Are YOUR Values Blocking Your Success?

With a change in my circumstances and recent problems in my life, I have been trying to define success and what it really means to each of us and I think I have worked out its foundations. I believe that the essence of our lives is our values - what matter to us the most and how they shape our world. Whether liberating or limiting, values affect everything we do.

Someone can live with a value that says: Dancing is not something any self-respecting person does! That's fine, but that preference ignores two important and beneficial facts about the pastime. First, that the more we exercise our bodies, the more we are relaxed by music, and second, the more we take time out to simply enjoy ourselves and connect with other humans, the better we both look and feel.

Values come from our parents, to begin with, then from our peer groups and then through our workplace, from the people we routinely try to impress and, finally, from ourselves through increased awareness and knowledge. What a lot of people subconsciously deny is that they can actually change their values and thus their lives, dramatically - almost in an instant; that values DO change as we grow, become more aware and evolve in our lives to match our aspirations and identity.

Every behaviour we express is done for either one of two reasons: to avoid pain or to get pleasure, according to our value system. So, if we are reluctant to change our values it is likely that we associate pain with them (the pain of disapproval, of isolation from a significant person/group, of punishment, of guilt, of disappointment or of confused identity, to name a few examples).

Values and Personal Perception
Values powerfully affect PERCEPTION which in turn decides our identity, beliefs, attitudes, behaviour, aspirations, purpose and the reaction from others. That's why fearful people with weak, inconsistent or superficial values tend to have no real purpose to their lives or any genuine success. It is difficult to achieve when we don't know what we want, when we prefer to blame others for our problems or are even afraid to dream.

Perception is actually governed by two elements: CONFIDENCE and FEAR, the amount of each depending on personality and experience. For example, someone who is confident would be more assured in approach and more willing to experiment and move into the unknown, to give greater acknowledgement and value to others because they are likely to feel less threatened. However, someone whose perception is dominated by fear will be more anxious, perhaps developing a siege mentality and likely to withdraw from most things in their lives because they would see everything as threatening, costly, painful or even alien to their values. They seldom see gains, only losses. Most of their values tend to be limiting, avoiding rather than approaching, which ultimately curtails their personal success.

Values also dictate five very important aspects of our perception:

a. Who am I?
b. What do I stand for?
c. Where am I going?
d. How much do I like myself?
e. How do I treat/relate to others?

During my marriage I was unsure of all of these elements of my life. If I had to rate each out of 5 at that time, as regards me, the score would be as follows: 3,3,2,3,2 (total 13 out of 25) - Today, being on my own, I would rate it thus: 5,4,5,5,4 (23)! You can see the leap in awareness and self-belief. That's how I know that the sky is now definitely my limit as I begin to use my knowledge and resources to fulfil the aim of those questions. Try that little exercise on yourself to see where you are now! The answer could be most enlightening.

The Effect of Congruence on Success
True SUCCESS comes when we have CONGRUENCE (or alignment) in our values and know the answers to the 5 elements above by heart. I could not be as successful as I hoped before now because I had too much incongruence and inconsistency in my life. For example, I wanted desperately to be loved by my husband but I still put up with a negative situation instead, thinking all the time things would change as I waited for him to act! Yet the key was me taking action, not waiting for someone else to do so. I also wanted to be a successful entrepreneur through my talents, but way back as a teenager I made vows to give up material things and eschew money which has remained in my subconscious ever since. The result is that I paid little attention to the finance while focusing on the product! But the two needed to go together.

 

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