Habit of Thought

What Values Do You Believe In?

Research has shown that about 95% of our values and beliefs have been learned by the age of 5.

Unless you have actively worked on choosing your values since then, most of your daily decisions are influenced by what you learned from the culture and circumstances of your life before you went to kindergarten.

What Is A Value?

A value is a belief, a mission, or a philosophy. It has intrinsic worth that inspires you and provides meaning that cannot be taken from you. Samples include family, patriotism, safety, creativity, orderliness, punctuality, loyalty, innovation.

Whether you are conscious of them or not, values are like your personal operating system, preprogramming your choice when making a decision.

Values Are the Operating System of Success

"Success is the continual achievement of your own predetermined goals,
stabilized by balance and purified by belief."

In my definition of success, you purify your goals by filtering them through your beliefs. Success means you have used your beliefs and values to actively select and shape your goals, the actions to achieve them, and design how you carry them out.

In computer programming, if-then-else logic drives the outcome based on pre-selected choices. Values are what you use to pre-select life choices. If honesty is one of your values, when presented with an opportunity to lie, you will choose to tell the truth.

Values As A Standard for Managing Your Personal Energy

In Loehr and Schwartz's book, they explain that values drive fuller engagement in all areas of our lives. A values-driven life increases the likelihood that you bring passion, commitment, and perseverance to whatever it is that you do. You make choices about how to behave from a position of confidence, strength and dignity rather than from anger, resentment or insecurity.

In this era of feeling our lives are controlled by everything but ourselves, this model gives us back that control.

What are your top 5 values? How have your actions over the last month reflected those?

 

Work-Life Balance: It's All About the Container

Work-life balance is lot like fashion. Its definition changes with seasons, trends, the economy, gender roles, and cultures.

The problem is, our life's container is time, which we perceive through the concept of a 24-hour day. All of those other influences come and go, but no one, not even Einstein and his theory of relativity, has found a way to increase the hours in a day.

Balance as a Life Stabilizer

The definition of success I work with includes goals that are stabilized by balance. Creating a dream inventory where you wish and brainstorm to your heart's content is one thing. Flooding your to-do list with tasks is another. Your sense of balance in your life is your thermostat telling you when to adjust how many goals and tasks you have in play at one time. Too many goals overwhelm you; too few goals give you little sense of fulfillment.

What Balance Is Not

All areas of your life, e.g., work, children, aging parents, home repair, finances, social life, hobbies, professional development, do not have to get equal time in order to have balance. Trying to do so will guarantee you won't have any sense of balance at all.

What makes you feel a sense of balance will change with time, life circumstances, your health, your finances, and other aspects.

There is no one perfect balance to strive for. This is where the "if onlies" can really derail you: if only I had more time, made more money, exercised more; if only the kids would clean up around the house; if only I had a more understanding boss; and so on.

The Big Rocks Story

Steven Covey in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, tells a story learned from an associate who attended a seminar. The seminar presenter used a glass jar, rocks, sand, and water. The jar represents your life. If you fill the jar with sand and water to fill every conceivable space (the tons of little stuff that lands on your desk), then you have no room to put in your big rocks (the people and activities that mean something to you).

Building a sense of balance in your life requires recognizing that you are dealing with an inflexible, limited boundary we call time. Just as jamming too many rocks into a glass jar will shatter it, putting too much in your life can cause painful breaks in your health and relationships.

A Practical View of the Time Container

I will go into more detail on this in a later post, but through another book I discovered that using Microsoft Outlook 2007's weekly calendar view as my "jar" works wonders in my ability to manage my time, and therefore, my sense of balance. Dealing with my life in weekly chunks with occasional forays into months and the whole year has made a world of difference in managing what I need to do and what I need to let go of.

I cannot locate the originator of my favorite definition of balance, but here it is anyway:

Balance is time for your passions.

How much time are you spending on your passions?

To Goal or Not To Goal

Does setting goals really work? Leo Babauta of the zenhabits blog says the best goal is no goal. 

Brian Tracy, a successful consultant, author and speaker whose work has had much positive impact on my life, has made a great career out of teaching others to set and achieve goals.

So what's a body to do?

My take on goals is that they are useful tools when used in the right way, just like any other tool.

Most of the problems people have with the concept of goals are not with the goals themselves but are due to one or more of these items:

1. You have no goals.
2. You have too many goals.
3. What you think is a goal is really a dream or wish.
4. You phrase the goal in a negative way such as "stop smoking," which your mind has a hard time translating into action. (This creates a "vacuum" into which old bad habits easily sneak back.)
5. The goals on your plate were handed to or dumped on you by a boss, colleague, spouse, parent, child, family member, friend, neighbor, or maybe even a stranger.
6. Something suddenly seemed to be a good idea, something that you hadn't pictured wanting or needing until you saw it. (This is often driven by advertising or a new product announcement.)

Earlier this year I wrote about an alternative definition of success. The first part of that definition is

"Success is the continual achievement of your own predetermined goals..."

