Life values

​​​​​​​The article was written based on the materials of the webinar by N.I. Kozlov at the University of Practical Psychology.

Unlike declared values, life values ​​are the values ​​of a person that really organize his life. A person can choose his values, but if he has chosen them, they become above him and he obeys them. Values ​​are like rules, and both are a set of prescriptions, but if a person sometimes wants to get around the rules, then life values ​​​​are rules that are internally binding on a person, this is what a person follows himself and cannot change.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to argue that it is values ​​that determine the lives of most people. The significance of values ​​in people’s lives is greatly exaggerated; few people really are guided by values ​​in their lives, and rarely ever. It can be nice to talk about your values, it’s natural to worry about lost values, but to live, realizing your own values ​​with every action, is difficult and not accessible to many.

The human organism lives driven by its needs, guided by its habits, and roaring with emotion when faced with something that does not suit it. Such a person can even say something about his values, if he has learned such words and it is beneficial for him to say them, in reality his behavior is determined not by values, but by much simpler mechanisms. A person is not born, they become a person, but not all of them and not at once, and life values ​​are an element of the life of a person-personality. Accordingly, you need to grow up to life values.

How to determine, and you have — what are really values, and what is not, petty habits and attachments? I formulated for myself the following criteria of values:

• The value is expensive. A person is ready to seriously pay for his values, it is more dear to him than …
• The value is recognized. A person thought about her place in his life and can convincingly tell why this is so important to him.
• Value is proactive. A person remembers what is valuable to him, without reminders: before his body, the people around him or the life around him will remind him of this.
• The value is positive. Unlike attachments, which a person can be burdened with, a person cherishes values, is often proud, and at least does not want to get rid of them.

Understanding your core values ​​in life is a very important thing. If you have lived a long and difficult life, and at the end of it you realized that you do not need and are not interested in such a life, then it will be too late to change something … If, on the contrary, you know well what you want in life, what for you are truly dear, every day of your well-built life will become meaningful for you. How to understand your values? This can be helped by the method of «Cards of Life Values», developed by prof. N.I. Kozlov.

If you have a habit of summing up the past year and making plans for the next year on New Year’s Eve, this is a good time to sort out your life values. It is very helpful to write down what is truly important to you, and then make sure that your life is consistent with your life values. Only a developed personality lives guided by its values: its goals flow from its values, goals unfold into plans, plans are concretized into the order of affairs, after which the personality acts. The more time you act not randomly, but in accordance with your considered values, the more you act as a human person.

The values ​​of each person are individual, like fingerprints. As a rule, our values ​​in life were largely formed before the age of 12 — thanks to or in spite of our parents, under the influence of school, teachers, culture, of which we are all a part. If you look at the hierarchy of priorities of different people, then many will have love, freedom, development at the top of the list, but everyone defines these concepts in accordance with their understanding.

What are the core values ​​in life? How many of them are there? The list of all life values ​​is huge, but everything that is too big can be divided into parts. In the case of a healthy individual, the core values ​​of life can be grouped into three main circles of values:

• Personal life and relationships;
• Business, business, work;
• Own development.

In a healthy and mature personality, values ​​are ordered, a person knows what is most important for him at this stage of life (self-worth), and what is a second-level value or service value: a means of achieving values ​​of a higher order.

The coincidence of the main life values ​​strengthens the relationship of people, the divergence or conflict of values ​​puts the relationship at risk. Close people are more valuable people for us than random people, and loved ones are the most precious people. However, how expensive are they? Each of us has our own hierarchy of life values, and each love takes its place in this hierarchy. Any girl is interested in what place she occupies in the heart of a young man: if she is higher than beer, but lower than her mother, it’s a shame. If you are taller than all other women, but after business, it’s normal …

The life values ​​of each of us do not develop in an empty place: we are saturated with the atmosphere in which we have lived since childhood, the idea of ​​the values ​​with which we were surrounded. The most natural way of forming life values ​​is not conversations, but the natural involvement of a person in new life circumstances for him, in which, naturally, these values ​​are close and necessary to him.