Responsible Living -- Discovering Your Values

We're not born with our beliefs.

They come from observing others as we grow up, from what our parents do (not what they say), from what our peers do and how everyone else reacts, from what we see on TV, hear on radio, read in books.

Our society, culture, and local environment all play a part in the process of developing our beliefs.

What a haphazard process! All the random happenings in your life have combined to make you who you are and what you believe.

Your beliefs should make sense, at least to you.

Nobody else has to understand them, but to you they should be internally consistent. By this I mean that all your beliefs hold together and support each other.

For example, let's say that you simultaneously believe "people should obey laws" and that "speeding is okay". Those are two beliefs that contradict each other. Both of them can't be true and still make sense.

Conflicting beliefs like this create tension in our lives. Tension is one of the things that keeps us from being happy, and can manifest as physical illness, emotional illness, mental illness, relationship difficulties, etc.

To figure out if your beliefs make sense, you could compare all of them to see if any conflict. But most of us aren't even aware of all our beliefs, so itemizing and comparing them would be difficult.

The best way to evaluate if a belief makes sense is to start with your assumptions.

Everyone has something they take for granted that cannot be proven. Maybe you believe in God, in reincarnation, in alien abduction, or all three.

All of your other beliefs should follow from your assumptions, in order to make sense. The problem is that most of us haven't thought about our core assumptions much, if ever. I know I hadn't before I started this process.

Identifying our basic assumptions is critical to knowing which of our beliefs make sense, and which don't. We eventually want to realign our beliefs so that they all make sense, dramatically reducing the internal tension in our lives.

Here's where you have to stop reading and start owning.

Take out a piece of paper, and draw a line down the middle of it from top to bottom.

On the left side write down everything you do on a regular basis. Even if you don't do it often, write it down. For example, paying your car insurance happens infrequently, but regularly. Anything you do regularly implies a belief that you're getting benefit from the activity, and what we're exploring are your beliefs.

You should have a big list on the left hand side of the page. Maybe you even had to use more than one page, which is fine. Don't censor yourself, write it all down.

Use code words for activities you might not want someone else seeing, in case you lose this paper. But write it all down, in your own hand (don't use a computer for this). Engaging our kinesthetic senses is important.

Do not read ahead until you have filled out your list!

Now, on the right hand side of the page, write down next to each item why you do that item.

Just write the first thing that comes to your mind. Don't censor yourself!

You'll eventually end up with one or more whys next to each regular activity. If you cannot find a why for an activity, that's okay, just skip it and move to the next. You may discover the why later in the list.

Now, for each why, look at it carefully.

Does that why really just support something on the left hand side of the list? For example, if two of my items on the left were "go to work" and "get a haircut", and the why for the haircut was "can't go to work with long hair" then getting the haircut is actually in support of going to work.

So I'd draw a line through getting a haircut on the left. What you want to end up with is only those activities that are primary in your life, and not supportive of other activities.

Now we get to examine the whys.

Now, go through every item on the right side of your list, and ask yourself Why?

You go to work to provide for your family. Why? You get your teeth cleaned because you want to keep your teeth. Why?

Be brutal with yourself. Don't take the easy answer. You may need to reflect on some items for days before you realize why you believe it.

Write down the whys of the whys on another sheet of paper. If you have a why that you can't figure out another why for, then just copy it over to the new sheet.

Go through this new list and try to identify commonalities between the items. This is very personal and subjective, so take your time and don't ask for advice.

The commonalities just might be your core values, if you went deep enough into the why of things.

When you have your list of values, you now have a nice list you can use to compare values to see if they conflict.

Do that.

Each value should support the others. If you have some that seem to conflict with the rest, then those values probably aren't yours. They came from your parents, or your siblings, or your culture, but they're not really yours.

Don't own them. Cross them out on the page and let go of them. Write them down on another page and burn it. Whatever you need to do to symbolically let go of those values.

As part of this process, you might start to get a glimpse of your assumptions. Assumptions can conflict with each other, too. That's actually a cause of a great deal of internal tension.

Don't be afraid to let go of assumptions you find that aren't yours.

Eventually you should end up with a list of values you can live with. You should also rate them from most important to least important. Don't worry about getting this exact, just do a rough ordering.

Keep in mind, though, that identifying values is a lifelong pursuit. Your values may change over time, and that's fine. Always be ready to let go of values that aren't working for you any more.

The next lens in this series will cover what to do with your values now that you've identified them. When you're ready, click to go to the Living Deliberately lens.