Identifying Your Personal Values

The journey of achieving success in college begins with a single step: identifying your personal values. Your personal values are your core beliefs and guiding principles. They shape the roles you play in daily life. They color your interests and passions, and frame your thoughts and words. In essence, your values are a compass that help you make decisions and choices.

Even if you’ve never consciously thought about your personal values before, you already have some. Reflect on some of these questions to help you get started on identifying and naming some of your personal values:

• Do you have a hobby or something you enjoy doing with your free time? What does that activity provide for you? What do you like about it? Why is it important to you?
• Do you have any role models, mentors, or people that you look up to in your life, whether they are people you know personally, celebrities, or characters in movie or television? What is it about them that you admire the most? Are there ways in which you would like to be more like them? What does that say about what you think is important in life?
• Do you have any goals, short or long term, that you are really excited about achieving? What is it about those goals that excite you? How do you envision life will be different once you meet your goal? What does this goal mean to you?
• Think of a time when you had a conflict with someone in your life. Can you identify what caused the conflict? More importantly, can you identify why it was so important to you, what upset you the most, and what you would have accepted as an apology?

Getting in touch with and naming your personal values can be a powerful practice to help you start to identify what’s important to you in life, what you want to achieve, and how you want to spend your time. In fact, once you’ve identified your values, you may start to notice that other people in your life might have a different set of values and core beliefs that they live by. Understanding these differences might help you understand choices and behaviors from others that you previously had a hard time understanding.

Examining your personal identity and values is an important first step in college because it will help you begin the process of defining your educational goals and ultimately planning your career. Research has shown that students who get involved in career-planning activities stay in college longer, graduate on time, improve their academic performance, and tend to be more goal-focused and motivated. Overall, these students have a more satisfying and fulfilling college experience.

Using Surveys to Help You Identify Your Values

To help you begin to identify your personal identity and values, you can use a “self-assessment” survey. These surveys can help you evaluate your personal identity—your thoughts, actions, attitudes, beliefs, values, and behaviors—in relationship to life experiences, like going to college and preparing for a career.

Many different self-assessment surveys are available from college career centers and online sites. Some are designed as personality tests, like the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, or as inventories, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MTBI®), the most widely used personality inventory in history. You may also come across instruments designed as scales, measures, games, surveys, and more. These descriptors are often interchangeably used, although most often they refer to questionnaires. The distinctions are not as important as whether or not the instrument meets your self-assessment needs.

Some popular, free surveys are noted here.

Survey Instruments

ISEEK Career Cluster Interest Survey from ISEEK Careers/Minnesota Colleges and Universities lets you rate activities you enjoy, your personal qualities, and school subjects you like. Then you can see which career clusters are a match for your interests.

Values Clarification Questionnaire from InSite/Electric Eggplant is a two-part survey that looks at the specific values of ambition, appearance, family, friendship, independence, wealth, education, freedom, happiness, privacy, security, and honesty and then a scorecard and an interpretation are generated.

Career Interest Survey from CheckOutACollege.com/Community and Technical Colleges of Washington State allows you to select activities you like to do, personality traits that describe you, and subjects that interest you. The survey tool auto results suggest one or more of sixteen career clusters that match your selections.