Values are part of who we are. They are things we feel more than things we think. They help us navigate through life and understand how we contribute to the world. Jackie Le Fèvre, director of Magma Effort, spoke with the A Leader Like Me Nest community about the importance of understanding your values. In her discussion, she stated that values live within us and that they are a mixture of emotionally-rich and energy-driven ideas. She believes values are a person’s guiding compass, they help us identify what is important in life.

“Values are ideas that sit in the ancient part of our brain”, said Jackie during her masterclass. Values can also change over time. Members learned that the longer they hold fast to certain values, those values can turn into core values. Core values are values that are important to our deepest selves. They keep us aligned with our goals and help us make connections with people.

Jackie described values as both sitting in “a hierarchy and a cluster”. Values have order and we rate them by importance based on our beliefs and our lived experience, however, they also relate to one another and can change depending on our mindset. Here is a picture of different clusters of values and how they can form a framework.

Values are important to understand because they can support self-growth. Self-growth comes with holding ourselves to account against values that we chose to willingly honour. They shape the way we live and how we communicate with our friends and peers. If we take the time to understand the ‘why’ of the values we prioritise for ourselves, we can use that understanding to implement change. Values can shed light on the right path to fulfill our goals.

Identifying core values can help us discover the type of people we are and our sense of our ‘best’ self. Jackie talked about core values as ideas that are heartfelt heart and lived by each day. When we write our values down based on importance and read them every day, we can start to consciously live and act upon them in everything we do. This helps us to stay close to our truest selves and guide us to success.

Jackie Le Fèvre is the Director of Magma Effect and is currently embarking upon a Ph.D. exploring values and wellbeing. She is also the UK lead for Minessence Values Framework where she puts the theory of values into practice. You can find Jackie on Twitter @MagmaEffect and LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-le-fèvre

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