Find Your True Values; are you living the life you want?

Assess your life! One way this podcast (Feel Better Live More Podcast, guest is former Monk Jay Shetty) says to do this is to first look at your values. What do you value in life? Do you value freedom (at work or home), do you value connections with family and friends, living a healthy lifestyle, quiet time, getting outside as much as you can, etc. And then..if these are the things that are important to you, whatever they are, are your actions aligned with them? Are you moving closer to living a life aligned with the things you value? Here are the steps suggested in the episode:

1. Conduct a value audit! Confused at what your values actually are? “Values are a very intangible word so there’s a very easy way to figure out what you value. There’s two things you have to look at. You look at how you spend your money, the most painful thing you can possibly do, go through your bank statement and look at where your money is being spent, that is what you value. The other thing that we spend, is how we spend our time.” “Those are the two most perfect ways to see what you currently value, your value isn’t what’s in your head it isn’t what’s in your heart  it isn’t what’s in your mind, it’s how you spend your money and how you spend your time.” So take a look at where you are spending your time and your money! Is that where you want to be spending it?? Jay also mentions that everyone has to go to work so it’s not about what we do for work (although you could APPROACH your work with your values but that’s another story!) but how you spend your time outside of it.
2. Look at why you are doing the things you are doing. Jay says, “When we look at our value audit, I want you to write down 3 things that you’re currently pursuing in life. It might be a promotion, a new home, whatever it is that you are currently pursuing and then  I want you to ask this question; is that your desire and your dream or is it coming from something outside of you? A pressure, a family member, an expectation cause your friend just bought something, where is that desire truly coming from. And the third question is do I still want to pursue that. And if you go through that 3 step questioning process you’ll get to the truth of what you truly want to pursue and stop yourselves from building a sand castle which the waves of time will eventually wash away. And that’s what we get lost doing. We get lost building castles that we don’t even want to live in.” Ooh, I love that part. Stop building castles we don’t want to live in 5, 10 years from now. I know for me, in my 20s I almost got caught up in that. The stay in a relationship because you’re supposed to get married and start having kids, etc. It’s scary, to make big life choices based on what you think you’re supposed to be doing. And if you don’t stop and think about it and think about what you’re doing and why…then you could end up somewhere you don’t want to be. I don’t know about you but I’d rather be proactive in this way then have to dig myself out or backtrack. So, hooray for value auditing! 😉
3. Pull the weeds. “Treat this exercise like gardening, because when you do a values audit, you’re gardening your values and what that means is you’re pulling out the weeds and you’re planting new seeds. That’s really the activity that’s happening here: planting seeds in your mind, values that are good value that are going to grow into fruits and trees and give shade to others and help other people OR if you don’t garden once a month what’s going to happen? The garden is going to be full of weeds, full of stuff you don’t want there. And that’s what happens with our values that after a while our values start to attract dust, they start to attract being covered over by so many other desires so it’s a regular habit. Learning about ourselves is the most fun thing in the world, the most enjoyable thing in the world. When you learn how your mind works it’s such an exciting thing to do,” Jay Shetty.

Lastly, Jay mentions that if you change your habits, your life naturally changes. I hope you enjoyed this synopsis of a pretty long episode. You can find the full episode, titled How to Find Your True Values and Live the Life You Really Want on the Feel Better Live More Podcast with Dr Rangan Chatterjee. Let me know what you think of it in the comments below! 🙂