Are Your Goals Congruent with Your Values?

I’m going to ask you a question?

Have you aligned your goals and dreams with your values?

In my opinion this is the number one reason people do not achieve their goals! If your goals are not congruent with your own personal values there is no way to stay motivated to achieve them.

Your values, in other words your beliefs about what is right, good, desirable and worthwhile, and our value system; the way you prioritise or organise and make de

cisions based on your values, provide the basis for the choices you make about how much time, energy and enthusiasm you will give to any dreams and goals.

Your values are the intangible aspects of life that make you feel aligned, complete, on track, enthusiastic and functioning at a high level. Values are the essence of who you are. They are at your core. Although they may change over time, a life that aligns with one’s core values will feel more satisfying and purposeful, even in the most difficult and challenging times. Values are the things you do that you find very attractive, they produce an emotional state that you feel is essential to your life. As life changes, it is important to re-examine your values. What was important to you at 20 may not be the same thing as when you’re 43 or even 51.
Some examples of values include family,honesty, integrity, love, compassion, freedom, adventure, fun, service, creativity, connection, etc. When we consciously design our life to align with our values, life gets immeasurably richer — and easier! Gaining clarity of your values and designing your life around them is a process.

To discover your values, ask yourself:
What is most important to you in your life?
Then ask, what is important to you about that? What does this give you?

For example, if you answered that compassion is most important to you. Dig further to discover the core underlying value by asking what does being compassionate provide for you; you may find that compassion gives you a sense of connection, belonging, a sense of worth as in individual, a sense fo honouring your spiritual core. As you see in this example, the underlying value extends beyond compassion. Focus on what the value gives you to be sure you’re uncovering the core value because this will help you set your goals around your values.

The truth is dreams are easier as they are more naturally aligned with your values, but goals can be another matter.

Let me give you an example:

In my value system wealth and money is not a high priority that may be because I learned early in life that you could be happy without it and that I was unlikely to have lots of it (I did learn both of these things as we all do we learn things that serve us and things that don’t early in life). However like most people including you, I do want the things money and wealth can buy.

So being rich and working just for financial return is not high in my value system, this can present a big challenge, because no matter how hard I work, I either give too much away (because I am just so nice), I do not charge any where near what I am worth, or I don’t follow through on the things that will bring me financial return.
Now it’s not that I don’t know what to do, I do. BUT – you don’t change your life because of what you know, you change it because of what you feel!

Your values are the things that tell you how to feel about everything in your life. If you don’t value money, or health, or family, or watching TV, or using the internet you are very unlikely to spend much time on them no matter what your head tells you, you ‘should’ be doing.

So what do we do about this situation?

There are at least a couple of ways to change this; #1: you can change the priority level of your value around your goal. This means taking ‘finance and money’ and perhaps ‘career’ near or to the top of my values system. This is easily done with the right tools, usually this is done in conjunction with an NLP practitioner taking you through the visualisations and steps.

The other way, which is easy for you to do on your own, right now; is to change your beliefs around money and wealth, or what ever value is inhibiting you achieving your goals. As we are working with money and wealth, let’s take a look at how I would do that.

First of all I would need to understand why money and wealth are not at the top of my list of priorities. As a spiritual person I may believe that I shouldn’t want to be rich as it is unspiritual (not my challenge but for many it is), I may believe that I don’t deserve it or that I am not good enough to earn it, I may have learned that money was hard to come by and that people from our family (area, class etc..) don’t get rich…. loads of reasons. That’s where changing my beliefs around money come in, and to do that we need to look at why I am having the thought that I need money…

Secondly, I would need to understand all the reasons why I think I want more money, notice that word think! As money and wealth are not high on my list of values it is how I think about them that I am working with right now as we have already established that my feeling may be negative around the issue of being a wealthy person.

So my thoughts are like most people; life is just easier when you have some, I could help loads more people if I am wealthy, I could help my family and make sure they were set for life, I could travel the world presenting workshops on this and other life strategies – especially my own Quantum Chaos Life Strategies (working title) and this are all things I really want to do.

Now that we have established a more purposeful and dare I say it, spiritual reason to be wealthy I can now choose a word that is representative of all of these thoughts that by design I am totally, passionately emotionally attached to. Now comes the emotion!! The emotions I have attached to all these wonderful outcomes are much more congruent with ‘who I am’ and hold loads more emotional back up than the few left overs from my childhood.

So my word for the value I want to attach to money and wealth is now FREEDOM!! Freedom to help others, freedom to spend more time with family, freedom to travel, freedom to present my main passion to the world and inspire others to live their truth – freedom.

It just so happens ‘freedom’ is already high on my list of values, I love freedom and always have. I love to do my own thing and rarely let anything tie me down unless I am already joyous about doing it and even money will not change my mind if my freedom is at stake. I have rarely worked for anyone else because I value my freedom.

So now when I think about being wealthy the word freedom becomes my replacement word and it is attached to a value that is very high on my list already, therefore I can now work for my freedom, play for my freedom, create and manage businesses for my freedom and as long as I think about my freedom I can keep my motivation high as I pursue this congruent goal.

Being wealthy or rich is now just one of the steps to my unltimate goal of freedom, it is not a goal in and of itself, but a means to an end and really the reasons we want to be rich are never really about the money – they are because of the experiences that money can bring us. Having money as a goal will rarely work unless we focus on why we want to have money.

If  money was the goal when you got it you would never spend it.

Now when you have a goal, think about the bottom line, what is it that goal will bring you, why do you want it? and then find a word that represents a value already high on your list that you can attach it to.

Being congruent with your value system is the only way you will achieve your dreams and goals and live the life you were born to live.

Annie Infinite

Related articles by Zemanta

• Lived Values (dragonintuitive.com)

© 2010, AnnieInfinite. All rights reserved.