Objectives

• Become familiar with the basic relationship of human values to psychological and philoshopical endeavors.
• Understand that values are formed from external and internal drives of an individual.
• Explore one’s own value system.

Original Post:

When asked to think about my life values that are truly mine and no one else’s, I found it surprisingly difficult because my first life value is my family and because of that they influence my other values. So instead of thinking of just my values and no one else’s I thought of my values based on how the people around me have shaped me because I know who I am today is because of them.  Next we are asked to show how we represented those values today, I am going to talk about this weekend in general instead because today was a travel day which involved a lot of sleeping. This weekend I was in Seattle for hockey playing UW and my dad and brother were there. Because My most important value is my family, i gladly gave up hanging out with my team for a couple of hours yesterday so i could show my dad and brother how much they mean to me and to really thank them for supporting me. The main reason I was in Seattle in the first place was because of hockey and how much I enjoy playing hockey. The last 3 of my top five; loyalty, friendship, and leadership can all be used to describe how i feel about my team. They first off are my friends and the loyalty i feel towards them cannot be matched. Being a leader to me is the best way to show that you care about a cause or a group, to really put the needs of the many ahead of the needs of yourself and i accomplished that by coordinating my team off the ice as well as being a effort leader on the Ice. After the top 5, the bottom 15 are in some order but not 100% in the correct order mostly because they all mean either just as much as another one or its hard to say which is ahead of which. The main one that was represented out of the bottom 15 is security, security in my future and in my family. I put security in my future by thinking about school as well as internship possibilities for this summer, and in my family by ensuring that i talk to them and keep them informed in my life and make sure i am informed in their life.

As to which of these values I inherited from my family, I would say all of them especially my top 5. I think that there are some values that i may value more than my family like personal accomplishment or wealth, but all in all my family has been the direct influence of my values.

The goals that I have yet to accomplish are mainly economical or my future job and family. And what is holding me back are a couple of things, my education level and my decision making. I need to graduate before i can truly get a job and eventually go back to school before i can achieve my ultimate goal. What that ultimate goal is though is unclear. That is my second problem, I do not know what I want to do. I feel like i should work for a while in the financial field and by doing that will figure out exactly what I want to do.

 

Reflection:

This was my favorite assignment of the first half of the course because it really made me step back and think about what was important to me alone and not other people. This is huge because ordering what means the most to me was tough after the first aspect, family, because a lot of things mean something to me and to rank them is difficult. As I thought about where these came from though I got a little confused because I would say they come mostly from my family, but then my siblings would have the same ranking of values as I do and I know they do not. So reading “A Question of Values: Six Ways We Make the Personal Choices That Shape Our Lives” by Lewis made me realize that our decisions, in the most basic sense, come from sense experience, deductive logic, emotion, and intuition. This made me realize that I think differently than my siblings so my values can’t only come from my family but my experiences and how I responded to them.

I think this assignment has proven the objectives of the artifact because at first I didn’t really consider what my values were or how to rank them or where they come from so to realize that values are formed from external and internal drives in myself was huge. This will help me in the future because I know what my priorities are and can act on them and don’t have to debate what to do. I do believe that my internal drive is greater than the external one and that is why I am different than my siblings. But the external drives are what make my number one my family because they do mean the most to me and that has been the teachings of my parents and grandparents since I can remember “we will always be here for you no matter what decisions you make in life”. This is what drives my internal voice or drive so do something that pleases myself in order to please my family.

 

Future:

In the future I will continue to prove these life values and strive to better myself and the people around me based on that, and hopefully if I ever have kids I can prove to them that they are my number 1 value.