Blueprint >> Top 10 Values

Disclaimer: This document is in raw form as I process and distill 4 years-worth of my personal development notes. Expect some typos and cryptic language for now. I will be updating frequently and polishing up.

Prescription: Identify your top 10 values. Review your values every day. Align everything in your life with your values.
Related Concepts: Be Principle-Centered, Mission Statement, Alignment, Know Yourself

What is the Concept of Top 10 Values?

The idea that you should sit down and articulate which ideals are most meaningful for you in life. These top 10 values should then serve as your life rubric.

Why is it Important?

Happiness is about living in integrity with your values. If you consistently fail to live up to your ideals, you will feel frustrated and guilty.

You cannot be successful in the long-term if you act against that things that you belief are most important in life.

Top 10 Values Videos

[coming soon...]

Top 10 Values: Key Points

Must know your top 10 values, what they mean for you, which ones are most important, and which ones you're not living up to. Values basically define what's most important for you in life, and if you're not making that a practice, you will not be happy or successful long-term.

Values are ideals, not a measure of how you've been living your life in the past. There could very well be a huge gap between your ideal values and the values you're currently practicing. That's the case for most people, and it's a problem. But to even see if this problem exists, you need to know your ideal values. The ideal is what your greater, highest-consciousness self would pursue. But, it's important not to confuse ideal values with desired values. If you're looking at a list of values, there is a tendency to pick the ones you think would be cool or exciting. That's wrong. You need to pick values that truly drive you, or have driven you in the past. Not the values you'd like to have some day.

• Values you're living now >> Values that drive your highest self (right) >> Values your ego thinks would be nice (wrong)

Once you make a list of your top 10 values, write out your personal definition for each one. It doesn't matter what the dictionary says. What matters is identifying what is important to you and why. What is the core? What is the essence of each value? This exercise should be repeated many times over the course of your life, allowing you to refine and home in on the values and definitions that resonate most with you.

Knowing your top values, and especially living them, makes you grounded, secure, confident, calm, and decisive. If you're indecisive, it's probably because you don't know what is important to you. Knowing your values will make it much easier to make those tough decisions, and it will make it easier to say No to things that are not aligned with you.

Clarifying your values is good so that you weed out any extrinsic forces like society, family, church, media, friends, etc. Your values should be entirely your own. You do not value what others think you should value. You value what you think is deeply important and meaningful.

Self-actualized people, and your highest self, will inevitably value noble things. The following values are common for self-actualized people in various degrees. Use this list to spark ideas for what your highest self wants. Some of these will resonate with your much more than others.

• Wholeness — unity, integration, order, interconnectedness
• Perfection — inevitability, necessity, just-right-ness, excellence
• Completion — ending, finality, it's finished, destiny
• Justice — fairness, lawfulness
• Richness — differentiation, complexity, intricacy
• Simplicity — honesty, nakedness, abstract, essential
• Beauty — rightness, form, completion
• Goodness — rightness, justice, oughtness, benevolence
• Uniqueness — idiosyncrasy, individuality, novelty
• Effortlessness — ease, grace, lack of strain, beautiful functioning
• Playfulness — fun, joy, humor, amusement
• Truth — honesty, reality, pure, clean
• Self-Sufficiency — autonomy, independence, self-determining, environment-transcendence
• Love — caring, connection, helping others, appreciation, gratitude

References

1. Awaken the Giant Within, Anthony Robbins
2. IPEC Coaching
3. Towards a Psychology of Being, Abraham Maslow