What makes you tick? What are the most important things to you? What defines you? Your answers to these questions are critical to your future success. Knowing what your personal values are is essential in reaching the future you want. Without this knowledge, you won’t know what really matters to you, why are are doing the things you are doing, or what motivates you. You will find yourself stressed, unhappy, and in conflict with what you really want out of your life. If you want to truly be successful, you need to make sure that your goals in life and your values are in alignment. If they aren’t, you will find it a struggle to sustain enthusiasm and energy in carrying out your current activities.
If answering those questions above didn’t give you a sense of what personal values are, read this:
Personal values are the things that are most important to you; the things that you will not compromise on. This could be being debt free, owning a home, or having a large personal wealth. Your values are what motivates you and what give you your passion.
When you were a child, your values probably came from your parents. What your parents thought was important you thought was important. Later on though, your values were influenced by your friends and colleagues. Your values are not set in stone but they also don’t change a lot. Many of the things that started out being important to you at a younger age still are in your adult life.
Your values can be divided up in to different categories: your family, your life, your work, etc. Things like honesty, freedom, and genuineness would be life values. Having freedom as a value could mean never being tied down to debt or a mortgage or a job you don’t like. For me, one of my biggest life values is loyalty. I really believe in standing beside those in my life no matter what the circumstance. This may mean that I have to give up things that are important to me temporarily in order to be there for the person at the time. The key to remember is that you define personal values as the things important to you and no one else and that your values will direct the actions you take in your life.
So sit down and ask yourself, what is really important about life for me? Write your answers down and then ask yourself if they are a clear representation of who you are. Lastly, rank them. Determine what your highest values are and put them at the top of the list. This will give you a clear outline of which direction you should take in your life. In essence, it is your manual to a successful future.
By coming up with this manual, you will know what your priorities are and what actions you need to build into your future plans. Financially, this could be your ticket to being debt free. Health wise, this could be your ticket to avoiding a heart attack. The bottom line is that you will be living the life that you want to live which will in turn bring you future success and true happiness.
