What do you carry in your back pack for increasing the quality of your life? How do you know what is important to pack with you for the journey? Your back pack is just like life and is limited in what it will hold. The quality of your life depends on filling your back pack with purposeful and meaningul direction and then doing what you consider most important.
When life feels murky and you chase your tail. Stop! Take a moment to stand still so you can hear the whisper of your heart’s desire. Look for the energy embedded in your body to guide you. Sometimes taking a risk to pursue your dreams brings on heart palpatations because it is scary to go after what really matters. Cool! You are alive. Sometime, tears and racing thoughts of insecurity sweep across your face and jumble your mind in the middle of the night and day. Cool! You are really living your life. You can play it safe by putting only light weight stuff in your backpack. It is your choice what to carry and how important it is to have it along the path. The items in your back pack are your values. Nobody but you can make those important choices. There are a varity of tools you can use if you are looking for direction in clarifying what will help you increase the quality of your life. I like Life Values Inventroy. It is free and the results are detailed. Give it a try and let me know what you think. Tell us the results. If you do better with a hard copy for clarifying your values try this one [no longer available]. 
Here is a success story about a person I work with in utilizing Radiant Living Tool Box and Gift Set to complete her values clarification. The summary is in a brief format so as not to cloud the beauty of the simple yet complex conclusion the person uncovered.
After picking several life domains (see below) and a round of sorting the Radiant Living cards, she exclaimed, “This is a light backpack to carry through life. With these values I can endure whatever life brings my way.”
With further exploration, she said, “even with joy and happiness there will be moments of pain and suffering and I can still embrace a life lived in a value based direction.” She felt her vitality increase as she gained clarity by letting go of struggling to please others. Also, she was happy to know her values were always there and will continue to guide her actions in living life to the fullest. Parenting is the domain she wanted to focus on.
Here some questions for the life domain of parenting:
- What sort of parent would you like to be?
- What sort of qualities would you like to have?
- What sort of relationship would you like to build with your children?
- What would you start doing or stop doing?
- How would you behave if you were the ideal you?
Values are not goals or outcomes. Goals are an endpoint like a destination you arrive at and then check off your list as completed. Values are a direction to living life that points you in a direction like a compass pointing west. Also. just like north, south, east and west are not right or wrong. There is no “right or wrong” to a person’s values.
Life Domains:
Related Posts:
- How are Values and Goals Related?
- The Secret to Higher Self-esteem and Self Confidence
- You Can DO IT: Self-Efficacy
(C) Copyright 2014 Brenda Bomgardner.
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