Click here for Day One: Examine Your Starting Point of ‘Designing your Best 2011!”
Day Two: Determine Your Values
Day Three: Visualize Your Ending Point
Day Four: Chunk Into Goals
Day Five: Stumbling Blocks
Day Six: Public Declaration/Word for the Year (and a wee small contest!)
One of the reasons that goals are not achieved is because the ideas behind the goals aren’t all that fully formed. The initial excitement wears off as soon as real life starts to wear you down. Sometimes, the goals aren’t the right goals. Maybe the goal to become an Engineer was your parents’ goal and not yours. And more often than not, your goals aren’t being made for the right reasons.
Making a solid base for your goals success starts with a figuring out the ‘Why’ behind your pursuit in life. Why do you do anything? What’s important to you? And, the most important, how do you want to live your life in the future?
If you’ve never done a Values exercise, they’re quick, easy and painless to do. I think they’re fun! There are a lot of ways to come up with your values but this is the one I like to do. Set aside at least 15 minutes for this exercise but don’t short change yourself. Take as long as you need to make sure you come up with values that are very reflective of who you are as a person.
1. Write down five people you respect and admire; an alternate method is to write down the five people who have had the most positive impact on your life.
2. Write down six qualities for each of these five people (so you’ll have 30 adjectives written down ideally).
3. Circle the adjectives that you think resonate most with you and your life. Aim for five or six values.
Bonus: Ask three people close to you if they feel the values you’ve chosen for yourself ring true. I did this with 8 close friends and they all had valuable feedback for me.
That’s it – it’s that simple! You have a great start on what your values are as a person. I have three sets of values that I live my business, personal and family lives by: one for my company, one for myself personally and one with my husband for our family.
The values you decide on are what are going to guide you through choosing well thought out goals that really resonate with you and your life. These values will be the filter with which you judge your potential goals: “Does this goal fit within my values?” Or, these values will direct your goals. For example, my core value that drives everything in my life is my Family. If my goals aren’t aligned with the idea of Family at the center, then it’s time to reevaluate those goals and the value. Am I just paying lip-service to the idea that Family is a value? Or do I need to change my goals to fit my values?
Here are a list of possible Values that will hopefully get you thinking about things that describe your favorite five people. It is by no means a comprehensive list – just a little zing! to get your creative juices flowing. Ready. Set. Write!
Awesome! I found the exercise to be valuable for my business and personal
life and hope you do as well.
Thanks for the series of business posts AM. I’m finishing up defining my core values now.
I know! It’s like “Well, I **should** value this but really, my actions are
saying I value this so what’s the real answer?”
Thanks for this exercise. It is hard sometimes to look at yourself and what you truly value. Tough but good!
Hi Alison,
Welcome! What type of soap are you making? I can direct you to some of my
favorite soap projects, no matter what you make! I’m getting ready to do a
major revamp on the blog this year to make it more user friendly but for
now, all the posts have tags on them so if you scroll down through past
posts and click on ‘melt and pour’ or ‘cold process’, that will bring up all
the tutorials I’ve done on those subjects for the last 4 years. There are A
LOT of them. Or you can buy them all up to July 2010 (over 300 pages!) here:
https://www.brambleberry.com/E-…
P4833.aspx
Some people like having them as a nice easy PDF on their computer.
Welcome to the Soapy Club! =))) Glad to have you aboard.
This is excellent. I’m a new soap maker and a new follower of your blog. I wasn’t expecting to find this project but glad that I did! 2010 was chaos for me so it was no surprise to find that I value “focus” but do not have it in my own life. Looking forward to designing a great 2011!
Hilarious! Love that! And I love that you’re being so productive with your ‘down’ time (the shower!). I often will listen to books on tape while in the shower to get that extra 10 minutes of productivity in.
You’ll get a chuckle out of this: I read this and then mulled it over while I was in the shower, and I got so absorbed in thinking about it that I completely lost track of what I was doing and had to re-soap and rinse. :} Good exercise!
Katherine, Definitely don’t beat yourself up over the lack of happiness quotient. We all go through periods in our lives that ebb and flow. Some are more joyful than others. I wonder about you starting a happiness/thankfulness journal? Every day, write down 5 things that you are thankful about or that made you happy? That might help you to positively identify those teensy moments that are so fleeting but what make up happiness. Just a thought – and not an original thought – I’m sure Oprah, Jack Canfield or someone else has suggested that many times! =)
What a great list to start me off. It is so ironic, when I know what I want, but then fail to put it into words. My vocabulary on creating my list was most limited until I read this one. This is some list and I have printed it off to begin the process of figuring out what is in line with my actual goals, because it isn’t just about financial success, but a happiness which seems to be missing currently during the growth process and in dealing with the hardship realities facing us today. I pray every morning for a guiding light to give me a small hint of if I am doing things right.
Thanks much for this article….the timing was perfect!
Thanks dM. That’s a huge compliment coming from someone as accomplished and graceful as you are.
Wow, that is a big a-ha! Huge actually. Good job for discovering that and really ‘owning’ it. That is fantastic …
Thanks so much for posting this! I was a bit surprised by what I found. The values that most resonate (hardworking, organized, spiritual, financially responsible) are values that I feel are the weakest in my own life. It was a good exercise not only to examine what’s important to me but also to help me see what is keeping me from meeting my goals. I am looking forward to tomorrow!
This is good. I’m doing this now.