on discovering my personal mission, question 11

Life on Purpose: 15 Questions to Discover Your Personal Mission

Question 11: What are your deepest values?

I’ve tried to answer this question previously, while working with the Knowdell Career Values Card Sort. Very tough question, but so essential in life, to identify, to know, our values, to be able to speak, live our truth.

Knowing our values helps us to define the fundamental commitments that give shape to our life and work. For example, the Ford Foundation was founded “to advance human welfare” and all of the foundation’s work flows from this commitment.

The first “values” to come to mind are knowledge + creativity + freedom (here again, I’m inspired by the Ford Foundation, which has a program entitled “Knowledge, Creativity and Freedom” supporting “the search for meaning and understanding in a fluid and interdependent, yet deeply unequal, world.”

Other values I’d list are love and friendship, health (or well-being), equanimity, commitment (or integrity).

Getting at core values is not easy, especially when there are incongruities in our lives, between who we are, what we do, and what we (say we) value.