How do you live out your values?
How do your values affect your daily life? The decisions you make? Those around you?
Not everyone has a solid grasp on their core values, but for the sake of this prose, I’m going to assume each of you do (if you don’t, join me next month for the journal challenge — stay tuned!).
For those curious kitties out there, my core values are:
1. scream laughing
2. adventure
3. connection
4. vacation (if you weren’t around a few weeks ago, this isn’t exactly what you’re thinking)
5. honesty
These 5 values are the cornerstones of my life. Even though I identified them many years ago, I didn’t really know how to harness them until I became a coach and started helping others with this exact situation. Sure, if I look backwards, most of the big decisions I made in life had a dotted line to one of these, but that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to live my life with intent — down to how I spend each hour of the day. After all, your life is merely a culmination of hours.
The HOW behind this life of intent is different for everyone. This is what I work with clients on throughout our time together — how to start implementing these values into the intent of every aspect of their life. Sorry, no one size fits all approach here.
Think about yesterday. How intentional was your day? How did you choose to spend your time? We all only have 24 hours each day, but we each get to decide on a short term, micro-level how to spend those hours. We also are in the business of using our values to make the macro-level decisions throughout our life. If we don’t put intent behind this, I guarantee someone else will do it for you. This is extremely risky, because I have a sneaky suspicion their values are different than yours.
I get it, we all have responsibilities that feel like they are out of our control. Yet, I have a sense that at some point in your life you made a decision that turned into that responsibility. Was that decision intentional? Did it map to your values?
This all came to a head for me recently in a relationship (errr, the ending of a relationship. COOL.). I realized there is no use in discovering or talking about values if you aren’t going to REALLY live them out in everything you do. After all, how you do anything is how you do everything. If you were to compare my values to said person’s values, you’d see lots of similarities. Yet, when there is a disconnect in how those actually appear in your daily life, those values mean next to nothing.
Say you have a value of honesty. When you’re faced with a tough decision, if you don’t set out to make that decision with the intent of honesty, that value is not being honored and is, therefore, moot.
The greatest benefit we feel from living this life of intent is a deep sense of peace. I wake up each morning in total and complete peace, knowing that I am intentionally living out my life, according to my values. Good lawd, it feels good to be able to declare that and know it’s true.
On a scale of 1 to 'at peace', where do you fall?
