Title: 6 Ways to Discover and Choose Your Core Values | Psychology Today
Headings: 6 Ways to Discover and Choose Your Core Values
Meg Selig
6 Ways to Discover and Choose Your Core Values
Knowing your values can guide your actions and give you inner peace.

Content: Knowing why you are choosing Value 1 instead of Value 2 can be helpful in resolving any inner conflict you may feel. And certain values may rise to the top in particular situations. For example, during an emergency, “survival” may become the value that guides your actions. Values will also shift over time as you fulfill your various goals —for example, once you achieve a comfortable degree of "financial security," that value may recede into the background and other values may take its place. article continues after advertisement
Sometimes you’ll have to defend against difficult people—such as psychopaths, extreme narcissists, and master manipulators—who seem to be guided by negative values. With such people, it can be a challenge to stick to the positive values highlighted in this blog. Then there are the people who pay lip service to “core values” and “family values,” but whose choices betray their words as just empty rhetoric. Observing yourself and being honest about what you see might keep the phrase “core values” from becoming a cliché. You can’t be perfect and you’ll often need to compromise, but you can aim for the integrity that a values-driven life can provide. As Dr. Harris sums it up in The Confidence Gap: “