Feel More Peaceful By Living According To Your Own Values

Values are about what is important to you in life.  Living according to your own values sounds simple and easy.  But how aware are you of your personal values?  When your values are not clear you are like a boat in the middle of the sea without a map or compass.  I will take you step by step to discovering your personal and family values.

Identify Your Personal Values

Knowing ourselves is the beginning of building a harmonious existence.  We are all different, and what makes one person happy may be very upsetting for another person. Being aware of your personal values and living according to your values will help you make the fulfilling choices for you.

I am suggesting some questions to facilitate such an understanding of our personal values.

• Imagine you have no constraints in life. What would you do? Where would you live?
• A story, a characteristic or a memory that comes to your mind about yourself.
• What motivates you?
• Any memory or story associated with what motivates you.
• What gives you pleasure?
• When were you the happiest?
• What changes would you like to see in the World?
• How would you represent yourself, as a building, plant, an animal? Can you describe in detail?
• What inspires you in a story?
• What moves you?
• Can you describe yourself in a sentence?
• How would you describe yourself in two words?
• What is the story of your name? How do you feel your name has influenced your life?  How would you like your name to influence your life?
• What are your dreams? States of being, things that you would like to see happen or do.
• What characteristics in other people you feel irritated by?
• What elicits your anger? Disappointment? Sadness? Joy?
• What are you most proud of?
• Where do you see yourself in life? What is the next stage for you that will make you very happy and fulfilled in the next year?
• What do you like about yourself? Why?
• What aspects of yourself would you like to be different? In which way you imagine being different?
• What sort of people would you choose as a friend?
• Who would you like to socialise with? Doing what? How often? How long?
• Do you feel appreciated and understood by people close to you? How would you like to be seen by them and others?
• How would you describe your communication style?
• Who do you like as role models? Can you elaborate, which aspects and why?

Your answers are your treasure. If you are attracted to dependable and fun people as friends these two are your values.  You might find values such as honesty, courage, achievement, wealth, health, functionality, success, kindness, integrity, security or others may come up as important to you.

Note them and give them points between 1 and 5 to determine how important to you. Put the most important ones at the top.

Aligning Actions And Values

We all know more or less what motivates and irritates us. However living according to your own values consistently is a different matter. It allows you to differentiate between what is really important and what is not. This, requires diligence and conscious focus.

Ask yourself if your career choice reflect your values? What about your leisure time? Are you spending your time on things that matter most to you?

When your values and actions are not aligned you feel tormented. For example you might value providing good standards of work but you cannot say no to your friend and go out to cinema with him and your standards slip. Or the guy at the sports center wastes water; this upsets you very much, you don’t say anything but feel very angry inside.

Often we feel unable to follow through our values with our actions.  This is due to lack of clarity in our values and not knowing how to live in accordance to our own values.

Go back to your value list and for each one of them write down what you do and you can do to put into practice.

When you set a goal check if it is in line with your values, if it is not, you better change it with one that is aligned with your value system.

You need to keep your values in the forefront of your mind by printing and making it visible to you; by reading every day and planning your days accordingly.  Review your days how you could have done differently to be more aligned with your values afterwards.

İf your values are in conflict with others around you or wider society you can either try to change others or simply focus on living from your own values.

You will also need to review and change your values regularly, at least once a year. Different stages of your life such as becoming a parent will also require changing your priorities.

Discover and Live By Your Family Values

Family values are important because they provide us with a reference point we can make use of in order to make big or small decisions as a family.

Bringing out and being aware of each other’s personal priorities is the first step towards developing family values.  So as a start everybody in the family needs to do the personal exploration of their values.

Answering the above questions for your family and doing the same process for yourself will bring out your family and personal values.  The next stage is to get together with family members and process these.  You can use the way of the circle to process your discoveries. Finally you will come to an agreement about your family values that will satisfy everybody.

Next time you need to make a decision about a purchase, trip or career path you can use these values to guide you as a family.

Remember to review your values every year, also at important turning points such as your children becoming adolescent or leaving home.