Sunday, April 10, 2011

Living Your Values




Living Your Values

Explain the process of living with integrity to your values.


Why Do Values Matter?
The main benefit of knowing your values is that you will gain tremendous clarity and focus, but ultimately you must use that newfound clarity to make consistent decisions and take committed action. So the whole point of discovering your values is to improve the results you get in those areas that are truly most important to you.

Values are priorities that tell you how to spend your time, right here, right now. There are two reasons that priorities are important for our lives.

The first reason is that time is our most limited resource; time does not renew itself. Once we spend a day, it's gone forever. If we waste that day by investing our time in actions that don't produce the results we want, that loss is permanent. We can earn more money, improve our physical bodies, and repair broken relationships, but we cannot redo yesterday. If we all had infinite time, then values and priorities would be irrelevant. But at least here on earth, we appear to be mortal with limited life spans, and if we value our mortal lives, then it's logical to invest them as best we can.

You're free to decide what "best" means to you. The very idea that some possible permutations of your life appeal to you more than others means that knowing your values will be of great benefit to you. On the other hand, if any life you might live is as good as any other to you (whether prince or pauper, Olympian or obese, saint or sinner), then you can stop reading - you don't need this information. But most people can certainly envision lives that are more preferable to them than others.

The second reason priorities matter is that we human beings tend to be fairly inconsistent in how we invest our time and energy. Most of us are easily distracted. It's easy for us to fall into the trap of living by different priorities every day. One day you exercise; the next day you slack off. One day you work productively; the next day you're stricken with a bout of laziness. If we don't consciously use our priorities to stick to a clear and consistent course, we'll naturally drift off course and shift all over the place. And this kind of living yields poor results. Imagine an airplane that went wherever the wind took it - who knows where it would eventually land? And the flight itself would likely be stressful and uncertain.

So for these two reasons - limited time and a typically low index of distraction - consciously knowing and living by our values become extremely important. Values act as our compass to put us back on course every single day, so that day after day, we're moving in the direction that takes us closer and closer to our definition of the "best" life we could possibly live. The "best" is your own ideal, but generally as you get closer to this ideal, you'll enjoy increasingly positive shades of "better" even if you never reach "best." And this makes sense because many results in life exist on a continuum. There are some discrete entities like being married or not married, but your health, financial status, relationship intimacy, and level of happiness are generally continuous, meaning that they can gradually get better or worse. It seems reasonable that more health, happiness, wealth, intimacy, inner peace, love, etc. is better than less.

But here's the interesting part: Since our time is limited, and since it takes time to move along the continuum through the various "betters," we usually cannot instantly achieve the state of "best." We can't land our plane just yet - it's still in flight. Moreover, everyone has a different definition of what "best" means to them. For some people, good health is an absolute must. For others, being compassionate is what's most important. And for each of these values, every person is at a different point along their own continuum. So imagine that there are a bunch of planes in the air, each in a different starting location and each having a different destination airport. You can't then plot the same course to land every plane at its "best" airport. Each plane requires its own individual course.

For a more human example, everyone is in a different state of health right now, and everyone has a different ideal for their "best" possible health. So the course each person takes from their starting point to their own best state of health will be unique.

Because of these individual differences, some of your "planes" will be much farther from their airports than others. If you want to weigh 150 pounds and you currently weigh 155, this plane is within sight of its airport and is approaching the runway. If you want to become a millionaire and you're flat broke with a low income, that plane is much further away.

Because you can't do everything at once, you have to prioritize which planes are most precious to you. You may not be able to land them all within the span of your lifetime because you probably don't know how long your lifetime will be; nor can you be certain how long it will take to land each of these planes. But realize that the closer you get each plane to its airport, the better that area of your life will be.

Now let's begin the process of…



Eliciting Your Values
Here is a step-by-step method to create your own personal values hierarchy. I want to warn you that this can be a time consuming process, and it will require your concentrated attention. So if this isn't a good time for you to do this, feel free to read it over now and then complete it when you can put in the time. It's hard work, but it's worth the effort.

The question to ask yourself is this: What is truly important to me in life?

Brainstorm a list of your values as your answers to this question. Try to reduce your responses to a single word or two that encapsulates each answer. For example, if one of your answers is, "having a successful career," then you might reduce that to the value of "success."

