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The topic today is values, that is, answering the question “What is most important to you?” As you think about that question, identify what is that one thing that is most important to you. Do you think that what is most important to you, such as peace of mind or family, makes you approach life differently or leads you to make decisions differently?
Of course, what is most important to you will influence everything that you do. What seems to really piss us off is when we encounter someone whose value system is totally different from ours.
When we meet a person with a different set of values from ours, we look at them and go, “What in the world are they thinking? Why would they do that? Oh my gosh! What’s wrong with them?” And all they are doing is acting on a set of values, on the things that are most important to them in their life.
What is happening is that we are judging them through the filter of what is important to us in our life. That is the number one thing that causes friction between humans. Someone is behaving according to their values, and we are judging them according to our values.
Now, what is fascinating about that is back in the day, we only had to deal with people who were just like us. This used to happen when we lived in villages, tribes and clans and all sorts of small societies from back in the day.
At that time, if you lived in a certain village, you lived in accordance with a given set of principles and values or behaviors because if you didn’t live according to the set norms, you were kicked out of the community or even killed. They would get rid of you because you were not upholding the values, behaviors, rules and standards of the village.
We are now at a point where there have been some interesting twists in history. We are at a point where we now live in a free society in which each person can stand side by side with other people who each have their own sets of values. Meaning, Person A right here says family is most important while Person B right next to him or her says God is most important. The next person to these two says love is the most important. The person next thinks their dog is the most important while another looks at this individual as crazy because to them, their child is the most important thing. To another, their business or their money is the most important!
What’s mind-boggling is that they are all right, and that is what messes up the entire system. Like I mentioned earlier, it would be very easy to hang out with only the people who had the exact same values as us.
But, that’s not the game! We’ve got to hang out with people that have radically and totally different values from ours, who see the world in a totally different way from the way we do, and look at the stuff we do and they are totally thrown off-guard. We somehow still have to interact in a civil way, in a caring and loving way with all those people.
The part that gets to me the most is this, just imagine for a moment that you sit down in 2020, this year, and you write down your most important values. And I know, all of you have, haven’t you?
That’s a sad topic. Have you taken the time to write down your values for this year? They are unlikely to be what they were 10 years ago. What is most important to you right now, at this moment?
What I found is that my values changed! My wife and I just did this the other day. We sat down and I wrote down my top 10 most important values. I wrote those down. I looked at the list and noticed how those have changed over the years. They were not always like that, and that was interesting.
I turned to my wife, Amanda, and said, “What about you? What are your most important values?” I can read them to you, because it is kind of interesting.
They were brainstormed, so they are in no particular order. Here’s what mine were; love, health, family, common peace, joy and happiness, business profit growth, owner vs. operator, adventure and travel, spirituality and God, and financial abundance. Those were the top 10 things that came to my mind in no particular order.
And I asked my wife, “What are your top 10 values?” She said love, health, mindfulness and spirituality, business systems and teams, learning and growing, family and community connection and contribution, exploration, adventure travel fun, play and laughter, and beautiful and cozy environments.
And I was like, “Wow, that’s really interesting!” If you examine that list closely, some of our values were the same! Health, love, family, connection, all these things. But if you also read closely, some of our values were not the same. We have some different values, which makes sense because we are humans.
But, when we put our values in order, when we ask what’s most important, when we ask what’s more important between love and health, family or health, business growth or family, etc. When we put all those values in order, we discovered that we had similar top three values. We didn’t state them using the exact words, but they were essentially the same. Now here is what was interesting; I noticed while studying relationships for five years before I met my wife. We’ve been together for six and married for five out of those six, so that is eleven years I have been studying, applying, practicing, testing and really diving deep into relationships.
In the process of doing so, I have noticed that most people have never sat down and asked, what is most important to me in life, written it down in order and then lived their life accordingly. Most people have never done that. If you have done that, high-five yourself because you are one of the rare humans who have done some of the work!
