How To Get Motivated By Aligning Your Work With Your Personal Values

Last week I wrote a post for Charlie Gilkey’s Productive Flourishing blog called, How To Recover From I0 Types of Demotivation and it got a great response. One of the types of demotivation that I discussed was values-conflicts and quite a few folks said in the comments that they identified values-conflicts as causes of demotivation in their lives, so I thought I’d share more about how you can discover your values, because that’s the first step to clear a values-conflict.

What are personal values?

Personal values are the stuff and experiences that you consider important in life. They’re your “why” behind all the choices you make. When we’re in relationships and environments and doing things that match our criteria of what’s important in life – in other words, our personal values are satisfied – then we’re highly motivated. And when we’re in relationships and environments and doing things that don’t match our criteria of what’s important in life, then we feel highly de-motivated. A key to feeling that your work is purposeful and getting motivated is in discovering your life values and aligning your work with your life values.

Your personal values can be conscious or unconscious – either way they direct your behavior, and unconscious values almost always have a more powerful influence on our behavior.

Here’s how to discover your conscious and unconscious personal values and elicit your intrinsic motivation at work. It’s a very practical exercise and so you’ll only “get it” if you take some time to work through the questions. Give yourself 30 to 45mins to do this and I assure you, you’ll be amazed at the clarity you have afterwards.

1.) Start by asking yourself, “What’s important in work?”

Grab a piece of paper and brainstorm, listing anything that comes to mind to answer the question, “What’s important in work?” Switch off your inner critic for this – it can help to play some music or work with fat colored crayons to get into an honest, childish space. Don’t prioritize or rank your answers, and stay away from using full sentences and long stories. Just brainstorm brief answers that come to mind when you ask yourself, “What’s important in work?”

2.) Now think of a time in your career when you felt really motivated.

Imagine your life as a movie reel, and go to a moment in your career when you know that you felt really motivated about your work, really alive and excited and fulfilled. Step into that moment mentally, seeing events through your own eyes as if you’re there right now, and notice what was happening for you at that time that triggered your feelings of motivation. Jot down those themes, adding them to your list.

3.) Now think of a time in your career when you felt really de-motivated.

Imagine your life as a movie reel, and go to a moment in your career when you know that you felt really de-motivated about your work, as if you just couldn’t be bothered about stuff really, and you felt tired and fed-up.
Step into that moment mentally and see things through your own eyes as if you’re there right now, and notice what was happening for you at that time that triggered your feelings of de-motivation. Jot down those themes, adding them to your list.

Your answers to questions 2 and 3 represent your unconscious values. While your answers to question 1 are your desired conscious values that you try to live by, your unconscious values have a powerful impact on your life and are often the values that you actually invest more of your time, energy, attention and money in.

4.) Now rank your values.

Have a look at your list of values. These are all things that are important to you – they made it onto your list out of an infinite number of different values out there. But they also have varying levels of importance to you. Take a moment now to rank them in order of importance according to how much energy, attention, time and/or money you’re willing to invest in them. Which of these values is your top priority – your number 1 value? And which comes next? And then rank the rest.

5.) Now circle your top 5 values.

These are the values that are most important to you in your work – the values that most drive your motivation levels at work. To what degree do you feel like each of these values is satisfied in your work, the way your work currently stands? Rate each value as a percentage, out of 100%, representing the degree to which you feel that value is satisfied in your work as it currently stands.

6.) Have a look at your values ratings

Do your values ratings explain your motivation levels at work? Remember that the higher you go up your list of values, the more important that value is to you, and the stronger it’s motivational – or de-motivational effect will be. So that means that, even if your number 4 and 5 values are satisfied more than 75%, if your numbers 1, 2 and 3 values aren’t being satisfied, you’ll feel quite de-motivated in your work.

7.) Would you like to increase your motivation?

You can do that by increasing your ratings on each of your values. So start with your top 5 values: what changes could you make to your work scenario, to be able to increase your ratings on each of those values? And what different would that make if you could make those changes to satisfy more of your top 5 values?

Let your values guide major career decisions

When you do this exercise, you’ll probably move from feeling a bit fuzzy about what’s de-motivating you at work to realizing one of two things:

• Either your work scenario is so far from your personal value system that you’ll never be able to align it, and you need to think about a change of work if you want to feel more motivated at work, or…
• You’ll realize what the specific reasons for your lack of motivation or inconsistent motivation are, and you’ll realize that you can take responsibility for making changes in your work so that you can increase your motivation levels and enjoy your work more.

Discovering your personal values puts you in the position where you know yourself better and so you’re more empowered to shape your work around the experiences that’ll elicit your intrinsic motivation, allowing you to do more of the work you love and love more of the work you do.

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