To make this task easier for you, I've put together an extensive list of values you can use to help build your own list. Don't worry about the order of your list yet or how long it is. Just get everything down in writing.

So you might end up with a list that looks something like this:

Love
Health
Wealth
Comfort
Fun
Happiness
Success
Learning
Peace
Intimacy
Adventure
Security
There's no hard rule for how long your list should be, but I usually prefer a list in the range of 10-15 values. If you have more than this, consider cutting out the marginal values that just barely made your list, or combine multiple values that are nearly identical on a single line, like achievement/accomplishment.



Prioritizing Your Values
The next step is to prioritize your list. This is usually the most time consuming and difficult step because it requires some intense thinking.

My preferred method of prioritizing my values list is to identify the top value, then the second highest value, and so on until I've rebuilt the whole list in order of priority from the top to the bottom. So you may begin by asking yourself these questions: Which of these values is truly the most important to me in life? If I could only satisfy one of these values, which one would it be? The answer to this question is your number one value. Then move down the list and ask which remaining value is the next most important to you, and so on, until you've sorted the whole list in priority order.

Sometimes the highest priority value will be obvious to you. Other times you'll have it narrowed down to a few choices but will have a hard time figuring out which one is really the most important among those. When that happens here's what I recommend. Invent a scenario for each value, and then compare those scenarios.

For example, if you're trying to decide which is more important to you, learning or peace, then ask yourself, "Which would I rather do - read a book or meditate?" This example assumes that reading a book would satisfy your value of learning and that meditating would satisfy your value of peace, each to roughly the same degree. I usually find that when I create scenarios for the tough-to-prioritize values, the best ordering becomes clear.

So let's say we've sorted our list above, and we've come up with this:

Peace
Love
Intimacy
Security
Comfort
Happiness
Fun
Health
Learning
Adventure
Wealth
Success
What can you tell me about this person? When you know a person's values hierarchy, you should have a fair chance of predicting their behavior. If this person lives true to her values, she'll lead a life focused on peace, love, and intimacy above all else. Her relationships (both with herself and others) will be extremely important to her, and she'd never put career success above her family.

On the other hand, let's say this person prioritized her values in the exact opposite order:

Success
Wealth
Adventure
Learning
Health
Fun
Happiness
Comfort
Security
Intimacy
Love
Peace
What kind of person is this? Now we have someone who's probably very career-oriented, perhaps an entrepreneur. She will lead a very different life than the person with peace as her top value. Succeeding and becoming wealthy is more important to this person than personal relationships, so if she has a choice between advancing in her career or going on a family vacation, she'll almost always put her career first.

I want to say again that this is indeed a difficult and challenging process. These are not easy decisions to make. If a value appears on your list, then it's definitely important to you. By prioritizing your values consciously, you'll be able to rely on them when you need to make important decisions in the future. If you know that what is truly most important to you in life is to experience inner peace, then it will be easier for you to say no to those things that take you away from peace.

Now that you have your own values hierarchy worked out, it may seem like you've just unlocked something important. Many books that cover values treat it as such. But in my experience, this particular list isn't actually that important. This list only tells you the values that have previously been conditioned into you - by your upbringing and by society. In terms of our airplane analogy, this list tells you where your planes are currently headed. But that isn't necessarily the direction you want those planes to continue to go.



Reexamining Your Values
Now comes the really interesting part. You don't have to continue living by the same values. You can consciously change them - even radically if desired. You can go from a person who values peace most highly to one whose top priority is success, or vice versa. You are not your values. You are the thinker of your thoughts, but you are not the thoughts themselves. Your values are your current compass, but they aren't the real you.

Is it really possible that you can consciously change your values? Yes it is. That will become clear in the next essay of this article when we explore how to consciously live by your values. But for now, let's tackle this question first: Why would you ever want to change your values?

You may want to change your values when you understand and accept where they are taking you, and you realize that what you appear to value right now will not enable you to enjoy the "best" possible life for you. Your "best" life is your vision of all the destinations you wish to reach - the greatest ultimate destiny you can possibly imagine for yourself. But your values are just a measure of the current direction you're headed right now. And in most cases these two things are incongruent, meaning that your current values are not aligned with the course of your best life.

I want you to take a moment right now to get in touch with what this really means to you personally. If you keep living by your current values, then you can expect to get similar results to what you're already getting, possibly a little better if you apply them more consciously. But most likely there is some part of you that isn't satisfied with where you'll end up if you keep following this same course. What are the "airports" where your planes will merely pass over but never land? Will you never experience an intimate, loving relationship? Will you never have children? Will you never become wealthy? Will you never develop an outstandingly energetic physical body? Will you never travel around the world? Will you never be able to help your favorite cause? Will you never feel that you're living in total accordance with your spiritual beliefs?

Now what if all these "nevers" could suddenly become possible for you? How can they? They can become possible for you by shifting your values. And here's the key: You don't need to maintain the same values throughout your entire life. You can change them as often as you like. I recreate my own values list every 3-6 months.

When you change your values list and consciously act on it, you change your behavior and therefore your results. And this can lead to incredible new experiences. For example, if your top value is health, and you're already in outstanding physical condition, what would happen if you changed your top value to wealth? You would cut back on your workouts for a while and invest tremendous energy into becoming wealthy. Your investment in health would slide a little, but in the short-term, it probably won't make a huge difference. Health may still be one of your top values, but it just isn't number one anymore. So now by focusing intently on your new top value of wealth, you eventually succeed in becoming wealthy. But eventually as you become very wealthy, making more and more money beyond a certain point may no longer serve you. Now you decide to shift your top value to compassion, so you go out and use your healthy, wealthy self to compassionately help others. Through this process of consciously shifting your values, you've changed from a gym rat to an entrepreneur to a philanthropist. You've lived an amazing life. But if you always maintain your original values, you'll only experience being a gym rat for your entire life. And most of your true potential would remain untapped.



Changing Your Values
So how can you decide how to change your values? You go through a very similar process of listing and prioritizing, but now you do it with your destinations - your goals. I'm not going to repeat the process in as much detail here because it's exactly the same as above. You just repeat the above steps with your goals instead of your values. Here's a sample goals list:

Reduce weight to 150 pounds
Become a millionaire
Move to San Diego
Become a real estate investor
Travel through every country in Europe
Fall in love and get married
Give a speech in front of 5000 people
Go skydiving
Get a part in a movie
Visit the moon
Run a marathon
So again, write out your goals. Decide which ones are truly most important to you. Prioritize them. And in this case it's fine if you have more than 10-15. More than 100 is even OK; it will just take longer to prioritize.

These goals represent the experiences that you feel are part of the "best" life you could live. I don't mean a good life or even a great life - I mean the best life. If a life where you never traveled through Europe wouldn't be the absolute best for you, then you'd better include that goal on your list.

Returning to our airplane analogy again, this goals list represents your list of airports. Now do you see the problem with having a static list of values throughout your entire life? How is a single list of values going to allow you to hit all these different stops? The values that will make you a millionaire probably aren't the same ones that will get you married. And the values that will send you skydiving aren't the ones that will help you become a real estate investor. At some point in your life, you'll need to focus intently on one of these goals while letting the others slide.

If you fail to focus your energy on the goals that are truly important to you, some of them will slip away, and that's a heavy price to pay. You may succeed in your career and never get married. Or you may get married but never enjoy a state of physical fitness. Think back to the big, meaningful goals that you've already accomplished. Didn't you have to go through a period where achieving that goal became your top priority for a while? And in the process, you (probably unconsciously) shifted your values to accommodate that goal. I remember that for the six months before we got married, my fiancée went into wedding planning mode. Her top values during this time became things like organization and preparation, but after our honeymoon, those were no longer her top values. They were no longer needed to such a degree.

Now that you have your goals hierarchy, pick the top one or two goals, and consciously devise a values list that will lead you to achieve them. Let's say your goals list is prioritized as above, so your #1 goal is to reduce your weight to 150 pounds. To achieve this goal, you might make fitness your #1 value. Then you might make self-discipline your #2 value, so you'll stick to your diet and exercise program. And then learning might become your #3 value, so you spend time educating yourself about proper diet and nutrition. You must design these values based on your own personal circumstances. Like any skill this takes practice, but over time you'll become better and better at designing your values to adapt to your goals.

Whenever you achieve a major goal, that's a good time to select a new goal and update your values list to accommodate it. Once you've run the marathon, if you feel ready to move onto something else, like becoming a millionaire, then you can knock health down a few notches and go into maintenance mode there while you push values like wealth, success, and courage to the top of your list to help you meet the next challenge.

Most books I've read that cover values suggest that you derive your goals from your values. I recommend the exact opposite approach - that you derive your values from your goals. I've spent years trying to use the first approach, and the result was a lot of frustration. I always felt I was missing something because my static values list never seemed to allow me to achieve certain goals. Eventually I figured out that goals come first, and then values can be adapted to fit those goals; when a goal is reached, then a whole new values hierarchy can be created. The airplane analogy makes this distinction very clear - before you can set a course for your plane, you must first determine the airport where it will land. If you set the course without knowing the destination, then you will experience tremendous frustration trying to get your planes to land where you feel they should.



Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Living Your Values




Living Your Values

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Explore how to live with integrity to your values, using them to make decisions and take action.


Using Your Values to Make Decisions
Once you know and understand your personal values, you can consult them whenever you need to make a key decision. Should you accept the new job you've been offered? Should you pursue a new relationship now? How much time should you spend with your family? These can be tough decisions without a clear right or wrong answer. You may choose to answer them differently at different points in your life.

Your values list provides a shortcut for making these decisions intelligently. When you're confronted with such a decision, you pull out your list and check the prioritization of values. Then ask yourself, "What would a person with these values choose to do in this situation?" It's usually the prioritization of your values that will answer the question.

For example, if you're offered a job promotion that will shift your work weeks from 40 hours to 60 hours but double your salary, should you take it? If values like success and achievement are at the top of your list, you'll probably say yes. If freedom and family are at the top, you'll likely decline the promotion. By clarifying your values, you've already done the hard thinking required to discover what's most important to you. So now when you're confronted with such decisions, you're able to reduce them to a values comparison, and the final decision falls into place. If the promotion equates to increased success but reduced peace in your mind, then you can compare those values to learn whether it's a good idea or not. Your goal is to increase your fulfillment of your highest values without sacrificing them to lower values.

Remember that this is only one of many paradigms for making decisions. As such it has limitations, but you should find that it brings clarity to your decision-making.



Achieving Alignment
Whenever your values shift, you may find it necessary to realign the various parts of your life to restore them to a state of harmony with your values. If success is your #1 personal value, then it will be important for you to experience it in abundance. Success for you may equate to a successful career, a high income, a fulfilling relationship, and a healthy body. Ask yourself what parts of your life are misaligned with your top values, and consider how to bring them into full alignment.

When you notice a misalignment between your reality and your values, you have two basic options to restore alignment.

First, you can adapt the situation to restore alignment. So if health is your top value, and you realize you've been keeping too much junk food in your house, you can modify your kitchen to fit your new health value, phasing out the junk and restocking with healthier choices.

Secondly, you can remove yourself from the situation and start fresh to create alignment from scratch. If you find yourself in a relationship where you definitely want to have children and your boyfriend or girlfriend definitely doesn't want children, you can choose to break up and seek out a more compatible relationship.

So whenever you encounter a misalignment, you can either adapt the circumstances to restore alignment, or you can remove yourself from the situation and start fresh.

I don't recommend the third alternative of living with the misalignment if you cannot adapt to it. This would mean living without integrity to your values. An example would be choosing to remain in an abusive relationship out of misplaced loyalty. Living with misalignment for too long often results in serious negative consequences.

Whenever your values change, it's important to review the various areas of your life to make sure they're properly aligned with the kind of person you believe you are. If you're in a relationship, is it compatible with your values? If you work for a company, are its perceived values compatible with yours? If there's a misalignment, then it's time to make changes either by adapting or by getting out.



Adapting Your Values
At some point you'll encounter a situation that forces you to reassess your values. Maybe a close friend dies, a major illness hits you, or you begin a new relationship, and consequently, you gain a new perspective on what's truly most important to you. This is to be expected as you grow older and have new experiences.

Suddenly your values list doesn't seem to be an accurate representation of the real you. You've changed too much. So it's time to reassess your values and create a new values list, following the process in Living Your Values, Part I.

Depending on how fast-paced your life is and how much change you experience, you may need to update your values every few months, or they may go relatively unchanged for years.



The Ultimate Alignment
The ultimate goal of living your values is to eventually bring them into alignment with universal principles. As you experience living with different sets of values, you'll learn what's truly important to you. Your values may shift a great deal at first as you set new goals and have new experiences, but eventually they will start to converge.

