Values and Goals – Living the Dream

Most people in life have not identified their core values. Have you? Your core values are the key to living a fulfilled and happy life. They are in effect ‘living the dream’. Many people go through life unhappy with where they have ended up and many others wonder why they did not end up where wanted to get to when they were young and starting out. In almost all cases it is because they did not identify their core values when they were young and set out a plan of how to set goals that are aligned with these values. Today I am going to discuss how to set your core values and start living your dream life. As they say ‘life is not a dress rehearsal’ this is your one shot so take it and take it well.

What is a core value anyway? It is simple and its personal, it’s something that is important to you, something that you feel will make you happy and that you can look back on later in life when you are old and think to yourself ‘those were the days’ and smile at what you did. Something else about values is that your friends, family, colleagues and peers will recognise you for them. They will remember you because of them. They are therefore your legacy. Let’s look at a few prominent examples. Ghandi was a selfless spiritual and political leader in India whose core value was to achieve change through non violent means. His core values led to a legacy that will never be forgotten until the end of the human race and resulted in the fall of the British Empire in India. Another more modern proponent of values would be prominent business man Bill Gates. His values were more business orientated and he was fiercely competitive and very hard working. His early goal resulting from his values was for every home to own a PC and I think it is fair to say he achieved that in bucket loads. In the past decade he and his wife have set about giving away much of his wealth through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest transparently operated charitable foundation in the world. So he and his wife clearly have another core value to help others less fortunate than themselves. The important thing about this is that all people of import and achievement know very clearly what their values are and have a very clear and concise relationship between their core values and their goals.

How do you discover your core values? The process I am going to share with you is something that you can use to do this for yourself. First get a piece of paper and a pen or pencil. A computer screen is somehow not good enough for this exercise. Next, using at most two words write down as many things that you think are important in your life that you can think of. Try if you can to use one word to describe each thing. For example, money, family, business, helping others, love, etc, etc. Keep going until at least 5 minutes have passed and you can think of no more. Now, go through the list and remove the ones that are similar in nature and replace with just one word to describe the duplicates. Make a new list of the values that remain on a fresh piece of paper. Finally, with the new list, imagine you have only 24hrs left on planet earth and you have been granted a wish with a condition. The wish is you can choose any value from the list that you want to be remembered for after you are dead and everyone who knows you will think of this when they think of you. What would you choose from the list in front of you? The condition is that you only have one minute to choose. After you have chosen put the number 1 next to that item. Now cover that item up with a strip of paper so it does not distract you (or make a new list) and repeat the process with the remainder of the list. Do this until you have the top 5 values. These are your values. The top three of these are your CORE values.

Once you have identified your core values you now need to make sure that whatever you are doing in your life conforms to these values. Anything that goes against them or does nothing for them will make you unhappy in the long run and your heart will not be in that activity and in the end it will be a waste of your time and ultimately your life. Finally you need to set some achievable goals for each core value. Define the success criteria for each goal and identify the tasks that you need to complete in order to achieve these goals. Do this and review your goals and tasks regularly and you are on your way to living your dream life. Remember; to dream is just a dream, to dream, plan and act is a goal. Go get your goals and go live your dream. Good luck.