Here’s an interesting quote from Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead.

Your values can act as a compass in life. They can help you move in the direction that you know in your heart you want to move in. Imagine that you are on a boat in the sea of life. North is toward your values. South is toward perfectionism and avoidance. When you move south, you may feel safer, but you will not end up where you truly want to go.

In her book, there’s an exercise to reduce this list of values to only two values. That’s right two values. I found the exercise difficult, and I wanted to share my process for reaching two core values.

I started out by choosing the values I identified with and created my own list of values. Brené refers to these as your second-tier values. Reducing your second-tier values to two core values is the tougher task. Here’s how I reduced my second-tier values:

  1. Organize the values that relate to each other into groups (e.g. “knowledge” and “wisdom”)
  2. For each group, choose one representative. These are your “finalists”
  3. Discover which values will help you test other value(s). I repeated this step until I reached my two core values.

Here’s an example to elaborate on the third step. “Accountability” and “financial stability” were finalists of mine. But I knew being accountable with my finances meant I was practicing them at the same time. “Accountability” was more flexible than “financial stability”, and deserved a spot in the next round.

My process eventually led me to courage and compassion.

Give Brené’s exercise a try. Was it difficult? Is there a different process that helped you?

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