A predetermined goal is one you have taken time to think about and develop in relation to all of your wants and needs, not just to what is in front of you at the moment.

Well-written predetermined goals are a great filter through which you can view and manage the information, suggestions, requests, and demands that flood you every day.

They can provide the motivation you need to prevail through setbacks or failures.

Predetermined goals become the gatekeepers that keep the ruffians at bay, the road ahead clear, the resources focused, the people aligned, and the destination in sight.

And finally, there's no rule that says you can't change or even discard a predetermined goal. But as with anything that you have invested in, you are less likely to throw out a predetermined goal just because something flashier came along.

Which side of this question are you on? Why?

Success As Continual Achievement

Googling the word "success" produces a count of about 308,000,000 results. You'd think with that much information out there that success would not be such an elusive goal for so many.

In a previous post, I offered the definition of success that I work with. The main focus of that definition is continual achievement.

Kids get this unconsciously. They are whirlwinds of activity and experimentation, absorbing a huge amount of information even before the age of 5 about how to participate in and deal with the world around them.

They learn to sit up, crawl, walk. They learn to drink through a straw, then from a cup, and then with the lid off. They learn to ride a bike with training wheels, and then one day the wheels come off.

This continual achievement is the part most adults forget when they become adults.

For many years in the United States, the "American dream" was the commonly held goal: a house with a picket fence, 2 cars, spouse, 2.3 kids, dog, vacation once a year. Once you had all that, you had it made.

The odd thing is, once you reach the pinnacle you were aiming for and recover your breath, you start to look around and say, "What's next?" Or sometimes the pinnacle loses its appeal before you reach it, so you still ask "What's next?" Often people grab what they think is an easy solution to the uneasiness: a new spouse, a new job (or no job at all), a snazzy sports car.

Even money isn't a real answer to this question. In an article recently published by Wired Magazine, "Why Money Makes You Unhappy," the author quotes the psychologists:

"...our findings provide evidence for the provocative notion that having access to the best things in life may actually undermine one’s ability to reap enjoyment from life’s small pleasures."

Finally, another fascinating article, this time published by Slate Magazine, talks about the human need for "seeking":

"For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing."

Continual achievement's contribution to success is to always have some possible answers for "What's next?" in your pocket.

So, what's next for you?

F.E.A.R.

Seth Godin's book, Linchpin, does a great job of explaining that fear comes from the fear conditioning stored in the most primitive part of the brain, the amygdala. He calls it the lizard brain. It's job is to keep us safe.

Fear has its uses. The problem is that few of us face saber-toothed tigers, sharks, poisonous snakes, or murderous people on a regular basis. Our physical responses to fear are overkill when it comes to what scares us in this day and age.

In fact, much of our fear comes from its kissing cousin, worry. As defined in Wikipedia, "Worry is thoughts and images of a negative nature in which mental attempts are made to avoid anticipated potential threats."

"Anticipated" is the key word. We worry about what hasn't actually happened and may not happen. The fear of failure falls into this category.

We freeze, our brain turns to mush, heart rate and breathing accelerate, and our body gives us only two choices: fight or flight. In today's world, we actually have more choices than that.

The next time you feel fear or begin to worry, here are a few behaviors to replace them with:

• Learn an alternate definition of fear: False Evidence Appearing Real. Human imagination is a powerful thing, and sometimes it needs to be reined in a bit. For some, determining what the worst that can happen is and then preparing for it works well. For others, research and information is the key to reducing or eliminating fear. Talking over fears with a trusted person can bring a different point of view. Finding someone who has already done it and learning what they did also works.


• Turn the worry (negative energy) into a goal (positive energy). If you are worried about losing your job, set a goal about being prepared to search for the next one (start a blog, get involved in professional organizations or chambers of commerce, etc.). If you are worried about money, focus on the options to earn some.


• If you are feeling fear as part of a goal already in progress, write down affirmations on 3x5 cards and post them on your bathroom mirror, your kitchen table, and your nightstand to read and say out loud each time you see them.

What are you afraid of?

A New Definition of Success for A New Year

"Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person we become."

—Jim Rohn

One of the challenges in today's complex society is how to define success for yourself. In the olden days, success was pretty clear: food on the table, a roof over your head, clothes on your back, maybe education thrown in.

Today the media scream that success is lots of money to buy European cars, exotic vacations, expensive watches, designer clothes, and all manner of material things. The people in those ads look so happy and relaxed, comfortable in their own skin (which hasn't a blemish on it), without a care in the world.

It's tempting to let the outside world define success for us. Various studies claim we're exposed to  anywhere from 247 to 3000 ads a day.

I propose a definition of success that is universally applicable to all humans regardless of gender, ethnicity, age, income, geography, religion, or job.

"Success is the continual achievement of your own predetermined goals,
stabilized by balance and purified by belief."

What's your definition of success? How does it compare to this statement?