Now, I know when we get on these topics a lot of you are probably thinking, "Ah, this isn't really important to me." And, "Why do I really need to know this and who really cares about all this abstract stuff?"
Here's the point and here's why this is important to you.
As a human being, you're alive and you're the most conscious being on the planet and as a result of that, as a result of your brain being the way that it is, you have to depend on values, in fact it's a necessity. At Life By Design we often talk about requirements and strategies and identifying your values is a necessity and a requirement.
Let me put it to you another way.
Oxygen is a requirement and you know you need it to live and without oxygen you're going to die. Would it be important that we talk about how to get oxygen into your body? Would that be valuable to you?
Hopefully, the answer is yes because your life is important to you, and the same is true with values. The fact that you're alive, it means that you value something. And when I say value and the way that we define value in Life By Design is something that you wish to gain or keep.
Now here's the problem. The problem is that we don't spend a lot of time thinking about this. This is the dichotomy that people are living. You hear some people talk about what they think is important to them and then when you see how they act, what they said was important to them clearly wasn't really that important to them.
The purpose of this video is really simple. It's to get you to understand what your values are so you can make appropriate choices that are going to help you to experience more happiness in your life.
I'm recording this video at the busiest shopping time of the year. I just stopped at the mall and I witnessed a conversation
between two people and, you know, they were so excited to get this gift for their daughter and it wasn't that the gift was that important to mom and dad, it was the happiness of the child.
So, this is an example where family would be a value to these people. Now, they think that it's their daughter waking up Christmas morning and opening up a gift that's making her happy but in all reality when you step back and you look at things from further away it's their family. They value spending time together and seeing each other happy.
What are your values?
Here's a quick exercise that you can do, to help get you to get your mind thinking about what is important to you and what your values are. It's a really simple process that I'm going to break up into three parts.
Step One.
Where do you spend your money?
If you were to have $100, only $100, and you could spend it only on one thing, what would you spend it on? What would be the most important thing? What would be, if you had to order in your mind where would you spend that money, where would you spend it? I know for myself, I would buy my wife something and I'd buy myself a couple of books. Because that's what I value.
Step Two.
How do you spend your time?
What do you spend most of your time doing? Do you spend your time reading? Do
you spend your time training at the gym? Do you spend your time working? Do you spend your time with your family? Do you spend time at the bar?
Step Three.
How do you spend your energy?
Where does your mental focus go? What are the things that you would consider yourself the best at? When you wake up in the morning and you only have a limited time, where does your brain go first? What are things that you don't like doing?
When you start to look at where you spend your time, your energy and your money and you're actually looking at a list and you become conscious of these things, you'll start to really understand what you value. This becomes important because now when you have more time, more money and more energy you can start to put it into your values.
Once you start living a life according to your values, you become happier, you become the person that people want to be around and your life feels like it's amazing.
Another really important and corollary part of values is virtues but we're going to save that for the next video.
What are your values? Do your actions reflect what you value most? Do you spend the most time, energy and money on the things you value most? What realizations did you have after doing the exercise?