Nothing is eventually sacred however the integrity of your personal thoughts.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

In Half I of this two-part sequence, you realized a step-by-step course of for eliciting and prioritizing your private values. Now in Half II, we’ll discover easy methods to dwell with integrity to your values, utilizing them to make selections and take motion.

Utilizing Your Values to Make Choices

As soon as you understand and perceive your private values, you may seek the advice of them each time you could make a key resolution. Do you have to settle for the brand new job you’ve got been supplied? Do you have to pursue a brand new relationship now? How a lot time must you spend with your loved ones? These might be powerful selections and not using a clear proper or incorrect reply. You might select to reply them otherwise at totally different factors in your life.

Your values record supplies a shortcut for making these selections intelligently. Whenever you’re confronted with such a choice, you pull out your record and examine the prioritization of values. Then ask your self, “What would an individual with these values select to do on this scenario?” It is often the prioritization of your values that may reply the query.

For instance, when you’re supplied a job promotion that may shift your work weeks from 40 hours to 60 hours however double your wage, must you take it? If values like success and achievement are on the prime of your record, you will in all probability say sure. If freedom social buzz/hype and household are on the prime, you will seemingly decline the promotion. By clarifying your values, you’ve got already performed the arduous pondering required to find what’s most essential to you. So now once you’re confronted with such selections, you are capable of scale back them to a values comparability, and the ultimate resolution falls into place. If the promotion equates to elevated success however diminished peace in your thoughts, then you may evaluate these values to study whether or not it is a good suggestion or not. Your objective is to extend your success of your highest values with out sacrificing them to decrease values.

Keep in mind that this is just one of many paradigms for making selections. As such it has limitations, however you need to discover that it brings readability to your decision-making.

Attaining Alignment

Each time your values shift, you could discover it essential to realign the assorted elements of your life to revive them to a state of concord along with your values. If success is your #1 private worth, then it will likely be essential so that you can expertise it in abundance. Success for you could equate to a profitable profession, a excessive revenue, a satisfying relationship, and a wholesome physique. Ask your self what elements of your life are misaligned along with your prime values, and contemplate easy methods to carry them into full alignment.

Whenever you discover a misalignment between your actuality and your values, you have got two primary choices to revive alignment.

First, you may adapt the scenario to revive alignment. So if well being is your prime worth, and also you understand you’ve got been maintaining an excessive amount of junk meals in your home, you may modify your kitchen to suit your new well being worth, phasing out the junk and restocking with more healthy selections.

Secondly, you may take away your self from the scenario and begin contemporary to create alignment from scratch. If you end up in a relationship the place you positively need to have youngsters and your boyfriend or girlfriend positively does not need youngsters, you may select to interrupt up and search out a extra appropriate relationship.

So everytime you encounter a misalignment, you may both adapt the circumstances to revive alignment, or you may take away your self from the scenario and begin contemporary.

I do not advocate the third various of residing with the misalignment when you can’t adapt to it. This could imply residing with out integrity to your values. An instance can be selecting to stay in an abusive relationship out of misplaced loyalty. Residing with misalignment for too lengthy usually ends in severe detrimental penalties.

Each time your values change, it is essential to assessment the assorted areas of your life to ensure they’re correctly aligned with the sort of individual you imagine you’re. If you happen to’re in a relationship, is it appropriate along with your values? If you happen to work for a corporation, are its perceived values appropriate with yours? If there is a misalignment, then it is time to make adjustments both by adapting or by getting out.

Adapting Your Values

Sooner or later you will encounter a scenario that forces you to reassess your values. Perhaps an in depth buddy dies, a significant sickness hits you, otherwise you start a brand new relationship, and consequently, you acquire a brand new perspective on what’s really most essential to you. That is to be anticipated as you get older and have new experiences.

Abruptly your values record does not appear to be an correct illustration of the true you. You’ve got modified an excessive amount of. So it is time to reassess your values and create a brand new values record, following the method in Residing Your Values, Half I.

Relying on how fast-paced your life is and the way a lot change you expertise, you could must replace your values each few months, or they could go comparatively unchanged for years.

The Final Alignment

The last word objective of residing your values is to ultimately carry them into alignment with common rules. As you expertise residing with totally different units of values, you will study what’s really essential to you. Your values could shift a terrific deal at first as you set new objectives and have new experiences, however ultimately they may begin to converge.

Your values are your present estimations of fact. They symbolize your reply to the query of easy methods to dwell. Some units of values will fail to supply the outcomes you need. They might go away you feeling stressed and unfulfilled. Different units of values carry you nearer to a sense of congruence. Whenever you act with integrity to values which are themselves aligned with common rules, you get the very best outcomes.

This technique of alignment is just like how scientists attempt to uncover a mathematical components to clarify pure phenomena. Isaac Newton’s well-known F = ma regulation was an approximation of actuality. However it was inaccurate at relativistic speeds, and ultimately Albert Einstein offered a extra correct components. Simply because the bodily universe is the proving floor for hypothetical bodily legal guidelines, the universe can even offer you suggestions to let you know the way carefully your values align with actuality.

The method of discovery on this case remains to be experiential, however it will probably’t be measured as scientifically as gravity. The scientific technique requires that an experiment be repeatable underneath the identical circumstances, however human issues by no means duplicate the very same circumstances. When you make a one-time resolution in your profession or your relationships, you by no means face that very same resolution with similar circumstances once more. Since we can’t apply the scientific technique to such conditions, one of the best we are able to do is to attempt to classify occasions in keeping with patterns we have beforehand skilled.

What this implies is that the method of values clarification is inherently messy and inexact. It is also a uniquely particular person expertise. You can’t objectively show that one set of values is any higher or worse than one other, however you may start to see patterns over time, and these patterns may also help level you within the route of common rules.

The existence of common rules can’t be confirmed. Nevertheless, as you reside with totally different units of values lengthy sufficient and acquire sufficient expertise, you’ll begin to see that there are specific values which massively outperform others in sure areas, hinting on the chance that there could exist a real precept that works universally for everybody.

An instance of a possible common precept is that of equity. If you happen to align your self with the worth of equity and dwell with integrity to it, you’ll seemingly discover that it really works extraordinarily nicely. Equity implies that you deal with everybody you encounter as an individual of equal worth to your self – no extra, no much less. The precept of equity is captured within the phrases, “all males are created equal,” discovered within the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Equity is the foundational worth upon which democracy is constructed. The founding fathers of the USA upheld this worth as a “self-evident” fact, that means that they believed equity/equality to be a common precept.

Think about having to design your personal system for working an organization or a rustic, not figuring out prematurely what function you’d play after it was launched. It appears cheap that you’d design that system with equity for all contributors as a excessive precedence.

When your values are misaligned with the worth of equity, you can find that your outcomes endure. In case you are unfair in your relationships or your corporation dealings, others will acknowledge and adapt to your unfairness, making it more durable so that you can even obtain an inexpensive final result once you need it. They might even warn others prematurely of your conduct to make it more durable so that you can get something performed via others. So your effectiveness grows weaker the longer the misalignment exists. However once you construct a repute for equity in your entire dealings, you’ll keep robust ranges of belief with others, and that may make it far simpler to elicit cooperation.

I imagine the last word objective of residing and refining your values is to determine and obtain congruence with common rules. Then your mannequin of actuality lastly matches actuality itself, and in the long term your actions will persistently produce the very best outcomes. This is not simply a person journey both – it is one that each one of humanity is experiencing with every passing century. Social creations like democracy, slavery, or capital punishment might be seen as a part of an ongoing technique of values clarification.