It has become commonplace to hear people speaking to a loss of confidence with maintaining their jobs, keeping a work/life balance, effectively leading, or patiently parenting. A critical question to ask yourself is: Am I taking time for myself every day?
Richard Barrette’s Personal Value Assessment (PVA) is a strong start for raising self-awareness. PVA is a simple and complimentary survey that takes less than 5 minutes to complete that will generate a report of your core values.
Based on Barrette’s assessment, this is the importance of our core values: “Who you are, what you hold dear, what upsets you, and what underlies your decisions, are all connected to your personal values. Your values reflect what is important to you. They are a shorthand way of describing your motivations. Together with your beliefs, they are the causal factors that drive your decision-making.”
After you received your PVA report, follow these three self-care steps:
- With the awareness of your core values, spend time every morning to remind yourself of the things that you hold important to you.
- Reflect on what you have done well, acknowledge yourself in the middle of the day.
- Think ahead about what you want to accomplish and say it out loud in order to declare it to the world at the end of the day.
These steps take little time, but yield a high reward by ensuring we remain self-empowered and intentional. The results of practicing them include increased openness, creativity, confidence and more effective action-taking.
Right now, we all must take leadership within our own lives. When we are self-empowered, we make a positive impact to those around us and create a powerful community. Together, we are powerful.