Difficulty

Very Hard

1. Time currently is our most limited resource and time does not renew itself, …ever. Once we spend a day, it’s gone forever. When we waste that day by investing our time in actions that don’t produce the results that we desire, that loss is permanent. We can earn more money, improve our physical bodies and repair broken relationships, but we cannot redo yesterday. When we all have infinite time at our disposal, then values and priorities would be kind of irrelevant. But here on planet earth, we are mortal with limited life spans and when we value our mortal lives, then it’s just logical to invest our time wisely and as best we possibly can. We’re free to decide what “the best” actually means for each one of us. The very idea that some areas of our life appeal to us more - than to other people - implies that knowing and/or understanding our values will be of enormous benefit to us. However, if any life we might choose to live is as good as any otherplugin-autotooltip__small plugin-autotooltip_bigWhether... being a prince or pauper, Olympian or obese, saint or sinner, ...etc. to us, don't waste your time and energy to prioritize your values… because, your efforts will be of little value to you. But, your efforts - certainly - will be worth your while when you can envision a life that are more preferable to you than others.
2. As human beings we tend to be fairly inconsistent in how we invest our time, energy and money. We are easily distracted. It’s easy for us to fall into the trap of following dogmas unconditionally and/or living by a different set of priorities every day. One day we exercise; the next day we slack off. One day we work productively; the next day we’re stricken with a “spell” of procrastination. When we don’t consciously use our priorities (i.e. values) guidelines to stick to and remain on a clear and consistent course in life, we’ll naturally drift off course and shift all over the place, particularly when the winds of change start blowing and we are suddenly confronted with or challenged by all kinds of obstacles unexpectedly. This kind of living - often much sooner than later - yields devastating results and outcomes in the long run. Imagine a ship without a rudder¹⁾ that just goes wherever the wind took it… and who knows where it would eventually end up? And the journey itself? Would most likely be quite stressful, uncertain, confusing, disappointing and filled with all kinds of frustrations that we can do little about, other than to accept our fate and live with it as best we can.

Thus, to consciously know, understand and live by our values are essential. Values act as our compass to keep us on course every single day, so that day after day, we’re gradually inching in the direction that will probably takes us closer and closer to our personal definition of “the best” life we could possibly live (i.e. an optimal self-actualized life). The “best” is our own-personal ideal, but - generally as we get closer to this ideal - we’ll experience increasingly positive shades of “better”, even if we never reach “the best”. Because, many results or outcomes in life exist on a continuumplugin-autotooltip__small plugin-autotooltip_bigContinuum:

A continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly much different from one another, but the eventual outcome or result are quite distinct. . Obviously there are some exceptions, such as being married or not being married, but our health, financial status, relationships, networking and level of happinessplugin-autotooltip__small plugin-autotooltip_bigHappiness Can Be Learned

A new study coordinated by the University of Trento shows the beneficial effects of an intensive program on happiness.

The results showed that several psychological well-being measures gradually increased within participants from the beginning to the end of the course. That was especially true for life satisfaction, perceived well-being, self-awareness and brainfundamentalbrain are generally a continuum, implying that they can gradually get better or worse. It just seem reasonable that more health, happiness, wealth, intimacy, inner peace, love, contentment, …etc. is better than less. Our staying on this planet is limited and it takes time to move along the continuum through the various “personal betters”, mainly because we cannot instantlyplugin-autotooltip__small plugin-autotooltip_bigAn instant is a very short time. In combinations like instant coffee and instant replay. It means available right away without a wait. achieve the state of “best”.

To extract and compile our own personal value hierarchy is a time consuming process, that shouldn't be rushed and it require our concentrated attention and effort. To extract our personal core valuesplugin-autotooltip__small plugin-autotooltip_bigThe values that are REALLY IMPORTANT for ME and to which I am committed to... regardless or despite any external/outside value pressures, such as - for example - cultural, political, religious and/or capitalistic values. are very hard work that requires plenty of time and effort, but - in the end - it’s really worth it.

