Reconnecting with your values to create calm and authenticity

There are huge benefits to your wellbeing from knowing what your values are. Reconnecting with your values will help you to be calmer and less stressed in your daily life – because if you’re clear about them, you’ll be better able to live in alignment with who you really are.

Values are what matter most to us in life. They are what drive our opinions, emotions and actions. If you’re living against your values you will be in a chronic state of stress – and your feeling of dis-ease can actually become disease.

Reconnecting with your values to revive your sense of self

Being authentic and living through your values is essential for reviving your sense of self. Living authentically makes you feel connected to your higher self and lessens the drive to compare yourself to others. 

It’s easy sometimes to look at someone with a similar challenge in life – stress, health problems, relationship problems, body issues etc – and think they seem to be coping so much better than you. It’s easy to compare and put yourself down as not being as good as someone else in overcoming a challenge. But we never truly know how anyone else is coping unless we ask (and their response is truthful!) – and comparing ourselves to others can cause us to veer off course, away from our authentic selves.

You have to know yourself to create a life that will make you happy and content. And to ensure you’re not on a life path that is making you feel uneasy and torn.

Approach your challenges as yourself, using your strengths

It can be helpful to observe the strategies other people use to cope and to create a good quality life for themselves – and try some of these tools out to see what fits for you. But above all, try to approach your challenges as yourself, using your strengths. 

You have to know yourself to create a life that will make you happy and content. And to ensure you’re not on a life path that is making you feel uneasy and torn.

Reconnecting with your values will help:

• Give you clarity on your purpose
• Guide your behaviours, actions and reactions
• Make sure you’re not wasting time on energy-sapping things
• Give you self confidence
• Develop a friendship group that serves you and gives you a sense of belonging
• Revive your sense of self
• Create a life you will really enjoy

Are you living true to your values?

It’s time to sit down and get clear on what your values are. What’s truly important to you? What makes you happy? What are your priorities in life? 

1. List. Start by making a list of 10-15 values (things that are important to you).

2. Condense. Now condense that list down to your top five values. You might find it helpful to write each value on a separate scrap of paper, and physically move them into order of importance, to help you work out which five are really the most important.

You also might find that some of the values from your initial list are really part of the same core value – so together they will form one of your five (for example, ‘my children’ and ‘caring for my elderly parents’ could become ‘family’).

As an example, mine are:

Vision
Service
Compassion
Family
Curiosity 

3. Reflect. When you’ve got your five main values, and they feel right to you, it’s time to reflect: does your current way of living/being match your values? Does everything you do each day support them, or are there some things you do that aren’t in alignment?

4. Make a change. Are there any changes you could make in your home or work life that would make you more aligned to your values?

Start living in alignment with your values

Now you’ve established what your values are, try to make sure that every decision you make from now on (big or small!) is aligned to those values. Let go of behaviours that do not feel good to you, and instead emphasise and focus on the behaviours that do. 

Because true wellness is found when you are being your true self – and being true to yourself. Your unique, authentic, content, happy, forgiving, grateful and loving self.