Wednesday, June 4, 2008

How To Define Your Life Values

Have you ever designed your values? I want you to know that this could be one of the most powerful exercises that you could do. I remember the time when I designed my values the way I wanted it, it aligned my goals and propelled me in one singular direction.

When you have designed your values, how do you install them so they become a new pattern of thinking and behaving?

Well there are three steps you must do. The first step is to commit to your new values. This is to make a personal commitment and tell yourself that you will do whatever it takes to follow these values from now on.

The second thing to do is to make a public commitment.

How do you do this? Find five people whom you know. Bring your values to them and tell them that you will live by and commit to these new values. Make sure that these people are people you meet every single day, so that in this way they can hold you to your commitment and make sure you follow through.

The second step also consists of being totally aware of your values every single day, every single moment. So write down your values in your organizer in front of your desk, in front of your mirror or anywhere, where you can see every single day.

The third step, the most important step, is to begin making new decisions and new choices based on these new values. So if success and money was your number one value and health was number ten, it is pretty obvious that when you had to make the choice of going to the gym or staying back in the office to work, you would probably put off the choice of going to the gym. This would definitely result in your health and fitness level staying at mediocre levels.

What if you have shifted health and fitness as your number one value and money is brought down to number two? This shows that you have made a conscious choice to put aside time to go to the gym or go for that run, to increase your level of your health and energy after which you would finish whatever work you have to finish.

Here is another example, if money was the number one value in your life, and family and love was number ten, it is pretty obvious that when it came to a choice between taking your family out versus working on weekends, you would tell your family to wait till your work is completed till you bring them out..

Again if you were to make a conscious choice to put family and love high up in the values list, you would definitely make new choices and new decisions now.

Once you have begun to consciously make these new choices and new decisions repeatedly and consistently, what will happen? After a while, you will form a new pattern of thinking and behaving in which your values have naturally become a part of you.

So do it. Commit to design your values, design your life, creating the life of your highest ideals.

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