as individuals. I know there have been many situations in my life from high school to college that have caused me to reflect on my values. These various situations caused me to think about different perspectives, decisions, and what I may consider to be right or wrong. The people we surround ourselves with, as well as the environments we live and work in can all shape, alter, influence, or even change our values.

Throughout the article, I found difficulty with the basic modes in which we form our values. Maybe I have never given it much thought before, but it is difficult to decide how we may arrive at our values. Lewis explains that, “…human beings cannot separate the way they arrive at values from the values themselves.” He continues to elaborate by explaining how our experiences, emotions, logic, authority, and “science” are all mental modes or techniques that help us form our values. By using certain ones over the others, they become more dominant for an individual. An example from Star Wars was explained in the article. The idea of one mode for values was illustrated by the choice of emotion when Luke is told to “trust his instincts”. Lewis then goes on to explain that these characters are fictional and it is not realistic that many people could use one primary mode in order to form values. I agree with this logic. I think that a person must rely on a combination of modes but may choose to emphasize certain ones given the circumstances. This is what makes human values so complicated and complex. This is why a framework for sorting through values and finding a way to focus our values is so essential. I have come to agree with the fact that values are extremely difficult to explain in terms of how they are chosen, and how we use certain values within particular areas of our lives. This is why I think our values depend on a framework that relies on our experience as well as the specific situations we find ourselves in.