Seven Ways to Develop Your Value System

Some of us may be wondering, “My value system? What does it really matter?” Trust me, your value system matters more than you’ll ever know. Your value system defines who you are and portrays to others that person. Your value system defines your character and in fact is a major formative agent of your personality.

Here are six factors that form your personality:

1. Your value system: The value system of one individual differentiates him from another and defines what makes him different from the other.
2. Your skills and abilities: All your skills and abilities are a result of your value system. The skills you decide to acquire are dependent on your value system.
3. Your character: Your character is a set of distinctive qualities you display as a result of your value system. Honest people have a value system built on truth.
4. Your free will: Everyone defines freedom in different ways. What you consider right to do when you are given freedom is a function of your value system.
5. Your emotions: We all have different temperamental dispositions that equally define us. These dispositions are the natural agents that cause us to depict emotions in various situations differently.
6. Your social appearance: The way you act and behave in the public or society is also a function of your value system and defines you social personality.

From these six factors that define our personality, it can be observed that who we are is deeply rooted in our value system and a change in our value system can almost instantly cause a change in our personalities – our abilities, character, free will, emotions and social appearance.

Note: There is a difference between your beliefs and your values.

How to Develop the Right Value System

A value system that is built on excellence, kindness, integrity, love, compassion, and other such moral virtues can obviously be considered as a “right value system”. Changing and developing yourself starts with changing your value system.

Two ways we experience change include:

1. Unexpected tragedy or pain: Whenever something tragic happens to you, you most often will find yourself reevaluating your life. It could be a severe accident or the death of a loved one. You tend to experience positive or negative change when you go through pain.
2. Self-inflicted pain: This is the kind of pain you inflict on yourself to effect change. It does not pertain to physically hurting yourself in ways such as cutting your fingers or flogging yourself with chains as some of us may be thinking. Rather, it pertains to disciplinary actions you take in order to work on yourself and your value system such as deciding to wake an hour earlier than normal to develop the value of resoluteness in time management, striving to keep every of your rational and irrational promises to develop integrity and so on.

Seven ways to work on yourself include:

1. Determine and write down the list of values you want to develop. Don’t write down more than fifteen so that you can better focus on those values until you have developed them to maturity.
2. Find and write down at least three ways to work on yourself by self-inflicted pain, inconvenience or discomfort in each of those values daily.
3. Place yourself in the environment or create one if none exists that is in accordance with the values you wish to develop. For instance, it is easier to develop the value of responsibility when you have people around you that look up to you. Research has shown that 50% of human development can be attributed to the environments they function in.
4. Give yourself a daily report of how successful you were in exercising that value. Use the Benjamin Franklin Principle of focusing on one value a week and giving yourself percentile scores daily. Remember, change is more effective when gradual. Don’t push yourself too much, just ensure that you are making progress no matter how little each day. Gradual and steady progress always results in effectual change.
5. Make a study plan for yourself of books, videos, audio (including movies and music) and such informative materials that will cultivate in you those particular values you wish to develop.
6. Create a control system or structure; a good example is a spouse, or a friend – someone that you can be accountable to, that will help you monitor your progress.
7. Apply the Albert Einstein Principle of ‘research until there’s nothing left to study on that subject’ in developing your value system. Keep working on yourself for as long you live. Don’t quit even when it seems your value system has been developed to a reasonable and satisfactory level of maturity.