Be Clear About Your Values and Use Them as Your Compass and Map
One of the reasons many people struggle to move ahead or achieve anything significant with their lives is the simple fact that they don't have a direction to go.
Their lack of success has nothing to do with their intelligence level, nor does it have anything to do with their level of motivation and focus.
These people are smart enough. These people are not idiots. They are definitely not lazy.
Unfortunately, just like sailing a boat, if you don't have a clear destination and tools that would enable you to get to your destination, you're going to be lost.
At the very least, you're going to be sailing around in circles, wasting a lot of time, effort and energy and, ultimately, it will boil down to a matter of luck if you end up where you want to end up.
If you're sailing or driving, you need at least two things: a compass and a map.
It's important to keep this in mind if you want to achieve victory in life. If you want to transform your hopes and dreams into reality, you have to have a direction. This is where your values come in.
Integrity is all about living a more principled life. Your values set your direction. That's how they function, like a compass. A compass would tell you whether you're going east, west, north or south. It tells you the direction you are headed. And by comparing this direction to your map, you would know quickly if you're headed in the right direction.
You might need to change directions. You might need to take a detour.
The reason why you are able to make those decisions is because you have a map guiding you. Your values act as your map as well. You can easily tell whether you're acting according to your values or not. Put this all together and it's easy to see how practicing integrity, as far as your values are concerned, enables you to move in the right direction and move with the proper amount of force. Accordingly, you will be able to get to where you need to go sooner rather than later.
Sounds good so far, right?
Well, what if you are unclear about your values?
This is where people stumble. With the right direction, most people can get from point A to point B. I'm not just talking geographically, I'm also talking about life goals.
For example, given the proper amount of guidance and the proper values, our relationships can be more fulfilling and we can be happier people overall.
The difficulty here is when we're unclear as to what values we should operate with. This may seem pretty weird to you. After all, don't people already subscribe to values? Isn't there some sort of general standard or cultural measure of values? Well, that's how most people think, and that's what causes problems.
You have to understand that your values have to be your values. You can't just pick them up randomly from other people or from the general culture.
For them to really produce magic in your life, you have to consciously and intentionally select them. This is where most people stumble because most people think that they are just operating on autopilot values. They believe that if they're born in a certain culture, in a certain time, in a certain class, and in a certain context, that their values will naturally follow.
Well, people are free to think this, but I'm telling you, this is what causes people to live directionless lives.
Deep down inside, your subconscious is feeling imposed upon. It did not have a role in picking out your life's direction. It's not intentional and purposeful for you. It's just something that happened pretty much by accident. You were just at a certain place, at a certain time, at a certain context, and then all this social expectation is placed on you.
That's how most people operate and it's not a surprise to see why people often have a fuzzy definition of what their values are, much less a definition of those values.
You Have to Own Your Values
The bottom line here is that you cannot just rest on "inherited" values. Now, this doesn't mean that you have to automatically reject all the values that you picked up from your parents, grandparents, your neighbours and your surrounding culture. No. I'm not arguing that at all.
What I am saying is that you should question the values that you absorb and make sure they fit according to your goals, as well as your conception of who you should be as a person.
In other words, you have to take control. You have to be the "air traffic controller" of the values that you are operating by.
There has to be a higher level of intentionality and purpose and deliberation in the values that you're operating with. This is where lived values come in.
Values only have power if you actually test and live them out. So a good first step would be for you to look at all the values that you have "inherited" and test them out.
Do they make sense in your particular situation? Do you need to tweak them? Do you need to modify them in any way?
If worse comes to worst and those values really don't work for you, then you might want to throw them away and replace them with something that produces a better fit.
This is how you know you are operating based on your own personal autonomy and freedom instead of simple peer pressure. This also how you know if you're operating based on values that you yourself realise as meaningful instead of just living your life on autopilot because of other people's expectations of you.
Make no mistake about it, the most important and often crushing form of expectation is the expectation placed on you by your parents. At some point in time, you have to mature as an adult and stand on your own two feet and tell them, okay, at this point, I'm living by my own values. These are what makes sense to me. As your child, if you truly respect and love me, please allow me to be my own person.
This doesn't mean that I reject you as my parents. No. I still love you. But I just realised certain values that are specific and personal to me that I'd like to live by. All these other things that I inherited from you, I hang on to them not because I'm just going through the motions, but it's because they make sense to me individually.
Do you see the difference here? In the latter situation, you are exercising a tremendous amount of autonomy and personal power. In the former situation, you're behaving like some sort of pre-programmed robot. Which one would you rather be?