Core Values In The Army

Values, when I think of the word value, I think of something important to me. I think of something that has shaped me to be the person I am today. I have several values that I hold dear to me, for the sake of this essay I have chosen 5. Honesty, trustworthiness, resilience, reliability, and finally relationships. These values along with the AF core values, integrity first, service before self, and excellence in all we do, are values that I try to live my personal and professional life by.

In these next few paragraphs, I will explain how each value is important to me. How each value can compare or contrast with an AF core value. Finally, How I plan to align my values with AF core values or to continue to align with the AF core values. I hope you can learn something about me and how my values influence me as an AF member.

Why are honesty, trustworthiness, resilience, reliability, and relationships, important to me? Well, I’ll start with Honesty.

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Honesty is the most important value to me because I believe it leads to a happier and more fulfilled life. In the past, I wasn’t always honest with myself and other people. Since I received my article 15 3 years ago, I figured out that the event that leads to my incident could of all been prevented had I been a more honest individual. The next value I hold most important is trustworthiness. In my career as an aerospace propulsion technician, Trust is key.

If our flight crews can’t trust that I am providing them a safe and reliable aircraft, why would they ever want to fly on a plane that I worked on? Reliability is my next value. Reliability is important because people rely on me to be on time, perform my duties, and lead. I also chose resilience. Resiliency has gotten me through so much of my life and Air Force career. When I lost my line number 3 years ago and hit some low points, my ability to stay resilient through focusing on my job, made me realize that I could come back and regain the position that I had once lost. Finally, Relationships. I have learned that my friends, family, and girlfriend are important and that cultivating those relationships has a tremendous benefit to my mental resiliency. All of these values are important to me for different reasons but have a profound and positive effect on my life if I use them appropriately

I will now compare my values with the AF core values. Honesty is key when we are talking about integrity. Honesty and integrity go hand in hand in a way that I believe you can’t have one without the other. Honesty allows me to really practice my integrity when doing inspections on aircraft engines. I need to make sure that I am honest in my evaluations showing my integrity when something isn’t right and conducting the appropriate maintenance to complete the job at hand. Trustworthiness goes hand in hand with integrity because most of the time I’m performing maintenance when no one else is looking. An example When I have to perform a quick fix my leadership trusts that I’m going to do it safe and by the book. Reliability compares to excellence in all we do in a way that if I am reliable at my job and make sure I’m always going above and beyond to provide safe aircraft. People will be more inclined to know that my maintenance is truly reliable. Resiliency compares to service before self in many ways. One way is that I need to be able to use my resilience when presented with a service before self-situation. Such as when I took a short-notice deployment and had to postpone an eye surgery I need to get. I could have easily said I can’t, but I chose to put the mission first and use my resilience to know that I would be ok postponing this surgery. Finally, relationships compare to the core value of service before self. Relationships can be key when applying service before self. Making sure that your family friends and girlfriend are supporting you in situations where the Air Force requires you to put the mission first. My values all compare to the core values in many ways and I try to learn more ways that they compare every day.

My values align with the core values in many ways. I will now tell you How I plan to keep them aligned with the core values. Honesty aligns with the core value of integrity first in every way. Personally, for me, honesty is the key to practicing integrity in my everyday life. I will continue to practice honesty by trying my best to identify situations in which I can use my honesty to continue to align with integrity in my profession and personal life. My value of trustworthiness aligns with my core value of integrity currently. My leadership trusts me to maintain these aircraft when no one is looking. To continue the alignment of my value with integrity, I will make sure that when I am performing a maintenance task on an aircraft, I will always use the appropriate technical data and be safe when doing so. My value of reliability is currently aligned with excellence in all we do. My values currently align, because I go beyond and get certifications in my job that others don’t maintain my reliability. I will continue the alignment of those values by ensuring that I go above and beyond in attaining new certifications in my career field that will enable me to further understand the scope of my mission. My resilience currently aligns with the Air Force's core value of service before self. I do that currently by putting off my want to deploy, focusing my efforts and expertise on standing up a new unit, and doing what the Air Force requires of me. I will continue to align these values by using my resilience in keeping a positive attitude about this new challenge of standing up a unit. Finally, my value of relationships currently aligns with the AF core value of service before self. They currently align because my family friends and family and girlfriend, offer me tremendous support in putting the mission before my own personal wants and needs. They offer me a place to vent which in turn helps me put my service before myself so that I can achieve the mission. I will continue to keep these values aligned by continuing to seek their comfort and understanding to be able to more efficiently apply service before myself in my everyday life.

In conclusion, I hope you learned a little about me and my values and why I chose the ones that I did. I hope you gained an understanding of how my values compare to the Air Force core values. Finally, I hope that you were able to see how my values align with Air Force core values and how I will continue to maintain the alignment. Thank you for taking the time to read my essay.   

Works cited

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