Discovering personal values as a team

What’s your purpose? What’s your why? What do you stand for?

These might be some of the hardest questions to answer, especially when you encounter them in an online article, or in a self-help book with a tiny text box staring back at you. It’s nearly impossible to think of your deepest values on the spot. You get stuck, lose motivation, and end up closing the book or tab.

But when you know your values, they become immensely valuable. They give you direction. They guide tough decisions. They help you connect with others and set boundaries. They can even explain your behaviour — why we do or feel certain things.

A while ago, my brother shared an exercise with me to identify my personal values. Instead of blank-staring at the question, I had 125 values printed, cut out, and laid out in front of me. Everything from "adventurousness" and "authenticity" to "wisdom" and "wonder". What was impossible before became doable and fun through a simple sorting exercise (which I'll explain in detail below). I had my top 10 values in about 20 minutes.

In the days that followed, my values kept popping up in my mind as I went about my day. They were living in the foreground of my mind. When I was struggling to make a decision, I could see it was because two of my core values were clashing — freedom versus dutifulness. Or when I was sharing my motivation for an action, I could simply say that my “family” value was important.

For every PR.co company retreat, we ask the team to create something fun to share. The values were still actively present, helped me a lot, and I wished to gift this experience to my teammates too. So for our Ibiza offsite last year, I created a team workshop to discover your personal values.

The day before my flight, I designed the workshop. It has five sections that mix individual reflection with creative exercises and team bonding. The goal is to help everyone identify their values and build deeper connections as a team.

Here's an overview of the exercises:

1. Your Top 10 Values (45m) — The sorting exercise

2. Squiggly Birds (15m) — Creative warm-up

3. Back-to-Back Blind Drawing (45m) — Trust building

4. Visualise your Values (60m) — Turn abstract values into visual art

5. Sharing & Presenting (60m) — Optional sharing and displaying personal artworks

We started with the core exercise: everyone individually went through 125 values one by one, sorting them into three buckets: “highly important”, “important” or “not important”. Then they narrowed their highly important ones down to exactly 10 values and ranked them in order of importance. This method is so approachable — it's way easier to recognise your values than trying to come up with them from scratch.

Then came two creative drawing exercises. The first one, “Squiggly Birds”, was a 10-minute warm up. First, draw random scribbles on A4 paper. Then add dots, triangles and straight lines to create beaks, legs, feet, and tails to turn them into little birds. My goal for this exercise was to warm up people’s drawing skills (it might have been a while since they last drew) and help them feel creative. Everyone is creative, but not everyone might feel they are.

The next one was “Back-to-back blind drawing”. I specifically created this exercise to help people see that we're all different and come up with completely different expressions. Pairs sit back-to-back, touching backs, and need to draw a random subject that I called out loud. Then they reveal their creations to each other. It sounds silly, but it built understanding, confidence, and people laughed a lot. Everyone rotated so they did the exercise with every teammate.

With everyone warmed up and connected, we moved to the heart of the workshop: visualising your personal values. I brought pens and pencils, and people spent an hour turning their abstract values into visual art. Some drew symbols, others created mind maps, a few made collages. Watching everyone get lost in their creative expression, in silence, was incredible.

For those who wanted to share, we laid out our artworks on the table and presented them to the group. People talked about their values, why they are important to them, and how and why they illustrated them in a certain way. Seeing everyone’s authentic selves and hearing the stories behind their choices created real intimacy and deeper understanding. I felt immensely proud.

This workshop was a retreat highlight and people said they felt more open and connected in the days that followed. Mission accomplished.

And here’s my artwork. I’ll let you guess what my values are.

If you’d like to run this workshop yourself or with your team, here are the files:

• The workshop presentation

• English list of values

• Dutch list of values (I used these and translated them because there are more options)

Got any questions? Hit me up — I’m happy to help. Enjoy!