How to Determine What Your Values Are

As a life coach, I frequently help people work to clarify their core values and take steps to better align their lives with what's important to them.

As I read Larry James' Urban Blog yesterday, he challenged churches to test how well aligned they are with the values they espouse, specifically regarding poverty. His suggestion was that they look at their annual budget and see how much they spend on helping those in poverty compared to all of the other things they do. Most of us don't need to actually look at the numbers to recognize that the portion we spend on buildings, staff, and programs focused on ourselves leaves little or no room for helping the poor.

In an incident still infamous in our family history, I got out a flip chart one night when the kids were still young and our church was facing a capital campaign, and we worked through how we spent our money as a family in order to gain an understanding of what our family values were. While I still get razed about the flip chart approach, everyone got the point. Core values, and even an area of misalignment or two came through clearly.

Looking at where we spend our money combined with looking at how we use our time gives a rather concrete picture of what our core values are. Sometimes when we do this, the picture comes out and we say, "Wow, how we're living really does reflect our core values!" Sometimes, though, we look at the picture and say, "No -- that doesn't reflect my values, just the necessity of spending my money or time to stay afloat." The latter calls for some honest reflection -- and probably some changes. Living our lives (as indicated by how we budget our money and time) out of alignment with what we truly value has all kinds of consequences -- and none have good outcomes.

So do the exercise and see what you learn. Then see if a little fine-tuning might not make a big difference in your life, or whether a major change in direction might not be indicated.