There are many things in life that determine whether we fail or succeed in our work or personal lives. Lord knows I have failed more times that I can remember but along the turbulent highway to success I came across something that totally shifted the way I looked at success and failure.
We all know that goal setting or having a plan of action is a smart thing to do if you want to achieve something. Whether you’re setting up a business, wanting to lose weight, or want to make more money it all starts with a plan… and if you don’t have a plan, then you’re literally planning to fail.
But I’m not going to bore you to death about goal-setting today, I’ll leave that for another time. What I’m going to share with you right now is far more valuable to experiencing immediate satisfaction and fulfillment in all that you do. This truly is priceless because as you’ll discover in a moment all your goals and desires are nothing more than a values clarification.
When I first came across this ultimate source of success and failure and it was like I got handed a miracle cure for instant happiness and fulfillment. This simple formula for having success now in everything I did shattered the old paradigm of waiting to be happy until I achieved what I wanted.
How Do You Know What Your Life Is Truly Worth?
What I’m talking about here of course is your Life or Core Values.
Life values are those things that we need to experience in our life to feel satisfied and fulfilled. I call them ’emotional needs’ that all of us have that determine whether we are happy and fulfilled or not.
An emotional need is connected to those emotions that we need to experience that gives us a sense of satisfaction in our lives. This struggle is happening all the time for almost everyone but the difference is that not many people really make a conscious effort to understand how they work and how they can give this experience to themselves anytime they choose.
If we are meeting those emotional needs such as the need to feel secure, recognized, at peace, needed, safe, productive and so on or the need to give or receive love or give love, or the need to feel safe in a relationship, or the need for adventure or success in our lives, then on the inside we feel complete.
We all have a set of values that drives our emotional needs whether we recognize them or not. The key to absolute happiness and fulfillment is really quite simple – just make sure you know what your core values are and then take the time each day to prioritize them and give yourself what you need to feel emotionally satisfied.
I’ll give you an example. Let’s say your top 3 values are family, financial stability and health. If we look at the emotional needs of these values they would be love, security and peace. Then, you would set a goal to make sure you meet these needs on a daily basis.
That means that you would do 1 thing every day to feel like you have expressed your love to someone you love and care about in your family. How you do that is up to you. It could be as simple as paying a compliment, doing a random act of kindness or just spending a few minutes of quality time each day with those you love.
For the value of financial stability which is the emotional need for security in your life you could start reading a book on wealth building, or start up a budget that you stick to each day, or setup up a savings plan so you can leverage your money through investing, or simply give thanks for what you already have in your life.
And for health, which is the emotional need to feel happy because lets face it when your health is not good it’s very challenging to feel at peace with your life, there is no end to the things you can consciously do each day to look after your health and give yourself more peace of mind and energy.
I hope you’re starting to see the picture here that living by your life’s values is the best way to live a happy, productive and emotional fulfilling life right now. The fact is that every goal you have or everything you want to achieve out of your work or personal life is driven by an emotional need.
Think about it for a moment. Let’s say you want to be a millionaire… what you are really saying is that you want to have the peace of mind and feeling of being secure that having a million dollars in the bank would bring.
Or, you might want to become a famous author. Let’s say you achieve that goal – how would you feel? Proud of yourself, successful, powerful? Like all goals what we’re really looking for is the feeling that we get once we achieve it.
So my question to you is, ‘what if you could achieve those feelings that are important to you each and every day simply by knowing what your life’s values are and honoring them’? How do you imagine your life would be at the end of 1 day, 1 week or 1 year of doing this?
Well, I can tell you from my own experience it’s like winning the lottery every single day because you feel so blessed to be alive.
Discover Your Life’s Value’s
Take a few minutes to write down what you believe your top 10 values are in your life right now. This may change as things change in your life but this is a good place to start.
If you’re not sure what they might be then click on this link and download the PDF document that I have put together for you which has an extensive list of life values for you to review and choose from.
Once you’ve written them down, then stick them on your fridge or somewhere that you will see them each day. The reason for this is so that you look at it every morning and every afternoon and you make sure to tick them off one-by-one until you have honored each of your core values for the day.
It honestly doesn’t have to take long. Some days I get sop caught up in what I’m doing that I leave it until just before I go to bed to complete them.
Yes, it can be more challenging at night so I recommend you try and get them done by dinner time. I’ve even managed to get all mine done in 5 minutes as as time goes by you get more and more creative at finding ways to meet your emotional needs.
Keep in mind that it’s not the amount of time you spend within each of them, it’s the quality of that time. For example, 5 minutes of quality time being present with your partner without distractions and really being there for them is worth more than a week of rushing by each other barely noticing that the other is there.
Most of all have FUN with your daily activity. If you can start giving yourself the feeling that success brings through your own actions each day that is a tremendously powerful message you are sending to the life. Then life will agree with you and send you a non-stop flood of experiences to experience even more of what you love and enjoy.
At the end of the day life is about balance. By living by your life values you are inviting balance into your life and when you do that you will feel like you are living in Heaven on Earth.
