Values!!!

“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”

-John Wooden

An excerpt from Tony Robbins “Awaken the Giant Within”

The only way we can ever feel happy and fulfilled in the long term is to live in accordance with our true values. If we don’t, we are sure to experience intense pain. So often, people develop habitual patterns of behavior that frustrate, or could potentially destroy them: smoking, drinking, overeating, abusing drugs, attempting to control or dominate others watching hour upon hour of television, and so on.

What’s the real problem here? These behaviors are really the result of frustration, anger, and emptiness that people feel because they don’t have a sense of fulfillment in their lives. They’re trying to distract themselves from those empty feelings by filling the gap with the behavior that produces a ‘quick fix’ change of state. This behavior becomes a pattern, and people often focus on changing the behavior itself rather than dealing with the cause. They don’t just have a drinking problem, they have a values problem. The only reason they’re drinking is to try to change their emotional state because they don’t like the way they feel, moment by moment. They don’t know what’s most important to them in their lives.

The consultation is that whenever we do live by our highest standards whenever we fulfill and meet our values, we feel immense joy. We don’t need excess food or drink. We don’t need to put ourselves into a stupor, because life itself becomes so incredibly rich without these excesses. Distracting ourselves from such incredible heights would be like taking sleeping on Christmas morning.

Guess what the challenge is! As always, we were already asleep when the essence of what would shape our lives was formed. We were children who didn’t understand the importance of having a clear sense of our values, or adults dealing with the pressures of life, already distracted to the point where we couldn’t direct the formation of our values I must reiterate that every decision is guided by these values, and in most cases, we didn’t set them up.

What does this mean to you, set your VALUES!!!!!!