Living Your Values

What do you value?

By that I mean, what is truly important to you?

What principles do you want to uphold? Embody? Live in your daily life?

Respect? Integrity? Honesty? Dignity? Nonviolence? Kindness?

Create as long a list as you can manage. (If you have any difficulty with this, just google "values list" and you can pick from hundreds!)

Once you've done choosing the ones that appeal to you, choose your top 4. Yup! Just four.

Why just 4? Because that's about all you're going to be able to be able to live up to when the going gets tough.

How do you live your values when the going gets tough?

When you're having a hard day, that's when you want to yell or holler or kick or punch. That's not likely when you're demonstrating your value for respect or integrity or honesty or dignity or non-violence or kindness. In fact, that's the only time you CAN demonstrate those values. When it's HARD to live them.

And no, even if you work at momentarily disrupting and even truly overcoming the cycle of overwhelm, that doesn't mean you'll be perfect. There will be those truly trying times when, despite your best intentions, you will not live up to your values.

But you will NEVER live up to them if you don't try.

What are the first steps to living your values?

Start with identifying them - up to 4, remember? - and then intentionally choose to live up to them.

Will talk more about what that looks like in the next post. In the meanwhile, take some time and identify four priority values that you would like to embody in your life!

Until next time!