Living in Line with Your Values

How much time have you spent thinking about what you truly want from your life?  What kind of person you want to be?  How you want to be remembered?

Growing up, many of us receive messages about what a successful life should look like.  We can become so caught up moving from one task to the next, achieving one goal after another on a never-ending treadmill of doing what we think is expected of us, that we never stop to question whether what we are working so hard towards is what we truly want, or simply what we have learned we should want.

To others, we may appear successful, yet beneath the surface we feel dissatisfied and confused about why we feel that way when we seem to have everything that we should want.  This can happen when we are living our life out of step with our values.

I am struck by how many of us have never asked ourselves the question, “what do I want?”.  It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I asked myself that question after discovering that despite having achieved external markers of success, I felt unhappy and unfulfilled.  And it can feel like a big question to answer.  It can feel almost like a question that we are not allowed to ask ourselves.  Yet how can you know what direction you want your life to go in, or how you want to show up in the world if you don’t know what you want?  Not what you’re told you should want, but what you, as a unique individual, truly want.

I’ve often wondered how we recognise what truly matters to us.  This sentence that I came across in Jodie Picoult’s book stayed with me,

“Here’s what I know about me as a writer: I would write no matter what – even if there was no-one out there to read what I’d written".

To me, it captures something important about living in line with our values.  It’s about knowing yourself and doing something because it matters to you – not because others are watching, approving or rewarding you.

In my experience, meaning tends to be found less in what we achieve and more in how we live day to day, in how we treat others and through the choices we make when no one is watching.  Even when life doesn’t go as planned or goals are not achieved, we can choose to act in ways that bring us meaning and fulfilment, guided by our values.

There will always be times when we drift away from our values, which can lead to us feeling disconnected, unfulfilled or a sense that something isn’t quite right.  I’ve found that allowing ourselves the time to pause, reflect and ask ourselves questions such as What matters most to me? What sort of person do I want to be? What kind of life do I want?  can bring us back to who we are at our essence, reconnect us with our values and the things that matter most to us.