Tag: passion

The Importance of Personal Values

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
We are all faced with many questions and decisions each and every day.  We are called upon to determine the direction our life takes minute by minute from the time we awake to the time we return to sleep.  What is it that guides your decisions?
Many people determine their decisions based on the situation they are currently facing.  Others simply make the choice that best suits their current desires.  Still many others allow friend or family to make their decisions for them.  How do you make your decisions?  What do you fall back on when your world is in difficulty and the pressure is on?  How do you determine what you are willing to do and where you want to go when the stakes are high?
“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” ― Roy Disney
What you value is important because that will determine what you are willing to do and what you are willing to sacrifice in your life.  And once you know your values you can then decide easier what will best fit your values.  When you determine your values you decide for yourself what success looks like for you.  You can then be an immense success as a stay at home mom, even when the world wants you to be a leader of a fortune 500 company.  Success doesn’t mean that you are incredibly wealthy.  Success is determined by living life according to what you determined was important.  What do you value?  What are you building your life on?
You may determine that family is of great importance and wealth is very low.  This will allow you to decide what job you may be willing to take and how many hours of overtime you are willing to work.  You may determine that financial gain is most important and you will make decisions accordingly.  What you value arises from who you are and gives voice to the person you are becoming.  And if you don’t determine your values yourself, others will determine them for you.  Society, family, friends, employers are all clamoring to push their values on you.  And if you don’t have your own values to push back with you will become what they want you to become instead of who you are.
Determining what your personal values are isn’t as complicated as it sounds.  It will require you to sit quietly and do some thinking and writing, but it isn’t complicated.

First figure out what is important to you.  And make a list

  • There are many things we do that are important to others
  • What is important to you personally

Second think about why the things on your list are important to you

  • Some things are important to us simply because they are expected of us or we were told they were important
  • Some things we adopted from our parents, or mentors or other people we respected but we never took the time to figure out why
  • You need to decide if they are actually important to you, and if they are going to be something you build your life around you will need to know why they are important

Third work with your list and refine it.

  • Many of the things that are important which you wrote down will fit together.
  • Narrow you focus and shorten your list.  You want something you can use to guide your life, not a novel to carry around to read before every decision.  “For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs.” Simon Sinek
  • If your life isn’t spent living out your values they are not your values

If we will work with knowing what we value, and how we define success we can live lives full of purpose and discover and live our lives to our fullest potential.  With a little work and heart searching we can find out what is most important to us so that we are able to chart our course even when the storms are at their worst.

Values are extremely important.  Do you know what yours are?

Knowing Me as I Am

We are all the sum total of a number of various parts.  Our personalities are never made up of one thing.  We all have dominate personality traits and subordinate traits.  We have traits that function well under pressure and those that function well when things are calm.  Not one of us can say we are one thing and one thing only.  Even those most talkative extrovert needs and wants to be quiet and alone at times.  It is within everyone of us.

maninpiecesThe problem with our traits is we often categorize them and decide which ones we like and which ones we don’t like.  We try to set aside and forget about the traits we don’t like, and work to enhance the ones that we do.  We have parts of ourselves that we build our whole persona on and completely ignored and neglected others.

“If, for example, I only know my strong, competent self and am never able to embrace my weak or insecure self, I am forced to live a lie. I must pretend that I am strong and competent, not simply that I have strong and competent parts or that under certain circumstances I can be strong and competent. Similarly, if I refuse to face my deceitful self I live an illusion regarding my own integrity. Or if I am unwilling to acknowledge my prideful self, I live an illusion of false modesty.”

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When we separate and ignore parts of ourselves we think that we are helping ourselves and getting rid of what we feel is negative about us.  But we take away from ourselves when we do.  And the parts we ignore don’t ever actually go away.  They just simmer out of our sight, forgotten and ignored.  We think we have dealt with them and they are gone but they haven’t gone and they are not getting weaker.  In fact out of sight they have begun to build strength and will one day burst forth somewhere.  Just like a volcano erupts when it finds a weak spot, so the parts of ourselves we ignore will come out.  And they will usually come out in a destructive form.

Many addictions that people suffer from can sometimes be traced to parts of ourselves that we have shut down and ignored.  Parts of us that were important parts of ourselves.  David Benner wrote “There is enormous value in naming and coming to know these excluded parts of self. My playful self, my cautious self, my exhibitionistic self, my pleasing self, my competitive self and many other faces of my self all are parts of me, whether I acknowledge their presence or not.  Christian spirituality involves acknowledging all our part-selves, exposing them to God’s love and letting him weave them into the new person he is making. To do this, we must be willing to welcome these ignored parts as full members of the family of self, giving them space at the family table and slowly allowing them to be softened and healed by love and integrated into the whole person we are becoming.”

