I need to change my core values because they don’t reflect the Universal Human Values.
Choosing The Right Personal Values
What are the best personal values you can have?
I recently defined my values. But did I choose the right ones?
Today I’ll share the top ten Universal Human Values. They are the result of a survey from the World Economic Forum of half a million people in 152 languages from around the world. That’s a lot of people.
The Problem with Selecting Your Core Values
When you select your values, there is always some uncertainty. You’re left wondering, will choosing the wrong values stop me from living a great life?
The good news is there are no right values. You can be happy and successful in life with almost any core values.
But today I’ll show there is a certain flavour, a specific pattern, that your values must have for you to be happy and successful. And they’re not trendy values like the latest superfood you must eat or the Pantone colour of the year. As the name suggests, the Universal Human Values have stood the test of time across all people and all cultures around the world.
The bad news for me was that mine don’t fit this pattern so I need to change them.
The Top Ten Universal Human Values
Let’s start with the top ten Universal Human Values. What are they?
- Family
- Relationships
- Financial Security
- Belonging
- Community
- Personal Growth
- Loyalty
- Religion/Spirituality
- Employment Security
- Personal Responsibility
Now, I don’t want to copy these values. These are not the right values because there are no right values.
But, there is an important pattern here to help you answer the big question: Am I building the right things in my life?
Can you see the pattern? Four of the top five Universal Human Values have something in common. Have you spotted it yet?
What It Means to Be Human
The key to values success is alignment. You want to align your actions to your values. This way you’re more likely to take the right action and live a meaningful life.
But the Universal Human Values take this to a whole new level. These are the Mount Everest of Values.
They point to something fundamental and powerful about what it means to be human. Something that has been true for all human beings for hundreds of thousands of years. And something that we all need – like food, water and sleep. To be happy and successful in life you need this now and you’ll need this in the future. They’re not going away! And this means you definitely want to align yourself with them.
The Vital Universal Human Values Pattern
What’s the big pattern? 4 out of the top 5 are social values – family, relationships, belonging, community. That means 80% out of the top 5 Universal Human Values are not about you as an individual, but about how you work together with other people.
It’s Social over Self.
Human beings need each other to flourish. We prosper when we help each other. There’s an African proverb that says, ‘It takes a village to raise a child’. In other words, you can’t be successful on your own.
The Great Core Values Question
The big question you want to ask yourself is this: Are your values social?
In other words, do your values reflect your need to be social? Or are they all about you?
When I reviewed my top 5 values, I saw that only ONE of them reflected the universal human values of being social.
Now I’m not saying you have to literally use the words family, relationships, belonging or community. There are plenty of other social values, like… compassion, partnership, gratitude, caring, support… (And Loyalty which was also on the list of top ten Universal Human Values).
As a result, I’m going to change my values. I’m going to remove Autonomy and add something social. At the moment I’m not sure which one Il will choose. But, I’m leaning towards ‘partnership’ or ‘community’.
What about you? You want at least two social values in your top five so you can live true to the Universal Human Values. How many socially-orientated values are in your top five?
A Deeper Analysis of the Top Ten Universal Human Values
If you want to take this analysis further, four more points are worthy of consideration.
- Loyalty (value #7) is also a social value. That means 50% of the top ten values are social values.
- Two of the values, Personal Growth (#6) and Personal Responsibility (#10) are personal and all about you.
- A further two values, Financial Security (#3) and Employment Security (#9) are safety factors. In other words, if you look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, these two values occur at the bottom end of his hierarchy. This means if you are struggling to satisfy these needs they will be crucial to focus on. But as you find ways to satisfy them sustainably they become less important.
- The final value, Religion/Spirituality (#8) is a meta-value. Personal values reflect the self. Social values are all about other people. Spirit values, like Religion, are about issues that are bigger than you. Meta means beyond, which in this case means beyond the human level. That gives us three tiers of values. Personal (2-4 in the top ten), Social (5 in the top ten) and Spirit (one).
More on the Universal Human Values
To dig deeper and learn more about defining your core values and the Universal Human Values, read these blog posts next:
