Valued Living: What values matter to you?
A valuable life, what does it mean to you? Many people think of money when they think of a valuable life. After all, money is an expression of value, but that is not quite what I mean by a valuable life
A valuable life is one that you live according to your own values. A life in which you do your best to live by the values that are important to you.
This, in fact, makes you feel good. That you feel you have some kind of meaningful life. That you go through your life in a good mood.
You don't want to feel bad every day because you don't live by the values that are important to you, do you?
So how do you get a valuable life now?
Values and contexts in your life
You can also look at the contexts in which you want to have a valuable life. For example, you can take a deeper look at your relationships or your work.
First and foremost, it’s important to determine for yourself what is valuable to you. This might include freedom, love, emotions, joy, security, and growth.
Then again, looking at growth, you may find it valuable in your work, for example, but perhaps not in your relationships. You find those equally important, but at work you find growth most important and in your relationships you find love most important.
So your key values may vary by context.
Determine what values are important to you
Then there is also often a hierarchy, a ranking, in the importance you place on certain values. For example, one value is more important than another.
For me, important values are:
- Love
- Freedom
- Fun
- Growth
- Connection.
If this isn’t there, I feel even more worthless. If all five of them aren’t present in my life, then I really feel worthless. I’ve experienced this once in my life, but at the time I didn’t realize that was what it was.
This is also sometimes called depression. This is because the things you find important aren’t being fulfilled. I then started using alcohol and drugs. That made me feel free. This was a very important value to me (the second most important), so I started to feel a bit more valuable again. As a result, I also found it easier to connect with people, so suddenly there were two items on my list. This also gave me a kind of feeling of love. With XTC, for example, you get the feeling that the whole world is fantastic.
So a lot of those feelings were suddenly filled in that were not filled in before. Then when the drugs stopped working you felt even worse, because it was already unfulfilled but now I suddenly had "comparative material.
Of course, drugs are not a solution, but you can imagine people starting to use them.
Finding sober ways to feel your values
So to avoid filling your values with booze and drugs, it is important to find sober ways to feel your important values to fulfill them.
By now I am fortunate to know those too, so drugs I no longer need. In fact, if I were to use it now, it would no longer do me any good. I would just go out of my connection, I don't grow anymore, I don't have a sense of freedom, because I have to recover for days. So it just causes shit and I don't have that to do with it.
So finding sober ways to fill in your values is important for a truly valuable life.
You then write that list of what you think is important and put them in order so you can find the most important five. Then, in fact, you can actively work with those values.
For example, on freedom: in what ways can you feel freer? You can write that down with it.
How can I connect, how can I grow? These are all verbs where you can do a lot yourself.
The more you do so, the more you feel you are moving toward the value you value.
Money to live a valuable life
Money can be important to you, for example, because it can make you feel even freer. You can spend it on courses, books or whatever. Money can help you connect even more or grow other people.
Giving money to charities, for example, makes you feel good. You can pay for a date or help people.
What matters then is not the money itself, but what you can achieve with it. How you can fill in the values to live a valuable life.
You may not be able to buy off everything, but you can buy off a lot.
Taking responsibility for a valuable life
Another important aspect is the realization that you yourself are responsible for creating a meaningful life. No one else can do that for you—you have to do it yourself.
So you put the responsibility for your happiness not on your partner or your employer, but on yourself.
Also listen to this podcast on living a valuable life:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/195236/1387495-waardevol-of-waardeloos-leven?play=true
Taking that responsibility also means choosing for yourself. Prioritizing what you find important in your life. This may mean taking a break from cleaning up the house or doing something for your partner that he, in turn, finds important.
Valuable life and relationships
We humans are social beings, and as you can see from my list, having connections is important to us. Having a meaningful relationship is essential to feeling that you are living a meaningful life.
Research shows that valuable relationships are mostly those of people with a history and where you both anticipate future things in a positive way as a couple.
One way to do this is by having conversations and making decisions during those conversations about what the two of you will do[1].
Valuable life and time
There is also discussion about having a valuable life and time. I had already touched on a bit that feeling good makes for a valuable life and that a valuable life makes you feel good (especially the latter).
Of course, sometimes you may still have a down day, but it is important to feel generally well to be able to speak of a valuable life. Scientists believe the following 3 factors are important for having a valuable life:
- Wisdom
- Values
- Happiness (Happines) [2].
Wisdom comes with age. It is nice that I have learned that drugs are not for me and will not help me move forward. This also gives you a sense of growth.
With the values, I couldn't agree more. Living by your values really helps you feel like you are living a valuable life.
With happiness, scientists indicate that you feel happy when you see your child playing. So it's also about enjoying the little things in life. Enjoying the sun shining. Enjoying that cup of coffee.
Doing something meaningful can also help make your life valuable. For example, if you go cycling with a good friend of yours, it can feel nice because you are doing an activity together, thereby strengthening your bond. This while the cycling in itself may not feel good at all. After all, you're going to break down completely while you're biking rock hard[3].
Help for living a valuable life
So there are all kinds of values that you might find important. If you’re unable to live according to those values, it can feel very frustrating. You might even feel like you’re “stuck” in the life you have. For example, you have to take care of your parents, do things for your partner, and do things for your children, but none of that feels meaningful to you at all.
In this case, it is important to be able to choose for yourself, stand up for yourself and see how you can work together to create a life that works for both parties and not just the other.
For this you can get help and for this you can develop yourself. For example, with hypnosis. With hypnosis you can find out why you find it so difficult to live according to your own values, why you apparently do not deserve to do so.
Then you can change your beliefs, which will allow you to do this and make you succeed.
Want to know exactly how this works? Then come to a free online master class on hypnosis. In it you will learn, among other things, how to hypnotize yourself or other people.
Do you want to help yourself or others live a meaningful life? Then sign up for the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands’ training program. It’s ideal if you’re a coach who wants to help people overcome obstacles.
Also pin this handy infographic:
Sources:
[1] https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/whp/ev/2008/00000017/00000002/art00004
[2] https://www.nber.org/chapters/c5054.pdf
[3] https://www.nber.org/chapters/c5054.pdf (p. 17.)