Chapter 8 Your Values.
The subject of values must follow closely our previous discussion on lifes purpose. I will forge ahead here despite the dryness of todays topic, knowing that this will be one of the most important lessons in your life. This puts you on the right track, with a shower of blessings. The flowers and fruits of your life will blossom from here.
Almost all of what we think or feel hinge around our values, which are basic and exact belief systems about what is important, right or wrong, good or bad, and what makes life meaningful and worth living. Your values are the foundation on which you act and react to situations in life, and they groom your entire lifestyle. Values, like your major purpose can spark the actions that lead to great achievements; that is why crusaders fight for their religion, and soldiers go to war for their country. You gain amazing power by living for your values. You also experience a sense of direction, usefulness and inner peace. Your values are the lighthouses that guide you to your destiny, that is how important they are!
You must have complete Clarity of Values, otherwise, you do things that make you feel uncomfortable and unhappy later, because you are not clear about the appropriateness of these things for yourself and others. When you are definite about what is important in life, you move with confidence and make effective decisions. Most great people throughout history were very clear about their convictions. They consistently led lives in which their values, standards and actions were one. President Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr and President Nelson Mandela, for example, were conclusive about the need to erase racial discrimination in their countries.
When Florence Nightingale was only 18, she surprised her parents by visiting hospitals and charity institutions. She achieved greatness with clarity of values. During the Crimean War in 1854, she nursed and saved hundreds of wounded. Later, she founded the Nightingale Home for training nurses in London, and published a book, Notes on Nursing. Likewise, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Kenny Rogers, Lionel Richie and others who raised funds with songs like We are the World, Do they know it's Christmas, and Heal the World had distinct values too. I could go on and on about great people, but they all have the same clearness about what they ought to do and why they are doing it.
Clarity of values is one of the most important ingredients for achieving success. If your plans for accomplishment require you to do things which conflict with your moral values about right and wrong, your plans will not work because you dont have a clear conscience. To cite an example, if someone wants to help the poor by being another Robin Hood who robs from the rich, he will probably fail, out of guilt, and end up in prison too.
It is also important to determine your Ranking of Values, showing their order of priority and importance to you. You should therefore write down your values in order of importance, for example:
No. 1 in importance - Happy home, achievement, wealth.
No. 2 in importance - Health and beauty.
No. 3 in importance - Inner harmony and peace.
No. 4 in importance - Freedom, fun, and adventure.
You must ensure that all your values interlock and co-exist beautifully, with less significant ones trailing important ones. You must also keep them balanced and in harmony with each other.
Now I shall explain to you the importance of your Harmony of Values. If your values produce some fruitful actions towards your success but do not support your deepest needs, or if they disturb other things that are crucial to you, you may feel some inner conflict. At other times you may have everything and still feel discontented. Let us create and analyse a real life example: You value achievements through specialised skills, and aspire to be a gymnastic star, and you work very hard at it, so hard that you begin to miss your familys affection and even your family holidays, sooner or later you are likely to feel incongruent and unhappy, without the ideal balance.
You need also a periodical Review of Values, simply because you grow, while situations, environment, and the world change. Let us look at another model: Say, among one of you out there, your love for animals finally opened up your pet shop, coupled with your noble purpose of regularly donating pets for the old and sickly in various hospitals in the country. You made deliveries and exchanges, and everything went well. Your business grew fast (in line with the saying: the more you give the more you have), and within a couple of years you had a chain of pet shops, and large breeding kennels and aquariums, exporting fish and Persian cats to countries around the world, then you built a crocodile farm. You became the managing director, drowned in the massive daily responsibility of running your big business with 500 employees. The pets for the hospitals became history! Isnt it time to stand back and look at the whole picture and review your values? What about employing someone to do some social work, and dash those pets to the hospitals again? Or to save time, just make monetary donations to various places?
Periodical reviews of values show that you ought to have Flexibility. (I am thorough in my lesson here; leaving no stones unturned, and no room for unhappiness for you.) Flexibility means you have to adjust to your needs. Besides, certain values should be adopted because they have curative (healing) effects for some character weaknesses. For instance, if you are a quarrelsome, aggressive or revengeful individual, It pays to put Love and Forgiveness in the top ranks of your values. This is something you should take seriously, because I can assure you, you will be a happier person after you make those adjustments. You should make regular self-examination and fine-tuning. Retrospection and introspection are important. With more experience in life, you will progressively know the values to be enhanced, and values to be subdued or discarded.
In your business world and personal relationships, do keep in mind forever that you need to know the other persons key values too, and know how to fulfil them. If you dont, at work you will lose your workers top performance, or even lose him! Agood grasp of others values and yours is an excellent footing for relationships and inner harmony, which will usher you towards success and happiness.
"Going beyond is as bad as falling short." - Chinese proverb.
"Kindness gives birth to kindness." - Proverb.