If you don't know your true values, prepare for pain

The only way we can ever feel happy and fulfilled in the long term is to live in accordance with our true values. If we don't, we're sure to experience intense pain. So often, people develop habitual patterns of behavior that frustrate or could potentially destroy them: smoking, drinking, overeating, abusing drugs, attempting to control or dominate others, watching hour upon hour of television, and so on.

What's the real problem here? These behaviors are really the result of frustration, anger, and emptiness that people feel because they don't have a sense of fulfillment in their lives. They're trying to distract themselves from those empty feelings by filling the gap with the behavior that produces a " quick fix" change of state. This behavior becomes a pattern, and people often focus on changing the behavior itself rather than dealing with the cause. They don't just have a drinking problem; they have a values problem. The only reason they're drinking is to try to change their emotional state because they don't like the way they feel, moment by moment. They don't know what's most important to them in their lives.

The consolation is that whenever we do live by our highest standards, whenever we fulfill and meet our values, we feel immense joy. We don't need the excess food or drink. We don't need to put ourselves into a stupor, because life itself becomes so incredibly rich without these excesses. Distracting ourselves from such incredible heights would be like taking sleeping pills on Christmas morning.

Guess what the challenge is! As always, we were already asleep when the essence of what would shape our lives was formed. We were children who didn't understand the importance of having a clear sense of our values, or adults dealing with the pressures of life, already distracted to the point where we couldn't direct the formation of our values. I must reiterate that every decision is guided by these values, and in most cases, we didn't set them up.

If I asked you to make a list of your top ten values in life, to write them in precise order of importance, I'd be willing to bet that only one in 10, 000 could do it. (And that Vioodi of a percent would have attended my Date With Destiny seminar!) But if you don't know the answer to this question, how can you make any clear decisions at all? How can you make choices that you know in the long term will meet your deepest emotional needs? It's hard to hit a target when you don't know what it is! Knowing your values is critical to being able to live them.

Anytime you have difficulty making an important decision, you can be sure that it's the result of being unclear about your values. What if you were asked to move your family across the country in connection with a new job? If you knew that there was some risk involved, but that the compensation would be better and the job would be more interesting, what would you do? How you answer this question will depend entirely on what's most important to you: personal growth or security? Adventure or comfort?

By the way, what determines whether you value adventure more than comfort? Your values came from a mixed bag of experiences, of lifelong conditioning through punishment and reward. Your parents congratulated and supported you when you did things that agreed with their values, and when you clashed with their values, you were punished either physically, verbally, or through the pain of being ignored. Your teachers, too, encouraged and applauded you when you did things they agreed with, and applied similar forms of punishment when you violated their most deeply held views. This cycle was perpetuated by your friends and employers. You modeled the values of your heroes, and maybe some

of your antiheroes as well.

Today, new economic factors come into play. With most families having both parents working outside the home, there is no traditional role model for values in the home. Schools, churches, and, on the less appetizing side, TV have all stepped in to fill the gap. Indeed, TV is our most convenient babysitter, with the average person now watching television seven hours a day! Am I suggesting that the " traditional" family structure is the only way to raise children who have strong values? Of course not. What I suggest is that we teach our children our philosophy of life by being strong role models, by knowing our own values and living by them.