In order for us to be whole we need to discover the parts of ourselves that we have cut off and rejected, and begin to understand ourselves as a total picture, not just the design we were trying to become.  Our whole being was something that Jesus thought was worth dying for.  Everything we are including the parts we reject is part of who we were created to be.

“The self that God persistently loves is not my prettied-up pretend self but my actual self—the real me. But, master of delusion that I am, I have trouble penetrating my web of self-deceptions and knowing this real me. I continually confuse it with some ideal self that I wish I were.”

If we are to truly discover who we are we need to see all the parts of ourselves as important and valuable.  Only then can God show us how He designed us to be and only then can we actually become all we were meant to be.

“You can never be other than who you are until you are willing to embrace the reality of who you are. Only then can you truly become who you are most deeply called to be.”

 

Transformation through acceptance

transformationWe all know things about ourselves that need to change.  And many times we have even struggled to change them.  At times our effort is successful, and other times we fight to change things about ourselves and end up discouraged by our lack of success.  There are things that our loved ones tell us need to change just to add to our list of things we struggle to become.  Everyone of us can compile a list if we think about it of things that we don’t like about ourselves and want to change.

The list is endless and as diverse as we are.  Everything from weight issues and body types, to personality quirks.  Our lists include addictions and behaviors.   Some behaviors are learned and we have developed them as we seek to be included in our world, or to protect ourselves from it.  Regardless of  where you grew up, or your social status in life you have a list.  There are a lot of things about ourselves that we don’t like.  And many of them we have hidden away securely so that we don’t have to see them and hopefully no one else finds out about them.  Unfortunately our hiding them away has not helped us in any way.

“Self-acceptance and self-knowing are deeply interconnected. To truly know something about yourself, you must accept it. Even things about yourself that you most deeply want to change must first be accepted—even embraced. Self-transformation is always preceded by self-acceptance.” And the self that you must accept is the self that you actually and truly are—before you start your self-improvement projects!”  David G. Benner

In order for us to truly change we need to see ourselves as we are, and accept ourselves as we are.  This can be very difficult for us to do because there is a lot of ourselves that we find unacceptable and fight to guard and keep hidden.  This behavior has caused many of the struggles we now face, because a behavior, or part of ourselves that we keep locked away does not go away and it doesn’t get weaker.  In fact the behaviors and traits we hide away get stronger and more aggressive, and when they break free and get loose they always appear in greater intensity and there is often a disaster.  It is like trying to bottle up a volcano.  It may appear to be calm and serene on the surface, but what we ignore is brewing in intensity and will eventually explode and it always explodes away from where we hid it.

Which is why we often don’t connect our behaviors to their cause, and we end up fighting the symptoms of an issue and never deal with the root.  And this is why we don’t have lasting changes in our lives.  As we accept ourselves regardless of what we find we can then see what actually needs to change and begin the healing or learning process which allows the changes to happen.

All of this is made possible as we learn to accept ourselves as God accepts us.  For many people acceptance is a myth because they do not know the love and acceptance of God.  We have conditions on God’s approval and love for us, and it is always based on our performance.  We feel if we can just be good enough, and do right enough God will love us.  And this behavior is completely against scripture.  Romans 5:8 says “He didn’t, and doesn’t, wait for us to get ready. He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready.” MSG  God isn’t waiting for us to be acceptable to love us, He loves us unconditionally just as we are.  We cannot do anything to earn His love, and His love for us cannot be diminished or increased. 

We need to allow God to reveal His love to us and truly understand what it means to be unconditionally loved, and to experience this love personally.  This was what Paul was praying for when he wrote “ And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.  May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully.”  Ephesians 3:18-19 NLT

As we experience this love and acceptance it allows us the ability to look into the areas of life that we have been unwilling or unable to look.  And as we do we will find God there waiting for us each and every time, and the pain of the experience will be surrounded and invaded by the augustinelove that God has for us, and we will find ourselves knowing ourselves, and in the process we can know God more as well.  We can only change as we allow our lives to come under inspection and open the doors to the things we have kept locked away and allow the love and life of God to fill those areas of our hearts.