Values

Values:  The fundamental beliefs or guiding principles that an individual considers important and worthwhile to their lives.

Value:  The importance, worth, or usefulness of something compared to other things.

For the sake of the Flywheel Framework, think of Values as categories that actions fall into, and think of actions as having value based on which of the categories it falls into.

Values are the collections of actions we’ve previously found to be valuable in our lives and are how people make decisions or judgements as to whether or not something “has value to them”.  For example, “Spending time with family” is a category which is valuable to most people, and “Having lunch with mom” is an action which has value because it’s in the previously defined category.

These values have been built throughout our lives and will continue to be expanded and refined through the rest of our lives.  They’re the filter we use to navigate through the world.  We use them to decide who to be friends with, and who to avoid.  We use them to decide whether we like an employer, or what stores to shop at, what products to buy, where to live, etc.  Despite being one of the most fundamental and most powerful things we have, most people will struggle to explain what their values are.  Mostly just due to a lack of practice.

In Flywheel, there’s an area to work with the concept of values.  You’ll be able to write down all of the words or ideas that seem like values you care about.  Things like “Family”, “Integrity”, “Quality”, etc.  Once you have a list, you can sort them to narrow it down to the top 3 or 4 and write clear definitions for what those words mean to you.  It’s important this is your personal definition not the actual definition for these words.  You can reflect on past experiences, especially extremely specific ones like if you remember an event from childhood or school or work with specific people and specific details; those are good indications you’ve associated strong emotional memories with this for a reason.  These values will be used throughout all other aspects of Flywheel.  You’ll set goals with clear alignment to the most important values and be able to see how your actions contribute to them as a reminder every day.  

Like all things in this framework there’s no need to do this perfectly on the first try.  Do it once to get started and come back to it again every few months.  Over time you’ll get better at knowing which values are the most critical, and which are important, but not the critical ones.  You’ll get better at clearly defining what they mean to you, and you’ll get better at incorporating them into everything else.