I deeply want something to believe in, something to guide my decisions, and something that gives me comfort that there is a plan for my life and for the world. For me, that's God. This core value is critical in my life as most of my other values, desires, and actions spring from my faith.

My faith is a core value that developed over time. I was not a kid-on-a-mission, so to speak. My faith grew as I experienced life and all its blessings and hardships. I attribute a ton of where I am today to a higher power. There is no other plausible explanation.

Today, faith is core in soul because it gets stronger with every hardship I face - no matter how awful. If my soul did not need it, my faith would surely waiver and then fade in difficult times.

Let me elaborate. In frustrating and uncertain moments like these where I sense that my faith gets stronger, other things I enjoy very much - like my desire for achievement - weaken. Post-COVID, I don't necessarily want to be the best professor in the world. That goal is far from my mind. What I do want - however - is to think about my faith and how best to respond, act, and speak to anxious groups of students at least partially under my care. My faith tells me to be strong, kind, and compassionate in the face of pain and fear.

I find that change in my attitude about my professional success very interesting and telling about what makes up my soul. Faith is clearly on that list.

Family signifies different things to different people. To me, family consists of the people who I am closest to emotionally, spiritually, physically, and with whom I share common goals, dreams, and character. These are the select few people who are happy to function as part of my inner circle and help me feel loved, more secure, and healthy. They make me laugh and are there when I cry. They are stress-reducers as opposed to stressors. And . . . the feeling is mutual.

I love my family members all the time - even when we're mad, depressed, and frustrated with each other. Loving them is something that I can't stop doing; it's just engrained in my heart. It would take a lot to sever that intimate bond.

My family makes me a better person and our struggles make us all stronger. I would be lost without these people. No matter how hard a day or work trip I return from, I am always excited to hug, spend time with, and love on my family. They are a top priority.

These strong, constant, innate feelings tell me that my soul craves a strong family. The idea is deeply embedded in my spiritual core. That is why it's on my list.

Happiness stems from the word "lucky" in Old Norse - a Germanic language from the 9th century. Even modern thesauri put "happiness" in the list of words similar to "luck." Apparently, people - from our ancestors to our peers - beleive that being happy is subject to chance. I see the concept much differently. You can find hapiness even in the toughest of times if you possess the right mindset. Let me elaborate:

Happiness is powerful emotion evoked by actually living the type of life your heart desires. In other words, you are happier when you chase what matters most to you in your life. For me, those are the values I listed above - faith and family - as well as some core friendships and wisdom.

The reason why luck isn't all that relevant here is that happiness is more than just a fleting emotion. Happiness is more permanent and ranges from deep contentment to an overwhelming sense of joy. Happiness is more of a state of being and something that I crave at my core. I want to ingrain happiness in my psyche. When I am unhappy, my life feels far more off kilter than the average person. I have learned that real happiness is something that my soul craves.

For me, it is tough to find authentic happiness unless I am at peace internally and satisfied with my external situation (family, faith, career, health, etc.). It also helps me when my mindset is encompassed by a great hope for my future. Perhaps paradoxically, when I am authentically happy, I can still wake up in that state even in my tough times. For me - at least at this point in my life - it's a deeply embedded state.

It seems as if I have always wanted this core value. Ever since I was little, I was an optimistic, happy person. Today, most everything I do is to maintain and hopefully add some happiness to my life.

There are other important core values I considered for this part of my list. But, faith, family, and happiness came out as my top three, hands down. With these down, let's move to the next column and the core values that my mind craves.

The ability to set goals and then achieve them will take you far in life. Achievement is powerful because it encompasses virtues such as consistency and persistence.

The ability to see the positives without ignorantly minimizing the negatives.

Wisdom is the ability to understand the most important things in this world.

A fun-loving nature describes someone who really enjoys the pleasures of life. A day is complete as long as it involved laughter and fun. Helen Keller described this spirit very well, "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." Appreciating and using humor is often a big part of being a fun-loving person. These concepts usually go hand in hand.

The serenity prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr encapsulates a peaceful spirit: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. It's not that peaceful people don't get stressed or frustrated. Instead, there demeanor is better able to handle the stressors of life that everyone experiences.

It's important to note that a peaceful spirit is more than just outward calmness. Having peace in your core means that you supplement your external calmness with an internal state of contentment.

Joy is a powerful emotion. People experience joy when they anticipate, receive, or hope for something that they consider worthy or wonderful. Importantly, true joy does not dissipate in tough times. Instead, it remains constant. The bottom line: joy is a deeply embedded emotion. Richard Wagner said it well: “Joy is not in things; it is in us.”

Joy also helps you heal. This is because joy is an antidote for our pain. A joyful person still feels pain and gets sad. But the joy and the pain battle and joy almost always overcomes. Carlos Santana nailed it: "If you carry joy in your heart, you can heal in any moment."

Ask yourself whether you have a joyful spirit. If not, my advice is to try as hard as you can to develop this one as a core value.

