What is a value sort? Why is it important? How do I complete one? This post is designed to answer all of your questions, and walk you through the process of completing a value sort activity.
As I embarked on a year long shopping ban, I repeated one of my favorite activities, a value sort, to help me align my actions with my priorities when it comes to consumption. To read about my most recent value sort, check out the companion-blog-post to this one, titled LESS Aimlessness: Unveiling core values.
What is a value sort?
A value sort is one way to engage with what you value, and offers the ability to hone in on your most important values, and understand how they relate to one another. Values are “a person's principles or standards of behavior; one's judgment of what is important in life.”
By completing a value sort activity, you gain knowledge and understanding about what matters to you and what you care about, and you gain the ability to reference these values when making hard decisions in life—to begin to live in accordance with your values.
Why is a value sort important?
A value sort is not the only way to determine your values. Cait Flanders, author of The Year of Less, recommends in her book that you simply write down your most important values as they come to you. This can be a helpful method of determining your values if you are attuned to what values are, and are able to discern them from the situations in your life.
In the event that you aren’t sure where to start with recognizing and organizing your values, a value sort is an important tool because it lays out dozens of possible values, almost like a menu, and allows you to cultivate your understanding of yourself one value at a time.
In my opinion, the most important thing about a value sort is the process of sorting. While going through the activity, you may find yourself faced with questions you wouldn’t encounter in your every day life, like, “do I value Honesty?” or, “is Safety more important to me than Connection?” Reflecting carefully on these questions will create a much bigger takeaway than if someone simply informed you of what your values were.
How do I complete a value sort activity?
The rest of the post will be dedicated to walking you through the steps to complete a value sort. Make sure to take each step, one at a time, and try to complete the step before moving on to further steps. This will allow you to get an almost “guided” sense to the sort, and you’ll be able to do it again in the future as a self-guided exercise.
If video works better for you, you can also reference this YouTube video I made about the activity.
I challenge you to get to the root of yourself with this activity. Be as honest with yourself as you can be; it will only take away from the experience to try to “win” by valuing all the “right” things. This is about you, now, here, today. Let it be about you.
It is also important to focus on who are actually are, not who you would ideally be. This might seem counterintuitive, as most of us fall short of our loftiest values, but the point of identifying your values is to be able to better live within them. Make sure you’re choosing values that you want to live within, not just the values you think some Barbie version of you would hold.
You’ll want to start by printing or writing out a whole host of different values on small pieces of paper or cards. I keep the same set that I use repeatedly. It is possible to do this on a computer or phone if you must, but there is something to the act of physically arranging and ordering your values in space that cements the importance of each value you encounter. If you need somewhere to start:
All 88 values are laid out on a tabletop so they can be reviewed, sorted, and rearranged for the value sort activity.
Each time I do the activity, I also ask myself whether any values not listed seem relevant to add. When I did the activity for this post, I added eight new values bringing the total count to 88 cards. You can feel free to change this list in any way that suits you, tossing out or adding in values that apply to you more specifically as you see fit.
You can also add new values during any stage of the value sort if you realize that a critical component of your worldview is not represented, or even if you just feel that a synonym for one of the values resonates with you more than the ones listed.
After all of your cards have been laid out, begin by sorting the cards into two piles: those things you DO value, and those things you DO NOT value. For the purposes of this exercise, you might put a card into the DO NOT pile that contains a value that maybe you do hold, but that isn’t feeling very important right now, or that you don’t hold very strongly.
I put “meaningful work,” into the DO NOT value pile because, even though I think meaningful work is important, when I thought about it this time I didn’t feel anything in my body. This information tells me that the value is not currently salient for me—it’s not at the forefront of my experience.
This can get a little bit tricky because sometimes we are conditioned by society to believe that a certain value is “good,” and is possessed by “good people.” It might feel hard for example, even if you are alone, to say “I don’t value Responsibility, even though I’ve been told that ‘good people’ are responsible, because Responsibility is not the most important thing to me.”
Think of it like choosing a color palette for your home; you want to choose the colors that feel good to you, not just the colors that have been voted to be “best.” This is because the person living in your home is not a summary of every opinion in the world, it’s YOU.
After I took out all the things I did not (presently) value, I had 68 values left:
The 88 values from the value sort activity were reduced to 68 after the things I “do not” value were removed.
Next, you’re going to sort all of the remaining values into groups or clusters based on your associations. Every person is going to interpret this a little bit differently, so feel free to trust yourself and lean into anything that makes sense to you. Put the values into groups based on things that seem similar or related to you, or in your life.
Some groups might have several values, some may just have two, and you may find that some values, for you, stand alone. All of this is okay and any way that you bring your own spin to this exercise is welcome if it clarifies something for you. Remember that finding out what YOU value is at the core of this activity, and HOW you get there is every bit as important as WHAT you learn.
The 68 remaining values are arranged into clusters based on their relationship to other values.
After the values are sorted into groups, take each group into consideration one at a time. Try to reduce each group to it’s most essential elements by choosing the one word that stands out to you among values that you believe get at the same root.
For example, in one cluster I had Resilience, Grit and Growth as related to one another. When I thought about this group, I felt that each of these words were pointing toward the same value for me, and that Resilience was the word that called to me most out of the three; I advanced Resilience to the next round, and let go of Grit and Growth, because I felt they were appropriately represented by Resilience.
By contrast, in another cluster I had the values Time Alone, Slowness, Self-Respect and Rest all in a category as things related to the way I spend my life, and the reasons behind it. I decided that each of these was really pointing to a standalone component of my value system, and I advanced all four of them to the next round.
If anything is coming up for you about doing this “right,” or if you’re worrying too terribly about making sure that you follow each step exactly, make a note of that experience to come back to later with curiosity. For now, give yourself as much leeway as you need.
After another round of reductions, 34 values remain in the value sort activity.
At this point in the exercise, I had 34 values remaining, and felt I was getting to the core of what I care about and who I am at this point in my life. Some of the values I saw making it this far surprised me, but I remained open to the process. Each time I have done this, I have been able to make novel connections and exciting discoveries about myself, and the way I have changed since last I chanced to look closely.
When you have reduced all groups to their essential points, what you’re looking at is a skeleton of your value system. We want to take it a few steps further to get to bare bones. Challenge yourself to reduce this group of values further until no more than 20 remain.
Next you will reduce the list of values further to only your top ten.
Reduce it further to your top five, setting the other five to the side.
Reduce it further to your top three, setting the other two to the side.
Choose only one value from the remaining three. This is the value you hold above all else, and it is important information for how you ought to conduct yourself in the world, and a crucial thing to consider when you face hard choices on your path.
After you’ve identified your ONE top value, add back the two values most recently removed, in order of importance. You’ll now have a top three, ranked by importance. The top three might be the most useful chunk of information available from the value sort activity. Because it is bite-sized and deeply important to you personally, it is typically easy to remember. The top three values can be considered your “core values,” and make up the most strongly held components of your person.
The “top three” values are your “core” values, and are the most helpful takeaway from the value sort activity.
Take some time to write down your core values in a place that you can see them. I make a habit of keeping them in the front of my bullet journal, alongside a personal mission statement that I write.
Finally, go ahead and add back your fourth and fifth values, in order, then add back values six through ten, until you have a top ten values list ranked by order of importance.
When it comes to making changes in the way you move through the world, or facing decisions that seem to big to take on, knowing your values is one of the best tools available to you. In case you needed the reminder, only you can make your unique contribution to the world, and a value sort is one thing you can use to help clarify or remind yourself who you are, and what that contribution is.
If you complete this activity, please feel free to share your experience in the comments section!
Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash