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PERFORMANCE: Aligning Your Goals To Your Values
Your values are what you define as most important. At their core, values are your strongest emotional drivers. They are behind every decision you make. • You become clear on your values and what you value most. • You become sure of your goals and align them with what is most important to you. • You sort out your values conflicts and this means you go for your goals 100%.
Have you ever set a goal for something you really didn’t want or perhaps your heart wasn’t really into? ..........................................................................................................................................................
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Why aligning your goals to your values is so important?
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Your values are what you define as most important. At their core, values are your strongest emotional drivers. They are behind every decision you make, hot-‐wired into your nervous system to draw you towards some things and away from other things. To be clear, your values (what’s most important to you) are not things like a car or more money. You need to ask yourself, “if I had the car or money or the job etc., what would that give me?” For example freedom, power, security, recognition etc., It’s these emotional states that we define as your inner values. It is impossible to be successful when you unconsciously associate that success with pain! Working on values means firstly finding out what emotions are driving your current decisions, what is most important to you now. Taking this further, many people discover that they are being pulled in several different directions at once, so ironing out these inner conflicts becomes paramount. And ultimately, getting into alignment with your true values is the goal. Only when you have done this does goal-‐setting become meaningful. There is no point setting goals without first clarifying your most important values. When you are clear on your values, then goal setting becomes easy. The key is to then ensure that your goals will help you to achieve your most important values. Many people set goals that they think will bring what they want and spend their whole life climbing the ladder of success only to find it’s been leaning against the wrong wall (original source of this analogy unknown!). As Mark Victor Hansen writes, failure to achieve your values is not a setback, it is a real failure. Don’t let it happen to you. Work out what is most important to you and spend most of your time, money, and energy on those things.
Examples of values are: Happiness Love Success Health Freedom Security Adventure Power Comfort Humor Contribution Growth
Values – Clarify and Align Your Values
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Now list what’s most important to you in school or life. Do a top 5. Just write them, brainstorm them and then rank them in order of importance. ..........................................................................................................................................................
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Now that you are more clear on the inner values that drive you we can set goals to align with those. As we have seen having a goal that does not link and align with your deepest values will make you suffer, you will be conflicted and this is how self sabotage happens. However before we get to goals let’s focus on vision. Be sure to complete the free writing association below.
Write for 60 seconds about how you want this year or this semester to be for you regarding school. • Who do you want to be during this time. E.g., relaxed, calm, confident, motivated, happy etc. • What will you be doing if you were being that way? • What would you experience or have if you were doing that?
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Vision
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SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-‐based) are really clever for short term but not for longer term goal setting. Only really big goals inspire you. Set a goal that scares you a little but make sure that it ties in with what you rated high in your values. Here is the problem -‐ if you have a goal to receive a high academic result in a particular subject but you have a value that is high around freedom or fun and you feel that working hard for that grade will take your freedom and fun away you will not go for that goal 100% YES! It will be, “yeah I want to achieve that BUT I really want my freedom and fun.” So you need to sort out those conflicts -‐ you can check out the topics on the tapping technique or how to change your thinking around to help here. The other practical thing you can do is set it up so you work hard and reward yourself with freedom and fun. The good thing is now you know how to set goals that are really smart and inspiring and aligned to what drives you emotionally -‐ your inner values.
Time to set a goal and check to see if it aligns with your inner values. If it doesn’t, do what we just spoke about regarding negative thoughts or practically set it up so your reward for doing what you need to do to achieve the goal is experiencing your highest rated values. ..........................................................................................................................................................
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1) Identify Your Highest Values. 2) Create a vision for what you want to experience. 3) Set goals around this vision and check that those goals align with your inner values.
Goals
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Action for you to take right NOW:
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