Your reputation consists of the opinion people have of you based on your past actions, character, and decisions. Reputation often manifests itself in admiration or respect. People want to be respected.

At the end of the day, there are groups of people who care a great deal about their reputation. We all do in a way. But, for many, daily life is guided by fostering their reputation. Voltaire understood how important reputation can be: "Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable." The idea is that we all make mistakes in life, but our reputation smooths out the curve.

Resilience is a certain toughness; it's the capacity to recover quickly from all types of difficulties. The human spirit tends towards resiliency. Bram Stoker wrote, “It is really wonderful how much resilience there is in human nature. Let any obstructing cause, no matter what, be removed in any way, even by death, and we fly back to first principles of hope and enjoyment.”

Many people crave stability and structure in their lives. Narrowly, this means a life that is someone orderly. More broadly, a secure life is one where you have the bandwidth to deal with the shocks of life.

There is a line in the movie, The Notebook, that goes liek this: “I suppose [my life] has most resembled a blue chip stock: fairly stable, more ups than downs, and gradually trending upward over time. A good buy, a lucky buy, and I've learned that not everyone can say that about his life.” 

A stable and secure life is a huge benefit.

Creativity is the act of coming up with new and imaginative ideas that you then turn into reality. It is characterized by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and to generate solutions. Creative people are rare and, thus very valuable - particularly when they apply creative solutions to real-world problems in business, law, medicine, policy, etc. It's a skill worth developing.

It takes guts to be creative, to go out on a limb. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” Creativity is a core value that you should seek even if it does not come easily. The benefits far outweigh the costs.

Grace is forgiving someone without cause, showing mercy, swallowing your pride even when you're right. It is showing kindness even when it's undeserved or turning the other cheek. People tend to show grace when they care about the person to whom the grace is directed. Masters of grace tend to show it with everyone.

Interestingly, the ability to give grace is relative. It changes constantly. When you have power or the upper hand in a situation, you are able to provide grace. When you are on the other side, however, need grace instead. This is why grace is a powerful core value identified with God - who is always in a position of power over people. God never has to give grace but chooses to because of a deep love for people. In the end, grace is one of the core values that ebbs and flows for mere mortals like us. What shouldn't change is your desire to give grace more often.

In the end, grace is tough to give but wonderful to receive. This makes it a tough mindset to adopt. But, acting from grace pays dividends as you are better able to discard grudges, frustration, and negative thoughts. Grace allows you to move on with life and only costs you the emotional pain of swallowing your pride or losing an argument. Count yourself lucky if you are predisposed to act with grace. It should be a core value on everyone's list.

Plato wrote that justice is a proper, harmonious relationship between the warring parts of the person or society. This is a great way to think of justice. Competing parties win when it's appropriate and lose when it's appropriate according to the rules of society. No one dominates another person just because they have more resources or stature. Might does not equal right in contemporary forms of justice. It's easy to see why justice and fairness go hand in hand. What is unfair is often unjust.

But the concept of justice goes much deeper than that. Though the concept of justice means different things to different people, it should involve, at its core, generating equal opportunities for anyone interested and qualified in participating. More nuanced definitions of justice include:

Corrective Justice = giving people back what was taken from them. For example, if your car is totaled in an accident, a judge can make the wrongdoer pay you $$$ to get a comparable car. Note, it is impossible to get your same car back (it's totaled) and you will not receive more money than your car was worth (that would be unjust). Justice here seeks to put you in as close a financial place as possible to where you were before the wreck.

Distributive Justice = the apportionment of privileges, duties, and resources should be distributed in relationship to the merits of the individual and the best interest of society. In other words, equality should be the baseline which we depart from only for good reasons. Adherents of this theory believe that whether someone deserves more is often a matter of luck and, therefore, not a great reason to deviate too far from equality. Examples are Social Security and Medicare where resources are provided to very nearly all people over a certain age. Such redistribution of resources comes at the expense of individual freedom and that's an ethical issue to ponder.

Environmental Justice = focuses on making sure that all similarly situated people are equally protected from health and environmental hazards and that these same people have a say in how they are protected.

Procedural Justice = seeks to ensure that people involved in the legal system are treated fairly according to the rules and not based on their status or reputation.

Retributive Justice = an eye for an eye. In other words, take from the wrongdoer what he took from others. In some instances, courts of law look to retributive justice when imposing sentences.

Social Justice = a person's race, gender, or religion should not alter the availability and attainment of equal economic, political, and social opportunities.

If any of these theories of justice are appealing to you, it's likely that you have justice as one of your core values.

Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. Creativity is characterised by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and to generate solutions.

The ability to see the positives without ignorantly minimizing the negatives.

Self-respect is a confidence in yourself combined with an attitude of grace, honor, and dignity. You respect yourself when you stand up for your beliefs, priorities, and time. As you might sense, this concept is very applicable in your work life. Employees with strong levels of self-respect make sure your their doesn't always take advantage of their time or monopolize their priorities.

Some people seek truth as an end in and of itself. Philosophers, religious figures, politicians, business-people, professionals, and people in general have been discussing truth for centuries.