Your values are your current estimations of truth. They represent your answer to the question of how to live. Some sets of values will fail to produce the results you want. They may leave you feeling restless and unfulfilled. Other sets of values bring you closer to a feeling of congruence. When you act with integrity to values that are themselves aligned with universal principles, you get the best possible results.

This process of alignment is similar to how scientists try to discover a mathematical formula to explain natural phenomena. Isaac Newton's famous F = ma law was an approximation of reality. But it was inaccurate at relativistic speeds, and eventually Albert Einstein provided a more accurate formula. Just as the physical universe is the proving ground for hypothetical physical laws, the universe will also give you feedback to let you know how closely your values align with reality.

The process of discovery in this case is still experiential, but it can't be measured as scientifically as gravity. The scientific method requires that an experiment be repeatable under the same conditions, but human problems never duplicate the exact same conditions. Once you make a one-time decision in your career or your relationships, you never face that exact same decision with identical conditions again. Since we cannot apply the scientific method to such situations, the best we can do is to try to classify events according to patterns we've previously experienced.

What this means is that the process of values clarification is inherently messy and inexact. It's also a uniquely individual experience. You cannot objectively prove that one set of values is any better or worse than another, but you can begin to see patterns over time, and these patterns can help point you in the direction of universal principles.

The existence of universal principles cannot be proven. However, as you live with different sets of values long enough and gain enough experience, you will start to see that there are certain values which massively outperform others in certain areas, hinting at the possibility that there may exist a true principle that works universally for everyone.

An example of a potential universal principle is that of fairness. If you align yourself with the value of fairness and live with integrity to it, you will likely find that it works extremely well. Fairness means that you treat everyone you encounter as a person of equal value to yourself - no more, no less. The principle of fairness is captured in the words, "all men are created equal," found in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Fairness is the foundational value upon which democracy is built. The founding fathers of the United States upheld this value as a "self-evident" truth, meaning that they believed fairness/equality to be a universal principle.

Imagine having to design your own system for running a company or a country, not knowing in advance what role you'd play after it was launched. It seems reasonable that you would design that system with fairness for all participants as a high priority.

When your values are misaligned with the value of fairness, you will find that your results suffer. If you are unfair in your relationships or your business dealings, others will recognize and adapt to your unfairness, making it harder for you to even achieve a reasonable outcome when you want it. They may even warn others in advance of your behavior to make it harder for you to get anything done through others. So your effectiveness grows weaker the longer the misalignment exists. But when you build a reputation for fairness in all of your dealings, you will maintain strong levels of trust with others, and that will make it far easier to elicit cooperation.

I believe the ultimate goal of living and refining your values is to identify and achieve congruence with universal principles. Then your model of reality finally matches reality itself, and in the long run your actions will consistently produce the best possible results. This isn't just an individual journey either - it's one that all of humanity is experiencing with each passing century. Social creations like democracy, slavery, or capital punishment can be seen as part of an ongoing process of values clarification.

Friday, April 8, 2011

Draiman – My quest to restore Leadership, Experience and Integrity to City Hall




Draiman – My quest to restore Leadership, Experience and Integrity to City Hall

YJ Draiman

Candidate for Mayor of Los Angeles (2013)

I’m not a politician. You won’t get politically correct doublespeak from me, just the plain facts. The plain facts are often disturbing and as a NC Board Member I’ve never been shy from revealing the sometimes ugly truth about the way the City functions.

Career politicians like the current have no interest in serving the public; rather, they use public office to serve their own interests and those of the small but wealthy cadre of greedy “special interests” who fund their campaigns in return for favors when decisions over controversial matters such as billboards and development have to be made by elected officials.

All too often, the City Council’s actions support the special interests at the expense of the interests of the ordinary people like you and me.

When common sense dictates that our already over-congested streets should not be further burdened by more high-density luxury condominium developments, current elected official’s side with the developers and contractors who funnel campaign contributions to further their interests. We need a Los Angeles with Financial Sustainability that is my goal.

My pledge is for a “City of Los Angeles for the people” not for the politicians and special interests.

”To make our way, we must have firm resolve, persistence, tenacity. We must gear ourselves to work hard all the way. We can never let up.”

YJ Draiman for Mayor of Los Angeles – 2013