Brainstorm - on your own or with people you trust - a list of your core values when you attempt to answer the above question. Try to reduce your list of values to a single word or two that encapsulates the essence of each answer. For example… when one of your answers is, “having a successful career”, then you could reduce that to the value of “success”. To make this exercise more constructive, you might reference a list of values that you could make use of as a guide to assist you in building your own personal list of core values.

For the moment, don’t worry too much about the order (i.e. priorities) of your list just yet, or how long your list is. Just get everything written down or recorded. For example… you might end up with a list that contains the following core values…

• Love
• Health
• Wealth
• Comfort
• Fun
• Happiness
• Success
• Learning
• Peace
• Intimacy
• Adventure
• Security

There’s no specific rule or regulation for how long your list of values should be, but it is strongly advised not to compile a list of more than 10-15 core values. More than 10-15 values - in general - might complicate matters and frustrate you much more than providing any productive direction. When you have a core value list of more than 10-15 values, consider dropping the marginal values that barely made your value list in the first place, or combine multiple values that are nearly identical on a single line, such as achievement/accomplishment or learning/education/training for instance.

We have to prioritize our list of core values. This often is the most time consuming and difficult step to take, when we finalize our list of core values, because prioritizing our core values requires meditation, critical questioning and thinking, some pondering and questioning the validity of these values for us… until we are truly comfortable with our prioritized list of core values.

A possible way to prioritize our core value list is to identify the top - most important - value, then the second-highest value, …and so on, until we’ve rebuilt the whole list in order of our priorities from the top to bottom. We could start prioritizing by asking ourselves the following questions…

• Which of these values is truly the most important for me in life?
• If I could only satisfy or live by one of these values, which one would it be?

The answer to the above two questions is our number one value. Then move down the list and ask which of the remaining value(s) is the next most important value, …and so on, until you’ve sorted your whole core value list in order of priority.

Sometimes the highest priority core value will be quite obvious for us. Other times we’ll have it narrowed down to a couple of value choices, but still, have a difficult time figuring out which one is really the most important among those. When this is the case, imagine a life scenario for each value and then compare those scenarios with one another. For example… When you’re trying to decide which is more important for you… learning new things or inner peace, then ask yourself… “Which would I rather prefer to do, read a book or meditate?” This example assumes that reading a book would satisfy your value of learning new things and that meditating would satisfy your value of inner peace, each to roughly the same degree. When you create scenarios for the tough-to-prioritize values, the best sorting of your core values usually becomes much clearer.

When we compare the above sorted and prioritized core value lists, it becomes obvious that this is indeed a very difficult and challenging exercise. These are not easy decisions to make. When a value appears on our list, then it’s important to us. By prioritizing our core values consciously, we’ll be able to rely on them when we need to make important choices and take critical decisions. When we know what is truly most important to us in life… is to experience inner contentment and peace, and then it will be much easier for us to say no to those things and circumstances that could take us away from that inner contentment and peace.

However, when our list of core values are based on the values and priorities that previously have been conditioned into us by our upbringing, education and society, such a list of core values is worthless - even downright self-destructive - to us as a unique individual and our ability to live a life of development, growth and fulfilment. Such an indoctrinated, pre-conditioned and adopted core value list, sadly, merely allow us to follow a path in life of derailments and stagnation's, which ultimately becomes barely manageable, because such a life is littered with a combination of self-created and sustained psyche traps and barriers.

We don’t have to continue living by the same values for the rest of our life's. We can consciously change our values – even radically - when desired or needed. Nothing is stopping us to go from a person who values peace most highly to one whose top priority is success, or vice versa. We are not our values. We are the thinker of our thoughts, but we are not the thoughts themselves. Our values are our current compass, but they ain't the real “me”. Is it possible that we can consciously change our values? Yes, it is possible. But we need to tackle the following question first… Why would one ever want to change one's values?

