posted01/10/09
Today’s post comes from a very good friend of mine by the name of Dean Letfus from Massive Action
Over many years of observing and working with many people I have noticed that we don’t pick our values, they kind of pick us!
Professional psychological research tells us that our value systems are 100% developed before we are 7 years old. And 80% of this is established before we are 2!!
So changing a value system is a big deal. If we don’t like what we value we have to undo a lifetime of programmed thinking and behaviour.
In my work with investors I powerful value systems operating and often undermining our efforts. You see one of your stated values might be financial independence for example. However if your parents established core values in your life such as:
“Get a good education and get a good job”
“Money doesn’t grow on trees”
“We can’t afford that in our family”
“Rich people are snobs”
“Making money is related to time and effort”
“Having anything nice is showing off”
Then our stated value of financial independence is likely to remain a dream. Our behavior will be driven by these underlying core values, which in the case of the statements above is basically that poverty is good and being rich is associated with a string of negatives.
An extreme example would be gangs. I’ve worked and even lived with them and gang members operate on values of honour, “family”, pride and mutual protection. Most of us would be happy to have those values in our lives. Yet their interpretation of those values allows them to rape, kill, steal, intimidate and abuse others. They behave how they were programmed as children, in spite of their stated value systems.
So the initial key to understanding, (or changing) your values is to start to observe your behaviour. You are what you do, not what you think.
This will take some effort, but it’s worth it.
“I notice I am last to arrive at work and last to leave”
“I spend 15 minutes getting ready for lunch and 15 minutes recovering after lunch before I do any work”
“I adore my daughter but I bite her head off every time she walks into the room”
“Why do I always eat the last biscuit/chocolate/whatever and never offer it to my spouse”
“Why am I depressed for 2 days because I lost a stupid game?”
Don’t be too terrified
posted29/09/09
Today’s mindset over money blog post is going to be a bit different, in fact it’s not even the post that I had planned. You see as I was writing yesterday’s post about values I had something occur where I needed to assess my own value system.
I don’t know whether I have told you yet but I am married to the most wonderful lady, her name is Stephanie. In fact she is the major reason that I educate people and share my thoughts like this, that’s a story for another time. Yesterday Stephanie received a call to tell her that a member of her family was in hospital and not expected to live through the night. Now this was not unexpected as they had been slowly deteriating, but it was still a shock.
We were at least an 8 hour drive away from being able to visit Steph’s family member and Steph and I looked at each other. Without a moments hesitation we started packing the car, we dropped all of our plans for the day and just packed up and left. Now when something like this happens some people will way up the pros and cons, some people will go after just doing the bare minimum needed, but for us we dropped everything instantly and jumped in the car.
So it became amazingly obvious to me yesterday that Steph and I have the same value highest in our value system, family.
This story does not have a happy ending as despite our efforts to drop everything and take action straight away we were 20 minutes too late to be with Steph’s family member. Today I want you to take 2 things away from this post:
- Values – When writing down and assessing your values ensure you are being true to yourself. Only once you are true to yourself and your values will you be able to find your internal motivation.
- Life – Life is not like a movie, there is not always the fantasy ending, but no matter how something ends there is always good to be seen. The true challenge of life is to see the good despite being surrounded by the bad.
posted27/09/09
One of the major questions I get asked from people is where do I get my motivation from?
I don’t keep it secret, I work a lot, I get up around 9:30am each morning and start my work day and often continue working through until well after midnight. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t work these hours, I think I would get bored pretty quickly.
With that said though, I know a lot of people struggle to find the motivation to work those kinds of hours. In fact some people struggle to find the energy to just work 9am to 5pm. My opinion is that people who are struggling to find the time and energy to put into achieving their goals are using the wrong motivators. Let me explain…
Have you ever been to a motivational event and when you leave just a few days after the event those promises you made to yourself at that event start being broken?
Of course you have, nearly everyone who has attended a motivational event has this experience. In fact it’s expected, because at the motivational event you are motivated by EXTERNAL motivators not INTERNAL motivators. External motivators are great for a short period of time, they can inspire you to take action, but they wont give you long lasting change.
Long lasting change comes from the discovery and application of INTERNAL motivators. Today and over the next few days we are going to focus on discovering our internal motivators.
Discovering Your Internal Motivators Step 1:
This is not going to be a quick or single step process, so make sure you commit to following this whole process through. The first step to discovering your internal motivators is to take 10 minutes today to write down your top 10 values. Make sure you write them down on a clean piece of white unlined paper and use a colour texta to do this.
Watch out tomorrow for the second step
I have had a few emails from people over the last 24 hrs saying they are having difficulty identifying all of their values. The major problem upon investigation was that they were struggling to find the right words to identify their values with. To make it easier for you to complete yesterday’s task I have included a list of values below:
