Today I was inspired by reading an article on a dear friend’s blog and it got me thinking...
Sometimes I wonder if most people have any awareness of their own, deep, core and critical personal values. I for one pondered that question for a while… First, what are values exactly? Well they are basically beliefs we hold dear to us and are intrinsic to our very being and our life in general. Normally these beliefs start early in life and remain constant over time, even though they may change slightly or be forgotten on occasion - however they are always there. They are the guides we live by, how we live our lives depends on what we hold most dear to our being, and those are our core values and beliefs.
So in my case I have values such as honesty, loyalty, integrity, acceptance, trust, compassion, stability, security and many others that I live by. What I want to focus on is that the article mentioned above says that to be happy you must live your life by setting goals that are in tune with all of your values. So in other words, your goals in life and your aspirations and dreams must be congruent with your values otherwise happiness cannot be achieved.
In summary this just means that when you are working hard to achieve whatever goals you have set you have to maintain your values at all times in order to achieve happiness and success on a higher level. This is beyond positive thinking and all that stuff about affirmations and manifesting from the Universe and so forth. I think this is really important because I see it every day, people losing sight of their values! So many people are living their lives on a daily basis, going through the motions and achieving successes here and there but if only they realised that if they focused more on their core values and pursued ideals that matched them, their lives would dramatically improve.
I am also guilty of this myself. My values have not changed, but there were times when I forgot them, lost sight of them, or ignored them, and needless to say those were not good times for me. There were times I settled for situations that I knew were not right for me, and I forgot about my core values and remained on auto-pilot before I had some sort of wake up call or another that would snap me out of it and wake me up to what was important: I had to live my life in congruence with my core values. Once that light bulb went off, my life changed right away and a weight was lifted, I felt at ease with myself and things just fell into place. And I’m sure many people go through this from time to time. You also know when you are not living your life according to your values as you get an instinctive feeling that something is not quite right.
I don’t think it’s as important to put your values in any specific order as many books say to do, I think it’s more important that each day you remember what they are and you live and achieve success with those values at the forefront of everything you do. Of course this is not the same as setting priorities as we all know we have to do this on a daily basis. So in essence, having our values, knowing what they are, prioritising our life and setting goals according to those values and what’s most important to us, is a good recipe for happiness and a fulfilled life and then success will surely follow. I think this makes perfect sense!
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