Values

My Blog has been a bit quiet over the past few weeks. I’m sorry about that to those who regularly check it. Its been busy but there really isn’t any excuse to why I haven’t been writing. My job has been going well; I’ve been learning how to get more courage in calling people. I’m not so great with the phone- at least I don’t think I am. I have to keep remembering that they are just people like me. But I’m still nervous about every single call I make.

Last week in our team study, the chapter was on Values and what we value as people. I had done something like that before, a while ago, but found it difficult to define what I valued. This time I felt that I could define it better and although the book separated out different values that I would have put together. Some like Integrity and Authenticity which in my mind are quite similar. Cooperation and flexibility , and Family and friendship are also quite similar. Out of the list of about 50 Values, I needed to select 8 to be the Most important, 22 for Important and the rest were Not Important. It wasn’t easy to select only 8 although with there being a couple of pairs, it was not too bad. My “top 8” looked a bit like this: Religious Beliefs, Authenticity, Integrity, Cooperation, Flexibility, Friendship, Loyalty and Fairness. The questions after that were asking us to think of whether there are any conflicts that could happen within the values themselves, and then if the lifestyle we lead now ( work, home environment etc) do not match up as well as they could. I realized that for me, I do have conflicts within my values. I value Authenticity and Integrity, but Cooperation as well which to some degree is possibly too high on my list of values as a very strong Harmonizer and ISFJ ( from Meyer-Briggs Indicator). This means that because I want the harmony of the group or situation to be settled, I cooperate a lot which may then mean that I do things that I necessarily wouldn’t want to do. Its something I know I have a problem with and am trying to adjust myself to be less of a “push-over J”. Time and time again I’ve seen it hurt other people but strangely enough I’m at a loss as to what to do. How to change. How to make my values align more. So in the meantime I try to do my best to keep at being genuine and who I was made so I glorify Him, but it is not easy.

I wanted to put some pictures of my time here, but its not working for me ( beauty of the internet here!!)