The Importance In Knowing What You Value.

Knowing what you value is the entry way to positive habit building.  In order to determine the behavior you wish to create and be, you need to know what you want, and who you want to be.  The stronger you can create an identity for yourself, the easier it will be to take on behavior that represents and creates that identity.  If you understand yourself to be a hard working person, you will choose hard work when you know it is necessary.  When you identify as an athlete, you create a lifestyle in the same manner in which athletes behave in order to achieve results, i.e. championships, achievements, notoriety, health etc. Different sets of results come from certain types of choices.  But there are many time tested results that come from very similar value choices across the board.  The quicker you can recognize what your values are, the quicker it leads you to being able to be that person.

What should come first, your values or your goals?  I think the goal is important.  Having something you are striving for is a major part of why you wake up every single day.  It gives you a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose.  But the goal will be just a point in time.  That goal is only going to be a moment of accomplishment, which will be an important moment in your life, but there will be a lot more time before and after this “point”.  This is why solid values connected to this goal and the behavior that you implement consistently because of them will be a bigger contributor to who you are.

These values can and will dictate your stability in life.  You have choices every single day to make, and these choices become easier when you have a plan of who you want to be.  If you don’t know who you want to be, then exploring is the only way to find out what that is.  You have to explore both internally and externally.  You listen to what something is saying inside of you, and then you go test it out in the world that you experience around you to see if it something worth putting your time and energy into.  

You can also be inspired by the outside world.  The inner and outer world are very connected, especially when you are aware and pay attention to it.  Most of the time, you know deep down some of your biggest desires and interests, and sometimes if you aren’t around the right people, these get drowned out or discouraged.  This is why it is important to look at what you value.  Not what other people value.  Not everyone is doing this work, or is aware of their choices and behavior.  What you value should always put you in the best position to be the best version of yourself.  You should never value a lesser version of you to make someone else feel more comfortable and your values should be driven by you. 

Take a second, think of 5 qualities that you value.  You can even write them down if you want to.  Once you identify these values, I would start looking at why you think they are important to you.  For example, if you choose family,  why did you choose family?  What about it makes it valuable to you?  What can happen if you neglect this value?  What can happen if you take care of this value?  All of these thought and ideas will be part of the decisions you make in your life moving forward.  And even though you should be listening to your internal dialogue, there are many people in this world who have a solid value system that can be very inspiring to you.  This is why role models are important to young children, it gives them a sense of direction, connection, and purpose before they even realize what they are doing.  But then it is important to understand what you are doing so you can commit to it on a deeper level for yourself.

You will have a constant tug of war with this.  There will be a tug of war between what you value for yourself and the things others will tell you that you should value.  There will be a tug or war when it comes to where you value spending your time.  There will be a tug of war between how much you want to sacrifice for your future vs. how much you want to enjoy the temporary immediate pleasures.  And there will be plenty of disagreements over what is best for you.  Take the time to become clear and strong in the identity of your future self, and then no one should be able to shake you.

This is where I find ancient wisdom to be very handy and downright a road map to clarity.  There are virtues, lessons, and themes shared from many iconic human beings over and over again through the history books of their personalized experiences.  The majority of them hold very similar statements about what is important because the behaviors you carry out will be clear representation of how your life manifests in the future.  Many high level achievers, athletes, inventors, spiritual practitioners, etc. all give very similar advice.  It just depends on what YOU want.

I think this is extremely important to point out.

I think it is extremely important to point out because no matter what your goal is or what the subject matter is, the values needed to reach these states of being become unarguably similar and understandable the more you learn and apply them.  There are road maps and natural rules of the universe that are already placed in front of us.  We should spend some time seeing if these road maps make sense to us personally, but then after witnessing consistent results from others who put certain values and principles into action, we should take it at face value when it works.  Accept them after you have analyzed their impact, and then build off of them with your own personal creativity.  Creativity built off of the foundation of your values is what makes you unique and having the awareness to identify and live through your values will create stability underneath that creativity.

So my advice to you would be to look around you.  Look at the results.  Look at evidence. Look at patterns and themes.  Take some time to figure out how far you want to go and why.  Find the behaviors that lead you to the type of values that will create stability in your life.  But also look at the behaviors that create chaos in other people’s lives.  There will undoubtably be a pattern you can recognize, and this pattern, once recognized, will be easy to understand.  You do not need to experience everything for yourself to learn the implications of a certain pattern or behavior.  There are some things that are best avoided in life that you can learn from observation alone.

Lastly, after you have spent some time thinking about and putting your values to the test, legitimize this list of what you value.  From this list, have a top 5.  You can easily have more than this, but if you focus on 5 different qualities that you value, you will have a solid understanding of the person you want to be.  Prioritize your values in a way that when chaos starts to creep into your life, your ability to stabilize your mind, your environment, and whatever else you need to, becomes an action you can easily accomplish because you know yourself.  Know yourself so well, that no matter what anyone else has to say about you, it doesn’t phase you because you know you.

Your values become your behaviors and your repeated behaviors become your identity.  Take care of you and stay consistent in what you value.