We may want to change our values, when we realize, understand and accept where our values are presently taking us, and we also realize that what we value right now, will not enable us to enjoy the “best” possible life for us. Our “best” life is our vision of all the possible destinations that we wish to reach. But our values are just a measure of the current direction we’re headed right now. And in most instances these two things are incongruent, implying that our current values are not always aligned with the course of our “best life”-vision.

Please spend a moment - right now - to grasp and understand what this means for you personally. When we keep living by our current values, then we can expect to get similar results to what we are already obtaining, possibly slightly better, when we live our values more consciously. But it is most likely that there is some part of us that isn’t satisfied with where we will end up if we keep following this same course. For example… Will we never experience an intimate, loving relationship? Will we never have children? Will we never become wealthy? Will, we never develop an outstandingly energetic physical body? Will, we never travel around the world? Will, we never be able to help our favourite cause? Will, we never feel that we’re living in total synchronicity with our spiritual beliefs? What if all these “never's” could suddenly become possible for us? How can we possibly achieve it?… it can become possible for us when we shift and realign our values. And here’s the key: We don’t have to maintain the same set/list of values throughout our entire life's. We can change (i.e. reexamine) them as often as we like. Which - as a matter of fact - is eminently necessary as we gain experiences, grow as a person, become wiser and/or when our current circumstances change considerably and we are confronted with a different reality than the one we are accustom to.

When we either adapt, change, tweak or re-prioritize our current list of values and consciously act on it, we change our behaviour and therefore our eventual performance results. This is something that can lead us to incredible new experiences. For example… if your top value is health, and you’re already in outstanding physical condition, what would happen when you changed your top value to wealth? You would cut back on your workouts for a while and invest more time, energy and effort into becoming wealthy. Your investment in health would slide a little - but in the short-term - it probably won’t make much of a difference in the long run. Health may still be one of your top values, but it just isn’t number one anymore. By focusing intently on your new top value of wealth, you eventually succeed in becoming wealthy. But eventually, as you become very wealthy, making more and more money beyond a certain point may no longer serve you well. Now you may decide to shift your top value to compassion, so you go out and use your healthy and wealthy self to compassionately help other people. Through this process of consciously shifting your values, you’ve changed from a gym rat… to an entrepreneur… to a philanthropist. You live an amazing life. But when you always maintain your original values, you will only experience being a gym rat for your entire life. And most of your true potential would remain untapped.

How can we truly live our values?

We follow a very similar process of listing and prioritizing, but now we do it with specific objectives²⁾ in mind. There is no need to repeat the process in much detail again because it’s exactly the same as creating and prioritizing our list of values, the only difference is that we repeat the above steps with our formulated objectives as corresponding with our goals (i.e. our priority values). Here’s a sample objective list…

Again, write out your objectives. Decide which ones are truly most important to you at the present moment. Prioritize them. In this case, it’s fine if you have more than 10-15 objectives. More than 100 is even OK… it will just take much longer to prioritize and - please - keep in mind that the idea is to achieve objectives, not to continuously prioritize, re-prioritize objectives. Thus, limit your objectives to the number that can be accommodated comfortably within your SDS-strategy.

These objectives represent the experiences that you feel are part of the “best” life you could live. Now, do you realize the problem with having a static list of values throughout your entire life? How is a static single list of values going to allow you to achieve your life goal? The values that will make you a millionaire probably aren’t the same ones that will get you married. And the values that will send you skydiving aren’t the ones that will help you become a real estate investor. At some point in your life, you’ll need to focus intently on one of these objectives, while letting the others slide for a bit.

When you fail to focus your energy on the goals that are truly important to you now in order to seize your current window of opportunity, some of them will silently slip away - like most new year resolutions - and that in the long run is quite a heavy priceplugin-autotooltip__small plugin-autotooltip_bigThe price we pay...

