Identifying Your Personal Value Rules to Expand Awareness, Emotional Intelligence, and Resilience

In this article, we’ll examine what situations or “rules” trigger our values and consequently emotional states. Expect the exercise to take roughly 20 minutes. As a prerequisite, do the Values Exercise first.

“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it;

Blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches;

For the creator, there is no poverty“

- Rilke

What Are Value Rules?

Our minds are meaning-making machines. Every experience we have becomes associated with emotion. Our values act as a lens that filters experiences and sorts them into emotional buckets. We already know what our values are, so it correlates that we can figure out what experiences in our lives trigger those values, and consequently bubble up positive or negative emotions. 

Value rules are powerful a way of assigning language to the experiences that we associate with our values. When we identify our value rules, we create a mental association between situations, our values, and our emotions. This association helps us to gain an understanding of ourselves, thus raising our emotional intelligence. Our mind thinks through language, so the more language associations we create in our though process, the better we understand ourselves.

Creating a list of our value rules serves to open us up to expanded possibilities and choices. By going through the exercise, we get to identify new situations where we can feel our values. This practice empowers us to be able to choose which value to associate with an experience. For example - if someone is criticizing us it could easily trigger the negative value of inadequacy. Looking at it from a different perspective, it could also elicit the value of growth if we are able to reframe that criticism and take it as feedback! By identifying the perspectives, we can start to choose our responses rather than simply reacting.

Enumerating these rules generates mindfulness around our situations, our triggers, and our possibilities.

With this enhanced insight, we gain the ability to live more intentionally, empowering us to gain greater control over our lives. We can strive to have more experiences that elicit our positive values, and minimize experiences that trigger our negative values, or at least be more aware of them so we can better control our reactions!

Rules Discovery Exercise

As with most of these self-discovery exercises, I find it is most effective to use an old school pen and paper. You can print out and use this workbook to help.

This is a straightforward yet powerful exercise.  For your top 3 values (or more if you’d like) you identified in the Values Discovery exercise, ask the following question:

What has to happen for you to feel X (the value)?

Then ask yourself “what else has to happen?” until you get 3+ rules for each value.

For example:

What has to happen for you to feel growth?

●      Making noticeable progress at the things I care about

●      Having time to focus on the things I want to grow at

●      Applying my growth and share it with others 

●      Being complimented on my improvements

What has to happen for you to feel love?

●      Someone I care about telling me they love me

●      Having open, authentic conversations with others

●      Spending time on the phone with family members or others that I feel care about me

●      Engaging in acts of self-love such as exercising and meditation

And don’t forget to do the same for your negative values! These can be uncomfortable, but digging into them can uncover powerful insights.

What has to happen for you to feel inadequate (not good enough)?

●      Someone criticizing something that I’m proud of or nervous about

●      Feeling like I’m spending too much time doing things that aren’t in line with my goals

●      Doubting myself or my own ability to accomplish something hard

●      Beating myself up because I feel like I’m not doing enough or being “lazy”  

Next Steps

Remember that list of values you created in the last exercise? The one that you revisit frequently and keep somewhere visible so you can be more aware of them? Keep those in mind as you go about your day. Whenever you feel an emotion bubble up, ask yourself what experience or thought triggered that emotion and what value was used to filter that experience to create the emotion. 

This simple mindfulness practice will help you to monitor your rules, triggers, and emotions as you go about your day, building emotional intelligence and resilience. Discovering our rules provides powerful insight into our own mental playbook that runs when we encounter a situation or thought. 

Upon enumerating these rules, many people will notice that their positive rules are much more difficult to elicit than the negative rules. It’s no wonder we have so much trouble being happy!