If you want to know where you’re headed, look in the direction you’re facing. If you want to know why you’re going there, look no further than your values.
What you value determines where your life grows and where it doesn’t. Your values are critical in shaping your life. A great tool to find out where you need to do some values work is the “Wheel of Life.”
The “Wheel of Life” is commonly used in Coaching to determine problem areas in our lives. Using the template (left), you imagine the outer wheel is valued at 10 and the hub is valued at zero. You then place a line in each segment rating it from zero to 10 to uncover where you think you’re out of balance.
As a Coach and Brain UnTrainer, I can spot an imminent disaster using this simple tool and help a client to avert future pain.
Simply rate or calibrate your life. Rate each area of your life between zero and ten. The zero point is at the hub of your wheel and ten is closer to the outer edge of the wheel. Don’t think about it too much. Just mark each segment of your life quickly and then reflect upon your answers. After marking your Wheel of Life it won’t take too long to discover the flat spots or for some, the potential ‘Blow Outs!’ The question is; what causes flat spots and blowouts and how can you avert them?
What you value most determines what shows up in your life.
One little known fact is that your VALUES determine what shows up in your life. For example; a person who values WEALTH over FAMILY AND FRIENDS will most likely have more business relationships than social relationships, and therefore have a less active social life. Now that’s not a problem unless we desire more fun or social activity in our lives. The industrial revolution in my view commenced a trend where personal relationships have fallen down the values hierarchy due to people valuing work life over personal life.
The ‘Global Financial Crisis’ has equally caused many people to place greater time pressures upon themselves to make up for their financial losses and the ageing population are now rushing to make up ground for all the years of lost saving and investment as they near retirement.
I am convinced, that much of the pain that people experience is due to little or no knowledge about how their brain works. More-so, how to fix or even avert their own issues. I believe that those people who grow their knowledge of self, will see less blow outs over their lifetime.
One critical part in our brain that everyone should become aware, is called the ‘Reticular Activating System‘ or the ‘RAS’. The RAS is a self-filtering system that determines what you accept or reject. These are based upon your prejudices which are determined by your beliefs and driven by your values.
According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, we “filter around 2 million bits of information per second down to 7 plus or minus 2 chunks of information.” In other words, the data available to your central nervous system goes through a process of deletions, distortions and generalisations in order for you to make sense of all the information. In other words, for someone who’s number one focus is wealth over family and friends may find that they don’t even hear what they’re family and friends are saying at times. I’m guessing you might now have some idea how our highest level values influence our lives.
If people realised how powerfully their lives are influenced by their values, they might invest more time to understand them.
Let me make this as simple as I can. Imagine for a moment a person who values SECURITY over WEALTH might prefer a steady income and over large financial gains. While another who values GROWTH over FEAR might take more risks and perhaps enjoy much greater wealth increases (of course depending upon markets and choices). The point more specifically is that our values determine our choices and our choices determine our lives. The way I like to think of values is akin to the rudder of a boat. A small shift in values can take you to a completely different destination.
I have found that just helping someone to elicit their core-values and realign them can create quantum shifts in people’s lives and in their financial outcomes. Simply, people who do not have the words, “Money, Rich, Wealth, Financial Growth” or anything similar in their top six values will not have much money in their lives. In fact, I guarantee it.
Values are essentially an evaluation filter. They determine how we decide whether our actions are good, bad, right or wrong. They also help us decide how we feel about our actions. Values are in a hierarchy where the value at the top is the most important and the value at the bottom has the least influence in your life. Challenges in life are sometimes values conflicts, such as the values of say VARIETY and SECURITY when deciding where to go on holiday.
Values are broad concepts that guide decisions in life.
Values determine what is important to us, and they determine the foundation of our character. Significantly, what the conscious mind deems important is not always the same as what the unconscious mind values. Values can be detected by what people are attracted to or repulsed by and by people’s actions. Values determine how humans spend their time.
Because individuals have different hierarchies of values, they experience life differently. For instance, individuals, whose top value is WEALTH, will invest time and effort in that area. Their experience of life will reflect that focus. If some of those same individuals do not also value HONESTY, then they’re route would be very different from others who are highly value both wealth and honesty. Recognising, reprioritising, or aligning conscious and unconscious values, are major steps towards getting what one truly wants.
Over the years I have noticed the biggest shifts in people’s lives have come from the process of listing their values, determining their values hierarchy and changing their order of values where necessary. The simplest way to balance out your ‘Wheel of Life’ is to work out what are the highest level values that are driving you in that specific area or what values are not present that could make the world of difference to you.
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