Title: Personal Growth: Your Values, Your Life | Psychology Today
Headings: Personal Growth: Your Values, Your Life
Jim Taylor Ph.D.
Personal Growth: Your Values, Your Life
Are you living your life in accordance with your values?

Content: Have you consciously chosen to discard some values from your upbringing and adopt new ones? My experience with people who live unsatisfying lives is that the values they grew up with mostly weren’t unhealthy and that their present values haven’t changed since childhood. They never questioned their values. Instead, they simply bought into them early in their lives and created their life around those values. In contrast, fulfilled people tended to grow up with life-affirming values or had a “crisis of conscience ” in early adulthood that caused them to re-evaluate and modify their values. article continues after advertisement
Now that you have deconstructed your life and have a clear idea of what you value, you can see the values upon which you have created your life. You can see whether those values contribute to your dissatisfaction or bring you happiness. Look at which aspects of your life contribute to your unhappiness—your career, marriage, lifestyle—and ask yourself what values underlie those parts of your life. For example, if your career in the business world makes you unhappy—no judgment intended, but many of my clients happen to come from corporate life—you need to ask yourself what values you have held that led you to a career in business and how those values presently cause you to be an unhappy success. Popular Culture and Values
A recurring theme that runs throughout my work is that inadvertently buying into the values that predominate popular culture, for example, winning, status, power, appearance, and conspicuous consumption, is a leading cause of life dissatisfaction.