Tagged: Values

Personal Values

1. Enjoyment

2. Personal Accomplishment

3. Personal Development

4. Location

5. Health

After completing the Prioritizing Life Values assessment these are my top 5 values in my life. Enjoyment will always fall within my top values since I believe life is way too short to not do the things you love (so cliche, I know).  Along with that, personal development is important to me since I don’t find myself happy when I feel stuck in a place or situation. I enjoy continually learning, growing, and exploring. Building off that, location is really important to me and I love to see new places, experience different cultures, and meet new people. I think more recently health has become a top priority for me since college has definitely taken a toll on my immune system and sleeping habits. I think I place high value on personal accomplishment because my parents always pushed me to do better, try harder, and never give up. In some ways, this has bit me in the a** (pardon my french).

As you may notice, friendship or loyalty did not fall within my top 5 which, I think are things people often place a high value on. I also did not include community in my top 5 and so some of you may be wondering if I am an anti-social weirdo but as I write this I am actually on the Oregon Coast with a group of friends. A group of us rented a house down on the water for the long weekend. Today, we went to the Rogue Brewery in Newport, Yaquina Head tide pools, and spent some time wandering around the beach at Seal Rock. The weather report said it was supposed to rain all day and surprisingly it was a beautiful, partially sunny, dry day. There are so many values that play into my day, for example: friendship, enjoyment, and location. All of these values are also a part of my life back in Eugene. I am off to enjoy a wonderful seafood dinner with great friends and listen to some wisdom through Cards Against Humanity.

Happy MLK Day!

 

Evaluating Values

This weeks reading involved, “A Question of Values: Six Ways We Make the Personal Choices That Shape Our Lives,” by Hunter Lewis. The excerpt from the section “Sorting it Out” outlined how humans discover and assign our values. Lewis describes mental modes or the different methods in which we come to know things. The 6 different modes described are sense experience, deductive logic, emotion, intuition, authority, and science.

It was interesting to take a step back and consider how I have come to obtain certain values and knowledge in my life. For a long time, I have believed that values are a learned behavior and that many of the choices I make are based off of things I know to be true through logic. As a scientist, I find truth through observation and experience rather than through emotion or intuition. With that said, seldom do I realize that there are probably many aspects of my life where I have learned things through sense experience and emotion.

When I think about why I value logic and the laws of science over something like emotion I can’t help but wonder if the people we surround ourselves with and our career paths play a role in our developing values. Did I choose to study science because I value logic or have I placed a higher value on logic because I have chosen science as my field of study? This might be a chicken vs. egg type question that we could debate for hours.

Lewis proposes the following flow: mental mode ->way of forming value judgments ->dominant personal value judgment -> specific personal value-> behavior. In this way, our behavior is directly based off of our values and we have created those values based off of what we have learned. I find a lot of truth in this and think that our values can be revealed through our actions and words.

Lewis, H. (1991). Sorting It Out. In A Question of Values: Six Ways We Make the Personal Choices That Shape Our Lives  (pp. 3-19). San Fransisco:Harper.