To some extent there is a financial implication attached, but MAINLY the price we normally pay is with regards to either our health, emotional well-being, spiritual growth, inner peace and/or our unique beingness. to pay. You may succeed in your career and never get married. Or you may get married, but never enjoy a state of physical fitness. Think back to the big, meaningful objectives/goals that you’ve already accomplished. Didn’t you have to go through a period, where achieving that goal became your top priority for a while? And in the process, you (probably unconsciously) tweaked your values to accommodate that specific objective or goal.

When we have our objective hierarchy, select the top one or two objectives, and consciously devise a strategy that will lead us to achieve them. Let’s say your objectives list is prioritized as above, so your #1 goal is to reduce your weight to 150 pounds. To achieve this goal, you might make health your #1 value. Then you might make self-discipline your #2 value, so you’ll stick to your diet and exercise program. And then learning might become your #3 value, so you spend time educating yourself about a proper diet and nutritional strategy. You must design these objectives and values based on your own personal circumstances. Like any skill, this takes lots of practice to master, but over time we’ll become more efficient at relating and synchronizing our objectives to truly represent our values. Whenever we achieve a major objective, that’s an excellent time to select a new objective and “update” our current values list to accommodate it. Once you’ve run the marathon, and if you feel ready to move onto something else - like becoming a millionaire - then you can knock health down a few notches and go into maintenance mode there, while you push values like wealth, success and courage to the top of your list to help you meet the next challenge.

Once we know and understand our personal values, we can consult them whenever we need to make an important choice and/or to take a critical decision. For example… Should you accept the new job you’ve been offered? Should you pursue a new relationship now? How much time should you spend with your family? These can be tough and challenging choices and decisions without a clear right or wrong answer. Another complication is that we will probably answer these questions differently in different phases of our life's.

Our values list provides a sure way for making these decisions responsibly and accountably. When we’re confronted with such a decision, we can “pull out” our list of values and reaffirm the prioritization of our current values. Then we can ask ourselves… “What would a person with these values choose to do in this situation and under these circumstances?” It’s usually the prioritization of our values that will provide an answer to this question.

As an example… when you’re offered a job promotion that will shift your work weeks from 40 hours to 60 hours, but double your salary, should you take it? If values like success and achievement are at the top of your value list, you’ll probably say yes. When freedom and family are at the top, you’ll likely decline the promotion. By clarifying your values, you’ve already done most of the difficult thinking required to discover what’s most important to you. So now when you’re confronted with such decisions, you’re able to reduce them to a values comparison, and the final decision falls “kind of automatically” into place. If the promotion equates to increased success but reduced peace in your mind, then you can compare those values to determine whether it’s a good idea or not. Your goal is to increase the fulfilment of your highest values… without sacrificing any of them to lower values. Or - much worse - sacrificing your values in favour of external circumstances and pressures, so that you start to live the prescriptive values of others, the community, society or company you work for and lose your unique self in the process.

Whenever our values shift, we may find that it becomes necessary to realign various aspects of our life's to calibrate it to a state of harmony with our “new and/or re-prioritized” values. For example… If success is your #1 personal value, then it will be important for you to experience it in abundance. Success for you may equate to a successful career, a high income, a fulfilling relationship and a healthy body. Thus, we need to ask ourselves which aspects of our lives are misaligned with our top values and consider means and strategies on how to bring them into full alignment.

When we notice and experience a misalignment - between the reality we experience and our values - we have only two options to restore our value alignment. We can…

1. adapt, change or tweak the situation or circumstances to restore alignment. For example… When health is your top value and you realize you’ve been keeping too much junk food in your house, you could modify your kitchen to adequately reflect your new health value, such as phasing out the junk and restocking it with healthier choices.
2. remove ourselves from the situation and start fresh to create alignment from scratch. For example… If you find yourself in a relationship where you definitely want to have children and your significant otherplugin-autotooltip__small plugin-autotooltip_bigWho might be your spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend. definitely don’t want any children, you can choose to break up and seek out a more compatible relationship.

