How our Values and Beliefs Determine our Unique Path

What is determining the direction you’re travelling through life?

Life in the outside world begins as we suck in that first lung full of life-sustaining oxygen and we start our journey which ends with our final breath. We all share the same start and the same end in life with that first and last breath, but what happens in between, is unique to each of us.

For some, the journey is cut too short and for others, it seems never-ending.

For many of us, our future is determined by those early years of our childhood as we each face varying challenges, travelling our unique path. We learn life’s lessons through childhood challenges and for most of us we are supported by nurturing parents. For some though, their greatest challenge in childhood is their parents and/or the environment they live in.

For all of us though, our early lives are where we form many of our Values and Beliefs based on what we experience.

What are your Values and Beliefs? Do you know?

The Beliefs and Values we carry with us through our lives were often formed through the eyes of a child and yet we hold onto them for dear life and we rarely challenge whether they are still valid for us as adults. Some of us may not even consider what those values and beliefs are and don’t realise how much they are still steering us along our journey through life.

As the Captain of a plane, it’s important to understand what the instruments that steer and guide the plane actually do. What would happen if the Captain hadn’t taken time to learn about those instruments?

• I suspect he wouldn’t get far when he tried to take off and soar above the clouds and yet that’s what many of us are doing when we fail to learn more about ourselves and what is steering and guiding us through our lives.

How can we expect to soar above the clouds when we don’t understand our guiding force?

When something goes wrong on the plane, the Captain will recognise the warning signals and take action and yet many of us don’t heed our warning signs and we continue to make the same mistakes and repeat negative patterns of behaviour time and time again.

Understanding what’s important to us (our core values), helps us to make better choices. When we know what our values actually are and we make decisions that align to them, we’re much more likely to feel happy and fulfilled with our lives.

Let me give you an example…

If one of your core values is to spend quality time with your family and yet you take on a job that means you have to work away for weeks on end, you’re likely to start feeling unhappy and resentful of your job because you’re not achieving your desired work-life balance and the scales are tipped away from spending time with your family.

We often aren’t aware of how some of our Beliefs may be holding us back. As a child, my mum (with the best of intention) would often say things like:

“Money doesn’t make you happy” and “Make knowledge not money your goal in life”

As an adult, I can see the point she was making but as I child, I realise now that I interpreted this as “If money doesn’t make you happy, it must make you sad”. I worked really hard to become a Senior Manager in business and yet for many years, despite earning a good income, I rarely had any spare money to save. Why? Hmmm – possibly because I spent a lifetime giving it away and helping other people in my family.

What’s that got to do with Beliefs? Well, could it be possible that if I held the belief that having money would make me sad, that I would be better giving it all away?

I suspect that’s the case and in recent years, having recognised how that Belief which I formed in my childhood was holding me back, I’ve made a conscious effort to challenge it and change my behaviour. I realised that always helping some of my family out to an excessive extent, was actually detrimental to them, because they weren’t learning how to manage their own lives and finances properly either.

We should all spend some time learning about our controls, just like the Pilot. When we understand what our Values are, we can make better decisions in our lives and when we recognise that some of the Beliefs we hold may no longer serve the right purpose for us, we can challenge ourselves, become consciously aware of how they are impacting on our lives and make a decision to ditch them. They are the excess baggage that we can eject, to lighten our load so that we help ourselves to soar high and fly with the eagles.

If you’re interested in finding out more about your Values and Beliefs, why not Subscribe to my blog and you’ll receive your Brilliance Within Life Audit, which takes you through a Step by Step process to learning about your controls so that you can begin to steer your unique path to a happier and more fulfilled life.

You can read more about Values and Beliefs in these previous blog posts:

4 Ways to Develop your Personal Values List and help you to Lead A Life Worth Living!

Are ‘BELIEFS’ Holding You Back?

Tony Robbins also explains how you can start to master your values in this great video: