What an amazing World Values Day we all had this year! We can capture some of its flavour from some of the multitude of images that poured in during this year’s campaign. This year's theme around the link between values and wellbeing resonated strongly in many different countries and communities.

Everything you say or do comes out of your meaning-making stories. All of your behaviours. These meaning-making stories are how you answer the questions "What does this mean, and therefore who should I do what for?"

For almost 11 years, a group of committed cultural community contacts and informal leaders had been meeting and developing relationships with representatives within the child welfare system in order to ensure that these community voices would be heard, validated and respected.

Today, I celebrate a big birthday and myPractice for the day is “I agree and communicate sense of purpose, so people understand the "why"”, in honour of myValue “Creation”. 

"World Values Day" makes you realize that the importance of this day dedicated to values around the world is enormous.

Canadian psychoanalyst and management consultant, Elliot Jaques, was one of the first to recognise the importance of values in organisations.  Since then many academics and practitioners have identified the importance of values, devised tools and models to calculate and describe them, and more recently, marketing professionals have considered articulation of brand values as essential. It’s increasingly recognised that brands are no longer owned and controlled by the organisations who have the copyright of the trademark of the brand, brands are defined by all stakeholders, those who feel they share a sense of the values the brand represents to them. 

For some people, adding value and having a purpose in life are essential and fundamental aims. An increasing amount of research indicates that people who have meaning and purpose in their lives are happier, feel more in control and get more out of everything they do. They also experience less stress and are less prone to prolonged bouts of depression and this clearly can have a positive impact on personal well-being and mental health.

Today is World Values Day and the theme for this year is wellbeing. So, it seems hugely appropriate to reveal that 98% of respondents to Mad World’s recent Multigenerational Workforce, Workplace Culture and Wellbeing Survey strongly agree that it’s very important for them to feel valued at work. 98% also strongly agree that it’s very important for them to have a sense of purpose at work.

We also know that creating great workplace cultures is a crucial step toward increasing employee engagement, a key indicator of strong business performance. Not only does higher engagement correlate with lower turnover, according to a 2013 Gallup report, “companies with engaged workforces have higher earnings per share (EPS).”

I was invited by School 2030, which is an agency that has been commissioned by the Latvian Government to reform its school's curriculum, to visit Latvia between the 1st and 4th October. The purpose of my visit was to talk about Values-based Education (VbE) and the impact it can have on schools' culture, curriculum and life.