October Values Jam: Fueling Conversations, Building Communities

Values shape everything we do, and having awareness of our values and our communities values plays an important role in consciously and successfully navigating life and relationships. When we don’t know or understand our own values, how these show up for us, and how they might interweave with others, we can often create unintended disharmony.

What are values?

Values are inherent guidance systems that are available to everyone. They are ingredients to life. They are beliefs about one's own self.

We really liked the University of Texas’s video explanation and description of values as an overview: https://youtu.be/SCjYaatMJuY

Values are individual beliefs that motivate people to act one way or another. They serve as a guide for human behavior. Generally, people are predisposed to adopt the values that they are raised with. People also tend to believe that those values are “right” because they are the values of their particular culture.

Why exactly are we talking about values?

Values play a pivotal role in shaping our experiences and choices due to how deeply ingrained they are. But they can be easily misinterpreted. Knowing your values helps:

To guide you to the people, places and things where you feel a sense of belonging
To support you in setting values based boundaries with yourself and others
To direct or shape your thoughts, behaviors and choices

What can be tricky is learning to distinguish your conditioned values from your actual values, but this is an important step. Whilst we can’t unpack this fully in this article, we’ve added some insight below.

Your conditioning is in its simplest form, the way you have been shaped by external factors. The way you have been conditioned frequently impacts the values you identify with consciously or unconsciously. However, this is also where conflicts and tensions can arise, along with a either a sense of alignment or misalignment. If we are conditioned to believe in a certain set of values, yet we feel a pull towards other, often conflicting values, we can often end up feeling a bit off center and far away from ourselves. Cue the October’s Values Rally.

October's Values Jam: Fueling Conversations, Building Communities!

In line with World Values Day on 19th October, our September Community Call and our (to-be) new line of Conscious Coliving Masterclasses, we are inviting all of the Life Itself Community to take part in this month-long October Values Jam: Fueling Conversations, Building Communities! So often we navigate our lives, and by default our value systems unconsciously that we wanted to instigate even more conscious connections and conversations within the community, both ours and yours!

There are two ways in which you can participate.

By holding personal values based conversations In these conversations we invite you to initiate conversations with your family, friends and local community around that week's suggested values (which will be shared in the Whatsapp Community). We invite you to record the number of conversations you have each week so that at the end of the month we can work out a grand total of conversations achieved amongst our community.
By joining us on our live call to have a values based conversations with other members of the Life Itself community. There will be a 2 hour call on Thursday 19th October 7pm CET. In this call we will have the opportunity to come together and discuss the values inherent within Life Itself and it's community members, and to reflect on how our personal values based conversations are going.

We encourage you to participate in both.

Keep reading for more information related to the tradition of values and some tips and activities to get you ready for the rally.

Tips for value-based conversations

Sometimes values based conversations can touch on topics that are sensitive for people. Below are some tips to help you to navigate this month wisely.

Tip 1: Have the conversation in a safe and comfortable environment

Tip 2: Trust your instinct. Sometimes it will seem appropriate to naturally flow into the topic, other times you might want to schedule the conversation in advance and give the individual(s) a heads up

Tip 3: Come with an open heart and mind, and remember good communication comes with the ability to actively listen, not just talk, and to respect others opinions, even if you don’t agree

Tip 4: Set some ground rules for group conversations if you feel like it might be a sensitive subject or involves big personalities

Schwartz Values Mapping

schwartz-values-map Shalom H. Schwartz is a renowned social psychologist with expertise in cross-cultural research. He is best known for his significant contributions to the development of the Theory of Basic Human Values. Additionally, he played a pivotal role in shaping the values scale within the framework of social learning theory and social cognitive theory.

Schwartz mapped out 10 cross-cultural basic values:

Power: Social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources. (social power, authority, wealth, preserving my public image)
Achievement: Personal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards. (successful, capable, ambitious, influential)
Hedonism: Pleasure and sensuous gratification for oneself. (pleasure, enjoying life, self-indulgence)
Stimulation: Excitement, novelty, and challenge in life. (daring, a varied life, an exciting life)
Self-direction: Independent thought and action-choosing, creating, exploring. (creativity, freedom, independent, curious, choosing own goals)
Universalism: Understanding, appreciation, tolerance and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature. (broadminded, wisdom, social justice, equality, a world at peace, a world of beauty, unity with nature, protecting the environment)
Benevolence: Preservation and enhancement of the welfare of people with whom one is in frequent personal contact. (helpful, honest, forgiving, loyal, responsible)
Tradition: Respect, commitment and acceptance of the customs and ideas that traditional culture or religion provide the self. (humble, accepting my portion in life, devout, respect for tradition, moderate)
Conformity: Restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms. (politeness, obedient, self-discipline, honoring parents and elders)
Security: Safety, harmony and stability of society, of relationships, and of self. (family security, national security, social order, clean, reciprocation of favors)

If you would like to understand how your values sit within Schwartz’s Values Map you can do a free assessment here.

Activities to help you discover more about your values

In the first half of the Values as a Route to Happiness Community Call, Alan takes us through a practical exercise to more deeply and practically engage with our values. You can watch the call here.

Take a journal, and reflect on a typical day, or week for you. Note down the activities you do. What do you prioritize and why (i.e. through joy, expectation etc.)? What motivates you in your days/weeks? What makes you feel frustrated? What makes you feel alive or connected? Note down any themes or repetitions. Then you can start to dig a little deeper into understanding values that are creating a sense of connecting or disconnecting.

For example, if I spend a large amount of time during my week cooking out of choice, and I enjoy this or receive a positive outcome from this, I might distill that I have a value of pleasure, creativity or health depending on what I’m cooking. If I do this for my family I might distill that I have a value of family, providing or nurturing. However, if I do this, I don't want to be doing it and I feel exhausted or resentful most times, this might be a conditioned value that I have taken on but one that is not truly in alignment with me, because perhaps I value freedom and fun and I feel restricted with cooking._

Next, journal on your most ideal conversation or activity. What could you get lost talking about or in doing? After you have reflected on these, try to understand the motivating driver behind your choices and note down what this would be if it were distilled down into a value.

Secondly, to understand more about values, either use the values you have discovered from the above exercise or select 5 values from the list of values here, and take some time to journal on:

Why is this value important to me?
What does this value make me feel?
How do I currently integrate this value into my life now?
How am I planning to continue integrating this value into my future?

And just in case you had forgotten earlier, here is the link to register for the Values jam call See you then!