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[Mary Enriquez] In the village in Sierra Leone, the children start walking at 5:30 in the morning. The seven and a half miles to school it takes them three hours in the dark. Why do they do this? Well, they value their education and they're willing to make sacrifices to attend school. Have you ever considered what you value? Where those values come from? What do you give up for something else? What sacrifices do you make for goals that you've set? So let's begin by asking what are personal values. So personal values are ideas or concepts that a person believes to be true that strongly influence their decisions and how they treat the people and world around them. Now every person has personal values, they may differ from yours or mine, but everyone has a belief system that fuels their decisions and let's discuss where that system comes from and why it's important to evaluate your own.

My personal values are definitely from close people. I would say family, but I've also learned a lot from from friends from teachers, from coaches mentors, all that stuff and I kind of take bits and pieces from this person from that person. Kind of make my own belief 'cause I never want to be. I want to be different and I think a lot of people want to be different and want to be unique. I think a lot of my personal values came from, you know, starting at college I looked at who I was in high school and I didn't really like it. So I did a complete 180 and said everything I did not like in myself. I'm going to be exact opposite of almost to the extreme. You know. I was very undisciplined. I was very unmotivated in high school so I was like I'm going to be the most disciplined, motivated you on time person here, because I didn't want to be that anymore and sort of like to distance myself from that and so that's where I got my morals from recently, you know, before it was just, you know, whatever felt right or whatever. I guess I learned from my parents or from my classes or whatever, but now it's now that I'm in a position where I can look critically on myself and it's imperative that I look critically at myself.

I've sort of established better morals for myself and how I make my decisions. I would loop it back to my parents probably. My parents were obviously very influential in my life and very supportive, and they still are and a lot of my values have come from come from the home life, the socialized Whitmore family, I guess. Our values are influenced by many different things. First of all, our family. Our family, starts to influence us from the day we're born. We copy what they do. We say what they say. We believe what they think and so that starts to develop our value system from a very early age. Our friends as well. We listen to what our friends say, we see what their families do, and they especially influenced us in high school and middle school. Our school environment, our education, the media, our community, religion, teachers, coaches, even our neighbors, sports figures, scientists, industry leaders. So who had the most influence on your value development? Think about who has really encouraged you to believe a certain way or to make choices. But I always grew up obviously wanting to be like my dad. He started writing in all caps when he was in the military and after I learned how to write, I saw him do it one time and I was like, oh, you know, I'm. I think I'm gonna start writing in all caps. It was some of those goofy little childish things or whatever. But it was me wanting to appear like my dad. And so we look very similar. We are built very similar if you take a picture of him at 21 it is almost identical. It's a little bit unreal, actually. But I took that and I pretty much ran with it.

I mean growing up with him and spending so much time with him and working on cars with him, and he coached my my Little League teams and my travel ball teams and he was there for every step of the way. And so whenever we were spending time together and sharing ideas and sharing thoughts, I held his ideas to my perception of him. Myself and who I was, a lot of it had to do with my dad, you know, like any normal highschooler, I listen to my dad and I was like, alright, whatever old man like you were talking about. Like you have all the experience, like I don't care. I'm gonna do what I want. But now that I'm in a position similar to his work because he enlisted, he was career military and he retired as a Colonel. You know, I'm in these positions where these values are important; Being on time, being respectful, being well spoken, being outspoken is important, and I wish I had listened to him in high school because I can't even imagine where I would be now. I would probably be more developed in my own personal values and like skills if I had actually listened to him, but it takes, it takes, realizing yourself, you know, people can tell you all day, all day, this is your, this is not going to matter in 10 years. You know you're going to feel differently about this and some time, but you know, it really takes realizing that yourself and so my dad had a big part of that in sort of being patient with me. You know, telling me the same things over and over like.

OK, now you don't feel like this now I know you don't know this now, but this is what I wish I would have known then and I want to help you like being the best position that you can be. So I'm going to keep telling you this over and over and over again until one day you actually listen to me. Finally I listened to him and I realized, oh, he was a little bit right. No, I would have to say my dad from an early age. I've always wanted to be more like him. First and foremost, as a career he I want to live up to his name kind of follow his footsteps is what he did in his career and ever since I was three, I've been playing baseball to do to pursue that career and kind of be what he was. And off the career-vibe section of it, I've always wanted, I've always respected him and looked up to him so much for the type of person he is and how he treats people and the love that he has, not only for the family but those around him that he cares so much for. And his faith in everything, all the different characteristics and aspects of his life that I sometimes took for granted as a kid and kind of growing up. And it's hard, especially when it's your daddy like no dad. Why? Why you gotta do this like whatever? But then, especially as soon as I started growing up, I kind of realized that this is a special experience for me, because a lot of people don't have something, as special as that, and a father that's so willing and able to do everything that he can to make me successful and to make me grow and learn things. Kind of ahead of the curve before you learn it naturally through experiences and through failure or heartbreak, whatever it may be. So definitely he's been the one that shaped me the most.