The third alternative - of continuing to live with the misalignment - when “nothing can be done” about it, actually isn't a viable alternative at all, because this would mean to live without integrity to our values and a sure way to get stuck in life. An example would be choosing to remain in an abusive relationship out of misplaced loyalty. Living with misalignment for too long, almost always result in serious negative consequences, such as chronic depression or complete burnout.

Whenever our values change, it’s essential to review the various areas of our life's to make sure that it's properly aligned with the kind of person we truly believe that we are and/or can be. For example… When we're in a relationship, is it compatible with our values? If we work for a company, is its perceived values compatible with ours? When there’s a misalignment, then it’s time to make changes, either by adapting to or by getting out.

Important to realize and understand is that we frequently have to UPDATE our current list of values, as often as needed or required, but at least once a year. Generally, most people tend to do a personal value check and update at the end of the old or the beginning of a new year. The so-called new year resolutions, that isn't taken seriously by most people making them, and - normally - probably last for only a month or three. These lists of values does not represent our true core life values (i.e. our ethics and legacy statement). What they represent is merely what we consciously want to focus on for the next couple of months. Our core values serve as a compass, helping us to decide which way to go whenever we need to make key decisions. Our selected list of values serves the purpose of sharpening our short-range focus so that we can end up where we want to be in six months or a year from now. Once we reach that milestone, we usually need a different structured list of values to reach the next one.

At some point in our lives, we will encounter a situation that forces us to reassess and reexamine our current values. For example… Maybe a close friend dies, a major illness hits you, or you begin a new relationship, and consequently, you gain a new perspective on what’s truly most important to you. This is to be expected as we grow older and have new experiences. Suddenly our current value list no longer seems to be an accurate representation of the “real me”. We’ve changed too much. So it’s time to reassess and reexamine our values and create a new and prioritized list of values. Depending on how fast-paced our lives is and how many changes we experience, we may need to update our values every few months, or our values may go relatively unchanged for years when our life is slow-paced.

The ultimate goal of living our values is to eventually align them with universal laws. As we experience living with different sets of values, we’ll learn what’s truly important to us. Our values may shift a great deal at first, as we set new goals and have new experiences, but eventually, our values will begin to converge.

Our values are our current estimations of the truth. They represent our answer to the question of how to live. Some sets of values will fail to produce the results we desire. It may leave us feeling restless and unfulfilled. Other sets of values bring us closer to a feeling of congruence. When we act with integrity to values that are themselves aligned with universal laws, we obtain the best possible results… physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

This process of alignment is somewhat similar to how scientists try to discover a mathematical formula to explain natural phenomena. Isaac Newton’s famous F = ma law was an approximation of reality. But it was inaccurate at relativistic speeds, and eventually, Albert Einstein provided a more accurate formula. Just as the physical universe is the source for hypothetical physical laws, creation will also provide feedback to let us know how closely our values align with reality.

The process of discovery in this case is still experiential, but it can’t be measured as scientifically as gravity. The scientific method requires that an experiment be repeatable under the same conditions, but human problems and experiences never duplicate the exact same conditions. Once we make a one-time decision in our career or our relationships, we never face that exact same decision with identical conditions again. Since we cannot apply the scientific method to such situations, the best we can do is to try to classify events according to observable patterns we’ve previously experienced. What this implies is that the process of values clarification is inherently messy and inexact. It’s also a uniquely individualized experience. We cannot prove that one set of values is any better or worse than any other, but we can begin to notice patterns over time, and these patterns can help to guide us in the direction of universal laws.

The existence of universal laws cannot be proven. However, as we live with different sets of values long enough and gain enough experience, we will start to see that certain values outperform others in certain areas, hinting at the possibility that there may exist a true principle that works universally for everyone.

The ultimate goal of living and refining our values is to identify and achieve congruence with universal laws. Then our model of reality (i.e. umwelt) finally matches reality itself, and in the long run, our actions will consistently produce the best possible outcomes. This isn’t just an individual journey either… it’s one that all of humanity is experiencing with each passing century. Social creations like democracy, slavery or capital punishment, can be seen as part of an ongoing process of collective values clarification.