Cough, cough. Good evening, happy Sunday. So I’m going to continue, the Q and A Sunday that I started last week because I get questions, so why not answer the bloody things?
So this question came on a message last week, and I’ve since gone through this exercise with the person about values. And they’re like, “How do I know what my values are, I don’t know what my values are.” “How do I work at my values?” And I think it’s much like any exercise where we’re trying to answer something within ourselves, where there’s outside influences that can become part of it, can be really tricky because you might look at, you might know some people or you pick conversations about values and they value some things and you’re like, “Really? I Don’t really care about that.” So then you start to judge yourself about, “Oh, should that be my value cause, Oh my God, Oh, money’s one of my values, but they say that having money as a wealth, as a value means you’re greedy, so oh God, I can’t have oh…” See you get confused. And you can make… Hello. Not feeling very beautiful today. Anyway, thank you, I [tried 00:01:25].
So you get the out outside influences and then you might have a Google and go, “What are the top 10 values of the world?” And you think, “Oh okay, they should be my values.” But you know what? It’s much like passions. They may not mean Jack shit to you and that’s okay.
The whole point of values is you’re living a life where it’s important to you, not Google, not your best friend, not your third cousin twice removed, it’s important to you. But to start that you might need some ideas because values, there are hundreds, if not thousands of values that you could possibly have. There’s probably main ones in each area of life that you might want to focus on, but there’s a plethora of values to choose from.
So I was thinking if you’re not sure, and some values you just may know in here, “Oh my God, that is so important to me, so important to me.” And it’s an easy decision and there’s no questioning, they’re great. Those values when you like get it, you get it and they’re fantastic.
So what I encourage you to do is, I just said don’t Google those, is Google those or grab a book but many, many, many self-help books, motivational books, go to the library have listings of values, but you can literally go to Google and search, give me a hundred values and have a look through. And then play around with writing some words and similar to how I did the brain dump last week and similar to how I’ve explained how the passion test works for you guys, so you can go back to those lives, is then whittle it out.
So I just quickly write down and these aren’t my top six values, but I picked a couple. Achievement, family, kindness, obedience, satisfaction, vitality. So I just wrote those down. And I’m like, “Oh, okay, well, how do I get my top three, I know that’s six.” So you watch yourself.
If I could have achievement in my life every single day, is that more important to me than having family in my life every single day? Well, for me, family is going to win that one, so then I go to the next one. I go, okay, if I can have family in my life, is that… That was a bad example because family’s always going to win that one for me. I’ll take family off or we’ll go wealth. For my family, we’ll go wealth there, so I can get further down the exercise. How funny is that? Okay.
If I can have obedience in my life, or I could have satisfaction in my life every day, which would I prefer? Ongoing satisfaction.
If I could have satisfaction in my life or vitality in my life, every single day, which one would I prefer to have in my life? I’m going to go vitality, definitely on that one.
If I could have vitality in my life or I could have kindness in my life every day, you see what I mean? You get to something like, “Oh, it’s a bit hairy, it’s a bit hairy, it’s a bit hairy.” I’d probably go kindness over vitality, I think for me personally.
And if you’ve got a list of say 20, just words that mean something to you in that value family, you can whittle it down to five. You’re going to think it’s hard when you start. Yeah, you definitely going to think it’s hard when you start, but at the time you start going through it, that the difficulty disappears and you will enjoy the exercise and you will out of that exercise going, “Yay, I’ve nailed it, these are my top five values.”
And what knowing that’s really important because that’s how you make decisions. When all those things, when your values are aligned with your passion and they’re in line with those core desired feelings that you want to have, it makes making decisions so much easier. It makes where you’re going in a day so much easier. It makes what you write, what you work on. It makes what you wear easier. I promise you. I know that sounds random, but it does really does.
So thank you for the question and I hope that’s been a little bit helpful or a lot helpful about how to work at those. So just have a Google get one of those really big lists of values, maybe grab 10, you get a few more if you want and then do that exercise. If I had this one or that one, which is more important to me? Next one and whittle it down to get to your top five and you’ll see a change, I promise.
So until tomorrow night, have a good night everybody and stay safe in Australia in the fires. Oh my God, just heartbreaking, heartbreaking, heartbreaking. Thank you to everyone who’s looking after everybody in the fire zones, night-night.