James Lim explains how to identify your core values and use them as a filter for decisions. When your values align with your goals, you gain focus and motivation to actually achieve them.
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We hear a lot about how important our personal core values are. But how important are they? What will they do for you? And what are the practical benefits of knowing your values? In this video, I'll be going over why knowing your personal core values is absolutely essential. How they will boost your life, make you more productive and make anxiety inducing decisions fade away if you've ever had that lost feeling feeling or you feel like you're just wandering through life, not really, not really sure. Don't really have any conviction about what you're supposed to be doing. Your values may well be the key. So one way to think about your core values is a bit like a search filter for your life. Not dissimilar to a holiday search website where you're looking for your best destinations. You usually set your criteria and you go through and click search. It's a way of narrowing down things to a few options that you're most likely to enjoy. The same process can be done for life and your values. So just like using any type of holiday search filter, it's a way of clarifying your priorities. It helps distill the possibilities that you might want to pursue and helps determine what kind of next steps you might wish to be taking. So in previous videos we've discussed how values can make you feel fulfilled, and they are the most important aspect to understanding what's likely to make you happy. Now, when you're making choices in life, you've probably come across the feeling that when you're in line with what's most important to you, the process feels affirming and quite satisfying, even when choices are particularly difficult. So once you have a good foundation of your values and you know what's most important to you, you can go through a process of evaluating any new decision you have to make against your value set. And the way you can do this is you simply take your decision that you have to make and mark it against your set of values. And you simply look at whether it's aligned with what you believe in and what is most important to you, or whether you sense it causes some kind of conflict and friction against these values. Usually your instincts will be able to tell you and give you guidance as to what feels right in that instance. That simple process can be done at any scale, on small decisions or big decisions, and will make you feel confident with any type of decision you have to make. Now, in terms of productivity, we spend a lot of time looking at ways to increase productivity by using tools and tricks. But if you actually go through a values evaluation exercise and you really know yours, you can actually get the productivity simply by as a byproduct of having done that exercise. And the reason it works is because attention is spread in all directions and it's very hard to keep our focus. And again, there are lots of, there's lots of guidance around for trying to maintain focus and concentration. Simply knowing your values allows you to know what to focus on from the very beginning. When you know your values, you can prioritize and that way you can just concentrate on the small set of things and give you and, and it will give you a laser like focus so you can, so you can go on and achieve those things. And with all of the other things that enter your life, you can then push them aside. And it'll be a lot easier when life is really hectic and things come in at you all times of the day during the week. But if you've got a good framework of your values, it's a lot easier to deal with. And once you start doing this on a more regular basis, you will notice your focus levels increase and your ability to keep your attention in one direction drastically goes up, giving you free energy that you didn't realize you even had. But it was simply being wasted on other things of no importance and were effectively irrelevant to your current life. And a final note is if you combine your values with a vision somewhere where you wish to go, these two aspects will allow you to really start achieving things that you didn't think was possible. It's simply because having that extra focus and concentration and applying it to small areas of your life starts making you. It enables you and allows you to start achieving, achieving things and making progress. Then combined with that vision, it will allow you to get from A to B a lot more efficiently and you'll start to see the real world feedback and that will propel you on. Anyway, in a future video, I'll be covering the concept of vision and how to start generating ideas for a vision and where you would like to be in the in the future. So that's it for this video. If you've got any feedback, leave a comment below. Consider subscribing if you'd like to follow the content of this new channel and click the notification bell. If you'd like to keep up to date with when the next videos are coming out and my schedule because I'll be releasing quite a few videos over the next few weeks. Okay, see you in the next video.
