Your Values, Your Life
By
Why
didn’t anyone teach me about values and their importance in my life?
My
Mom and Dad taught me what was right and wrong, and this is a part of your
values. I took a class in junior college
on Philosophy and we must have discussed it at some point! Maybe it was because my family stopped going
to church – is that where I would have learned more about values?
Where
did you learn about values??
What? You say you don’t know what I mean? Read on….
A
value is a belief, a mission or a philosophy that is really meaningful to a
person or organization. Values can range
from the commonplace, such as the belief in hard word, self-reliance and
punctuality, to the more psychological values, such as the concern for others,
trust in others and harmony of purpose.
When
we examine the lives of famous people, we often learn of the important personal
values that guided their lives. On
closer examination, we realize that it was often these personal values that
propelled them to great success and achievement. Implementing personal values energizes
everything and everybody involved. We
can make a marked improvement in our own lives by either committing to the
values we already believe in or adopting new ones. If we don’t live our lives from our values,
we will experience conflict.
My
first major values conflict occurred in college. I was a psychology major and was interested
in the brain and how it worked. Then I
figured out how they learned about the brain – using animals as experimental
objects. I balked (this is the woman who
won’t kill a bug in the house but rather takes it outside and ‘releases’ it)
and dropped out of that area of interest due to this conflict. At the time, I had a job in the computer
industry and I just switched into that field.
My
second big values conflict occurred at the computer job. I worked there for 20 years, and over the
time I was there, I just couldn’t be happy with the company. I enjoyed my great co-workers, learned an
incredible amount about computers and people and enjoyed making the money that
this industry provides! However, I
couldn’t be happy with the idea that we using computers to help lawyers make
money from their clients – but in all honesty, that’s what we did!
My
third major values conflict was on a more personal note – it involved an
ex-boyfriend! He had a bad habit of
telling me he was going to do something and then very rarely following through. After awhile, this became one of the reasons
for the breakup of our relationship. I
knew it was important to me to ‘do what you say’ but I never realized just HOW
important…
In
my quest to become a personal coach, I’m attending the Coaches Training Institute. They use a method called Co-Active Coaching, and one
of the focuses of the program is on Fulfillment. One of the main pieces of fulfillment is
clarifying your values.
I
found some Values Tests on the Internet and promptly took a few of them. Interestingly enough, I received different
answers from these tests. So, what were
my REAL values?
At
coaching school, I learned some new ways to clarify values. We used various techniques such as
visualizations, looking at certain aspects of our lives to glean values and
using our listening skills to hone our values.
CTI also uses
unique identifiers for your values, so that they are very clear to you. I have my own coach, and through that work, I
have clarified my values further.
As
I continued to clarify my values, I figured out that I had been having values
conflicts throughout my life, but because I didn’t have a handle on exactly
WHAT my values were, I wasn’t aware of what was causing the difficulty in my
life. The three examples I gave above
came from this work and show how values can impact your schooling, career and
relationships.
Now,
I am working every day to learn more about what I value, and by incorporating
it into my life, I am more and more fulfilled.
It’s wonderful to understand more about what makes me happy.
Would
you like to join me? I believe you
would…..
If
you’d like to learn more about values clarification and fulfillment,
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