Now, I’ve also noticed that even those people who have done that work on themselves have rarely sat down and asked their partner what their top ten values are, shared with them their top values and then came up with a third list indicating their joint top values as a couple. Meaning, when you are separate, you have your own personal values and when you two choose to be together, right next to each other, what are your joint top values as a couple, the values that you choose to put above all else when you two are together?
If those values are out of alignment, you are going to have a lot of headaches with each other. Why? Because when you have a free hour of time, what are you supposed to do with it? Well, if your number one value is health, you might want to go to do something to improve your health.
Conversely, if your number one value is travel, you might want to go somewhere and travel during that one hour of time. If your number one value is growth, you might want to learn something and grow. You are going to choose to do something different according to the values you hold. I hope that makes sense.
What happens if you choose to align them together as “our values” that we use to guide us while we are together towards what is most important regarding how we invest our time, our money, our thoughts, our efforts, our energy and everything else in life?
All of a sudden, you guys are really connected. It makes things smoother, makes tough decisions not that tough anymore because you are in alignment. For example, if you say love is the most important, you then ask what love would do to handle a given situation.
In the same way, if health is the most important, you ask yourselves whether you are handling the situation in a way that promotes your health. Depending on what you choose as the things that are most important to the both of you, it becomes clear and obvious which decision you need to make.
Now without alignment, what tends to happen is that someone goes what is important to me is health, so we should go out and be healthy! But the other person goes, “No, no, no! Reading and learning is most important, so forget about going to the gym and let’s go to the library and read!”
And the other person will go, “Arrrg, it is always your way, so let us just go and do what you want.”
At that point the other person will soften and say since we did it my way last time, let us just go out to the gym as you want. And then they keep going back and forth between doing it one person’s way and later another person’s way. They keep having fights and arguments and irritations with each other all the time.
Those people don’t realize that if they just sit down and get these things in alignment then it will get a lot easier for them. That’s why my wife and I put these in alignment. Once you have them in alignment, map out your goals for the year. You say if these are the most important things for us, what top goals are we going to aim for this year to help us stay in alignment with what is most important to us.
What are the goals, what are the results we would like to achieve in these categories since they are the most important to us? What kind of path do we want to walk to achieve these goals? If those are most important to us, what is the journey we need to take to stay in alignment with our values?
Will you take a different path if your number one value was adventure or growth, compared to peace, calm and love? Of course you would take a different path! One person is climbing up the side of a mountain while the other person is walking a peaceful and calm journey in a quiet place. Both could be having the same destination but the journeys they take are radically different.
And so the alignment of these values allows you to be consistent and congruent in how you choose to walk the journey together.
So, I hope this is useful. I hope you take this. I hope, number one, you sit and write down the answer to the question what is most important to me in life. I hope you then put them to work, I hope if you have a spouse or significant other you share those values with them. This also works in business.
We sat down and asked ourselves what is most important to us in business? Our number one value at Performance Coach University, which is one of our online training programs for people who want to become a coach; our number one value is that we care, we care about people. I have team members who reach out and ask, how do we respond to this email or what do you think I should do with this text or what do you think I should say to this person? Well, I just say if you deeply cared about them as a human being, what would you do?
When put that way, it becomes clear that you would want to make sure that they were well taken care of, you would make them feel heard, seen and appreciated. So I say, well, go ahead and do that! That is what happens; the values guide the behaviors and if you have the values in alignment, the behaviors become pretty obvious.
So, hopefully this is useful. Apply it in your life, apply it in your relationship, apply it in your business and watch what magic unfolds. Have some fun with this, tag someone who needs to listen to this and if they don’t see the live version, you can go to JRCTV.com on our YouTube channel. It will be uploaded over there in the next day or so. All these videos go over there, so you are welcome to tune in and watch them over there. Also, share with other people who might need to watch them. Have some fun, I will see you guys tomorrow!
To Your Success,
Jairek Robbins