3 Strategies for Driving Your Behaviour in the Best Direction

Build your behaviour, and live your life, on strong foundational roots.

What is a Core Value?

We all have foundational beliefs. These are broad concepts which are important to us. These have built up from childhood. Many formed from our family and culture and so on.

Our core values are the ones of top priority to us. The ones nearest to our heart are the ones that mean the most to us.

How do we know what our top core values are?

The first thing is to create awareness. Awareness that we have core values and that they are important to us and that it's advantageous to know them. Three strategies to discover our core values:

1. Life Mentoring has developed an app to make it easy to rank your top values. Which values bring about a good calm internal state/feeling for you. Which resonate with you as being important. 

2. Look at what and, maybe more importantly, who influences you. What do you like and admire about them. Who do you see as a mentor in your life. If you have several - look at the patterns of similarity.

3. Look at your past - what did you enjoy or not enjoy and the same with your work. If you look at what ignited some feelings in you - the negative feelings and reactions indicates that something that has happened is not matching with your values.

Do note that they can change during your life so it is recommended that you repeat the ranking process. The word - or value - means different things to different people. So its safe to say that just because someone has the same values as you it doesn't mean the life by same code as you.

Why is it important to know them?

As our core values are a central part of who we are we can use them as our guidelines to live by. It is best to live with them in your awareness. When your behaviour, and way of living and behaving, matches your values then you find you are more satisfied and content. Life feels more comfortable and flows better. They also allow us to persevere and move forward in our lives. When you experience negative feelings you will notice that your values are not met. You may notice that someone has crossed your boundaries. It may be tempting to dismiss this feeling - with "I'm being too sensitive" and then ignore it. Our feelings are our red flags that something isn't fitting quite right for us. Pay attention to these feelings and have a look at what is behind them.

How can we use them to our advantage?

When making decisions in life, refer to your core values. Use them to assist you with the direction that will be best for you. This will lead to more flow and comfort for you. Also by knowing your values you will know whats important to you. You can use this knowledge to help guide others to know what your boundaries are and what behaviour might lead to them crossing these boundaries. Prevention is best but if they cross the boundaries you can readily explain what has happened.

Conflicting Values

What does it mean when there are conflicting values - either between oneself and someone else (or even within ourselves). It means there are two values systems at play. We need to look at these and work out an intersection between the two.

Summary

Our values are the important concepts which underlie our behaviour. When we feel comfortable in life we are living with these in mind. We can find our values using a choice of strategies. When our boundaries are over stepped we feel an emotion - discomfort at the very least - and this is our indicator. We can then use this to either convey to others or correct the situation to get us back into comfort.