Find Your Artist or Musician Values (6 steps)
Knowing what your artistic or musician values are is a powerful thing. It’s like having your own personal travel guide, for your brand and life. So this post shows you how to find what they are – and how to use them.
Your personal values relate to your persona, goals and inner characteristics. And they can evolve over time.
So it’s a good idea to revisit things every once in a while, to make sure there aren’t any major changes.
Alright, let’s jump right in and start with some definitions and benefits for pinpointing your artistic values.
What Are Personal Musician Values? Definition and Benefits
Your personal values as a musician are, well, personal. It’s also something that tends to be tiered, meaning you'll have a variety of values important to you – but some will be more important than others.
Personal musician values are those traits and identity characteristics that you prioritize and deem to be disproportionately more important.
This makes sense – and is kind of obvious. Here are some examples of common personal values:
Honesty
Trust
Creativity
Money
Health and wellness
Comfort
etc.
There are numerous more values to pick and choose from. But don’t worry too much yet – we’ll get there later.
For now let’s explore a few of the core benefits to knowing your personal artistic values as a musician or creative.
Some key benefits for knowing your values:
Improve and guide your decision making
Boost self awareness
Improve organization and prioritization of tasks and work
Support self confidence and assuredness in self
How to Find Your Artistic Values: 6 Steps
Finding your artistic values can be relatively straightforward.
For example, just look at a list of top values and choose the ones that most resonate with you.
But I think you’ll find that strategy doesn’t help much. You’ll either have too many choices or not know what to do with this information.
So let this quick guide solve that.
1. List the Things In Your Life That Are Most Important to You
A good first step is simply asking yourself what tangible or obvious things in your life you value most.
For example, your family, health or musical equipment are all potential answers.
Consider what things in your life you'd be upset (or even distraught) to lose. This may be pretty obvious – but it can create some great initial clarity.
If you’re struggling – or finding yourself valuing too many things – it can help to leverage someone like Marie Kondo and her “does it spark joy?” principle here.
Basically, getting to a place of minimalism condenses our life to only a handful of the most important, prized things – and it’s pretty liberating.
It declutters our life and it highlights our priorities and which material objects are closest to our hearts.
2. Explore Your Past Life Experiences and Your Core Goals
Now let’s take things beyond our material possessions. Let’s consider our past and future life.
We can develop things by asking some core questions:
What things have you done?
What are you most proud of?
Do you have any regrets?
Where have you been or traveled to?
Why did you go?
Would you go again?
What are your favorite memories and places you’ve visited?
Answering these questions can reveal what experiential priorities you may have. This can further develop our sense of what personal values we have.
Once you’ve dialed in on your past experiences (and which you cherish or regret most), let’s look to the future.
I talk more about the future and visualization below. But for now, let’s just jot down your core goals.
Where do you want to be in 1 year? How about 5 years? What are your financial, music career and talent goals?
Be honest and write down the goals most closely associated with your ideal future life. We’ll circle back to these in a bit (in step four below).
But first let’s explore the people in our stratospheres that inspire us most.
3. Examine People Who Inspire You
We’re constantly inspired by the people in our lives – even if we’ve never met them.
And especially as musicians and artists, we have a keen sense of who we aspire to become. We have very specific idols and artists that drive us and continually inspire us.
For me, I’m currently inspired by:
Kruwella
Jared Leto
Lauren Tsai
Martin Garrix
Myself
(and many others, of course)
It may look strange that I put myself as an inspiration. But I promise this comes from a place of self awareness, positivity, personal motivation and a healthy mindset.
I like to remember and be inspired by my own musical strengths, how much I’ve improved over the past months and how my daily focus is actively building my ideal future.
This is healthy, so I can’t recommend enough trying this self-inspiration strategy.
But either way, explore who inspires your music and goals. Write down why and the core values or character traits these people exhibit.
This information can obviously be incredibly helpful for identifying your own personal values with more clarity.
4. Visualize Your Future Self In Vivid Detail
Remember your goals from step two? Let’s pull those back out and unpack things a bit.
I’m a huge supporter of strong visualization. But the key is to feel it emotionally, as if your future life has already happened. The key is to get incredibly detailed and vivid.
So, imagine your goals and future ideal self. Now imagine (and even write down) the details:
Where are you?
What do you smell?
What are you touching?
How do you feel?
Who are you with?
What are you wearing?
What time of day is it?
What are the colors you see in your surroundings?
What are your emotions? (feel them now)
etc.
This is a powerful form of meditation – bordering on manifestation, but we won’t get into that here.
Let’s keep focus on identifying our values.
Write down the details of your future ideal, visualized self. This can be very revealing for what you value and what you want to achieve and why.
For example, I imagine myself sitting in comfy (but trendy) clothes in a California home with lots of windows and a fresh cup of coffee brewing and sunlight warming the right side of my face.
It’s early morning and I’m alone sitting on a washed out L-shaped couch with my computer open, planning my day (music studio time, meeting with friends and working on my business and blog).
I could go on, but I think you get the picture.
So my values (based on this visualization) could be time flexibility, friendship, creativity and autonomy.
And that’s definitely true – I strongly value all of those things, which boost my music-making productivity and fun.
5. Make A Rough Draft of What Your Top Values May Be
I think now we’re ready to hone in on what our core values are likely to be.
We’ve identified the things most important in our lives and the experiences we treasure most. We’ve explored who inspires us and why and how we see ourselves in the future.
Each of these exercises has given us ideas and direction for what our values are, or may be.
So write these down as a sort of first draft. Try to organize them from most important to least.
Do you agree with what you see? Are things more clear from when you first started?
If not, no worries! It’s a dynamic process and requires some serious self reflection.
So let’s add one more step that can take us there. Let’s get formal.
Let’s take a test.
6. Now Back Things Up With This Free Test (no email required)
I took this personal values test a little while back with a good friend of mine.
It’s actually really helped me to clarify my priorities and has given a nice boost of motivation and direction to the things I’m doing in my day-to-day.
And don’t worry, it’s completely free to take and you don’t even need to give them your email.
The site is (aptly named) personalvalu.es and it has a clean and modern design to it.
The test will basically take you through a series of value identifications, forcing you to choose and prioritize them from a foundation top level, all the way down to a more detailed level.
At the end, you’ll get your results and the top five personal values (from most important to least).
You can even download a phone screen background image of your core values, so you can always be reminded of them any time you look at your phone.
So check out the test and, if you’d like, come back to let me know your results in the comments!
Otherwise, thanks for stopping by today – I hope this post had value for you (pun intended).
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