CORE VALUES ~ Let's get serious with life

CORE VALUES ~ Let’s get serious with life

Posted By jessi on November 8, 2011

Values are priorities that tell you how to spend your time, right here, right now. There are two reasons that priorities are important for our lives.

The first reason is that time is our most limited resource; time does not renew itself. Once we spend a day, it’s gone forever. If we waste that day by investing our time in actions that don’t produce the results we want, that loss is permanent.

The second reason priorities matter is that we human beings tend to be fairly inconsistent in how we invest our time and energy. Most of us are easily distracted. It’s easy for us to fall into the trap of living by different priorities every day. One day you exercise; the next day you slack off. One day you work productively; the next day you’re stricken with a bout of laziness. If we don’t consciously use our priorities to stick to a clear and consistent course, we’ll naturally drift off course and shift all over the place. And this kind of living yields poor results.

Since our time is limited, and since it takes time to move along the continuum through the various “betters,” we usually cannot instantly achieve the state of “best.” We can’t land our plane just yet – it’s still in flight. Moreover, everyone has a different definition of what “best” means to them. For some people, good health is an absolute must. For others, being compassionate is what’s most important. And for each of these values, every person is at a different point along their own continuum. So imagine that there are a bunch of planes in the air, each in a different starting location and each having a different destination airport. You can’t then plot the same course to land every plane at its “best” airport. Each plane requires its own individual course.

You have to prioritize which planes are most precious to you. You may not be able to land them all within the span of your lifetime because you probably don’t know how long your lifetime will be; nor can you be certain how long it will take to land each of these planes. But realize that the closer you get each plane to its airport, the better that area of your life will be.

The question to ask yourself is this: What is truly important to me in life?

The next step is to prioritize your list. This is usually the most time consuming and difficult step because it requires some intense thinking.

Now comes the really interesting part. You don’t have to continue living by the same values. You can consciously change them – even radically if desired. You can go from a person who values peace most highly to one whose top priority is success, or vice versa. You are not your values…but your values will define the direction you are heading.

You may want to change your values when you understand and accept where they are taking you, and you realize that what you appear to value right now will not enable you to enjoy the “best” possible life for you. Your “best” life is your vision of all the destinations you wish to reach – the greatest ultimate destiny you can possibly imagine for yourself. But your values are just a measure of the current direction you’re headed right now.

When you change your values list and consciously act on it, you change your behavior and therefore your results. And this can lead to incredible new experiences.