Now let's imagine that we're in a grocery store parking lot were walking behind a gentleman and he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his cell phone. When he does that, a bundle of cash falls on the ground. No one sees this, but you, you pick up the money. Do you casually put it in your pocket? Or do you call out to the man and return it to him? This is what's called a value dualism. So while on one hand we might value the money, we need money to pay for things. On the other hand, we would value our integrity in doing what we might believe is right. This conflict is called value dualisms. So what would you do in this situation? Think for me the toughest one, within high school and college, like that entire period, was honesty versus loyalty. I, for the longest time would always be the nice guy, the one that just kind of said something, whether you believed it or not, just to be your friend, you know and. For the longest time I didn't really get in trouble by it, it just kind of happened, just go with it. But then the first couple years of college I was put into like a leadership role within the baseball team and you're expected to call people out or to be that leader and say stuff when there's need to be said that may at first hurt somebody or not hurt somebody but kind of come off as a different perspective.

It may cause them to look at you a little bit different, but at the end of the day, you know that you're doing what is right and you're being honest. And honesty is what's going to grow to make the team or whatever group you're part of better. So you should understand that it's not. You're not disloyal by being honest with somebody, and that was something that for me I definitely one of the biggest lessons I've learned in. If I could go back and tell my younger self just don't don't put so much importance on loyalty and know that honesty is what builds loyalty. I have a decent example of that and that would come with basically some classes, don't exactly call out roll every time, and so there's a sign in sheet and you've probably got in this example before too, but there's people that will just rotate days and go one day, sign in for both them in another person, and then the next time they flip flop and so they have to go to half the classes and that was becoming a problem in one of my classes and I eventually picked up on who was doing it. It was a buddy of mine and it was somebody that I know I revere and I would I would hope that he would say something to me if I were in his situation and it got so bad that that the professor was catching on and they were threatening on failing people.

In reality it was just a situation that had kind of spun out of control, just out of the laziness of not going to class in the first place, especially since their schedule is blocked off to have free time for that class, because it's a class. And so before it got incredibly problematic, I pulled him aside and I basically I asked him what he was, what he was doing it for, and what he was doing with his time that he couldn't go to a 50 minute class, you know, and it was he was only missing or he was basically going every other time, so he's missing 50 minutes. And I walked him through the repercussions if he got caught and obviously I told him that I wasn't going to tell on him and that was where that confliction of loyalty to him versus the honesty, too, whatever professor, I wasn't going to rat him out, I wasn't going to snitch. It wasn't my business, but I just asked him to re-evaluate why he was doing that and whether or not the eyes that were on him from him being in a leadership position, whether that was worth displaying that to everybody that looked up to him and I mean the matter got resolved and he basically took a 180 in reality and so it ended up, you know, going pretty well in that I didn't have that conflict for too long, but when I did I was kind of caught in the middle.

I'm trying to think of something right now, but I can speak to that conflict between like loyalty and honesty and in high school especially, because I did personally experience situations like that where I would take on punishments and like repercussions on myself for someone who ultimately didn't matter and I shouldn't have been covering for anyway. I think something that I wish I would have known is like look at the people around you and determine whether or not they're actually worth it. You know 'cause you have all of the, there's a culture of like protect your buddies, don't snitch, snitches get stitches, all these different things that sort of ingrained in the minds of people that loyalty is unconditional, which in my opinion it's not, at least right off the bat. You know, if you have someone who's been consistently your friend for a long time for years and you see them struggling, that's when you know loyalty, I guess, is more important, or you should pay attention to it more than honesty. But if it's someone you just met this year or this semester, or you're new to the school and you're just trying to make friends like, think about the people that you're, you know, compromising your morals and your values for you know 'cause that tension is important and it causes you to take into question again why you do the things that you do like. You have to look at your thinking at that point again, and so if I could go back and look at myself in the face, I'd be like he is not worth it to take that punishment for him.

Don't do that, you know. Look at him and look at people around you and look at yourself and realize you're more important than that. Your values and how you view yourself is more important than this like this one event that happened that you feel like the world is going to end if you don't carry on your shoulders. Milton Rokeach is a social psychologist and he developed a ranking system by way that we can rank the values and things that are important to us and he called them two different types. One is called the instrumental values and one is called terminal values. That instrumental values are modes of behavior. They are means by which we achieve our goals. The instrumental values are what we would describe as qualities of a person, like courageous, forgiving or polite. Terminal values are goals to achieve over one's lifetime, so these would be things like good health, wisdom or a comfortable life. So in Rokeach's value survey, the participant ranks all of the values in order from 1 to 18 and enforcing ourselves to rank we must thoroughly examine what is truly important to us, our personal values. When reviewing our own rankings, we can then begin to make connections between what we value in our decisions. Let's take an abbreviated version of the Rokeach Value Survey. You'll select your top three values and describe why they matter to you.