During a recent workshop session, I was asked to define my core values knowing that these personal values would also define my company’s values and reflect on my business.
Core values reflect who we are on a personal level as well as on a professional one. They represent us, define what is important to us, give us a code of conduct, guide our daily actions, and give a purpose to our life by revealing what we stand for. These values are unique to us. They are our footprints. And these core values create diversity and complementarity within a group of people.
Values are discovered overtime, and after some personal work, I am now able to describe what has driven me and motivated me since the beginning…
Passion, Independence, Integrity, and Quality.
Passion: everything I do is meaningful to me, whether it is about work, volunteering, cooking, craft or sport. I enjoy learning and teaching. I accept challenges by starting a new scientific or art project. I embrace complexity, as it requires strategy, problem-solving, a vision and attention to detail, and I am working hard for accomplishment and success. One could see me as competitive and driven, when I see it as being passionate running a project from start to finish regardless of its difficulty, with energy and enthusiasm.
Independence: I thrive when building my own plans and making my own decisions. Independence means freedom, ownership, and accountability. Entrepreneurship seems now natural to me, and it makes sense to build a consulting business where I can lay out my own strategies in terms of business development, marketing approach, and objectives for the future.
Integrity: Integrity embraces respect and honesty. I respect people I connect with, people who stand for their own values, for the environment I live in, for the science that is developed every day to ensure each of us a better life. My daily actions are run with honesty, even when it implies accepting my weaknesses and limitations, my mistakes and missteps that need to be acknowledged and built upon for my personal and professional growth. Integrity helps me to provide me an outstanding support to my clients.
Quality: I have high expectations for what I live for, for what I give and for what I receive. I value the quality of the time I spend with my family and my friends. I ensure quality of relationship with my clients, and I develop quality work out of respect for my clients.
All these core values are strongly connected and interdependent: quality of work cannot be delivered without integrity and without being driven by passion. Passion leads me to be creative and to make my own choices with self-confidence and assertiveness.
So here I am, genuinely living in harmony with my core values on a daily basis and building success within my personal and professional activities to better support my family and friends, and better serve my clients.