Did you know that being in tune with your values can help you to make clear decisions?
When you know what your personal values are, you trust yourself more. And because you trust yourself more, it makes the decision-making process easier. Your self-respect grows and so does your self-esteem. And you can have confidence that what you are pursuing is going to leave you feeling fulfilled, instead of depleted.
I know this from personal experience, having spent a lot of my life feeling frustrated and never feeling like I was living the life I was meant to.
If you are struggling to make decisions in your life, there might be a good chance that you are out of alignment with what truly matters to you.
Here are four reasons to start living your life in alignment with your values.
Core values are not permanent
Our personal values can be pretty consistent throughout our lives. However, they are not set in stone.
Experiencing big changes in our lives, like moving cross country, leaving parents home, going to university, or even going through trauma, such as the death of a loved one, illness, or divorce, may change completely what we value most.
So, discovering your core values is not an exercise that you do, and then forget about.
Our experiences have the power to dictate our needs but sometimes we let fear take control and we see ourselves stuck in a certain period of our lives. Our automatic thinking patterns can limit us in a ridiculous amount of ways if we allow it.
So it’s important to be deliberate and learn to understand what actions really take us closer to where we wanna see ourselves.
There is great freedom in starting to focus on what is essential, discarding that which takes up unnecessary space, and filling our lives with more of what gives us a sense of purpose.
Live your life according to your standards and not anyone else’s
Have you ever set aside the time to focus on determining your core values and what really is important to you?
Do you know the real reasoning behind the things you do or don’t do?
Well, it all comes down to your personal core values.
They are a way to check if you are on the right track or if there are things in your life that need to be removed.
It’s incredible how these values play an essential part in your overall happiness, success, and confidence in the choices presented in front of you.
So you want to take the time and energy to be sure that your definition of your best life is according to your own personal standards and not anyone else’s – before making life-altering decisions.
When we aren’t in tune with ourselves and what’s important to us, it can be easy to judge our life by other people’s standards. Each of us has our own unique definition of what it means to live a successful life.
For some people that might be how much money they make, for others how much adventure was packed into their lives, or it could be making a difference, and so on. Defining your life by someone else’s measure of success will only lead to frustration and never feeling like the life you are living truly matters.
Take some time to create vision-aligned goals, based on your values.
Have clear guidance when making tough decisions
We all have to make difficult choices each day. There are only so many hours in a day and we often have to say no to things in order to say yes to others.
When we aren’t clear about our core values, we might be saying “yes” to things that don’t truly matter to us and saying “no” to the ones that do. Knowing your core values will give you a clear guiding light to base your decisions on. You’ll feel more comfortable saying “no” because you’ll know that you’re living up to your core values.
The lifestyle you live, the food you eat and the friends you hang out with are all choices influenced by your personal values.
When you know what your personal values are, it will better the quality and improve your decision making. Even better, you have peace with what you have decided.
Living in alignment with your personal values makes you trust yourself more, you honor your own decisions and your self-respect grows and so does your self-esteem.
In a nutshell, it only brings you closer and closer to :
- Focusing on what is essential
- Increasing your self-trust
- Not questioning your decisions
- Increasing peace of mind
- A more purposeful life
- Achieving your goals easily
Find more contentment
Your values are deeply personal and uniquely yours. They are the things that you consider to be important and meaningful in the way that you choose to live your life. And as you start making decisions in life according to them, you will naturally find yourself drawn to people, ideas, events, etc., that align with your values. They will effortlessly inspire you to take action accordingly.
Okay, sounds great – right? But how do we figure out our values in the first place?
Try out this simple 2 step exercise and you yourself can map out what values do mean a lot and which ones you can start using right away to live a more purposeful and aligned life .
Step 1
Come up with a list of about 50 Personal Values ( If you can’t think of any, you can easily find a list on Google too.)
Circle the ones that are more in tune with what you believe or live by and from them go narrowing down the list until you get to 10 values.
Step 2
Try uncovering the “why” behind why a value is important to you. Go deep and try asking yourself why is this important to you, at least five times or until you can’t come up with any more answers.
You may find that a particular core value drives a ton of other values for you, but there’s always a core reason why those things are important to you.
Finally, check which ones are interconnected and try to reduce the number of values to five.
Now comes the time to be deliberate and start using these five core values as a compass to guide your personal and professional decisions living a more aligned and meaningful life.