Discovering Values, Motives, and Life Goals

Want a better life?

More Happiness?  More Well being? How do you get yourself motivated today to improve your life?  How come no one ever taught you this before?

Let me share a secret with you. A secret that the most accomplished people already know.  A secret to living the good life that no one has taught you before.

Archer woman aims her arrow at the target

What is that secret?  — Motivation always starts by deciding what interests you. We call these interests your “Values.”  Set a goal to accomplish something new in that area and you will attain more of whatever you value.  It is a magic formula that really works!

Values + Goals + Action = A Better Life!

Most people want more out of life than what they are currently getting.  But they may be afraid to dream of anything important out of fear that they won’t get it and then will feel disappointed. If you know your values you need never fear again. Values and Goals naturally lead to action. Repeated action leads to results. You naturally move toward what you value. Pura Vida!

Let’s put it in action right now.  Try the following exercise —

 

Exercise Step One:

Take out a sheet of paper.  Write a list of everything you value.  It may take several pages but it is good to get it out on paper where you can look at it.  Consider what you value in the different areas of your life:

  •    Personal Emotional and Mental Self,
  •    Family and Spouse or primary relationship,
  •    Friendships and Community relationships,
  •    Career and Financial,
  •    Spiritual life
  •    Possessions and living quarters,
  •    Physical condition and health, and

You can add any other area that is important to you.

Our values are what motivate us, they are what we think is important – what we value. Sometimes they are the things that excite us and sometimes they scare us. But they are never boring.  At the Weekly Wisdom Game we cherish learning about a person’s values.

Exercise Step Two:

Write a Goal or two that moves toward what you value.  Just a little one. Small steps lead to greater things.  It is better to make goals so small that you can do them right away and in one event.

Tiny goals organize our actions so that we move toward a better life.   Consider whether you would benefit from having goals to improve in the areas of your values?  When we define our values and work toward improving them, we are working toward Virtues. Virtues are the values that make us better people.  We want to be Virtuous people, right?

When you know your own values and virtues you can more easily stay focused, and you will find many ways to accomplish goals that satisfy your values.  If an action doesn’t serve your values, make you a better person, why would you do it?

When you know another person’s values you can be of better service to them.  You can help them in ways that support their values. You can show them how a proposal you are making helps them satisfy their own values.  You can motivate them to take actions in service of their values. You can convince them to do things that are important to do. At the Wisdom Games this last weekend we learned how to discover another person’s highest values. Values are the key to motivation, influence, getting going, and building trust.

Be aware that there are two types of Values.  Those you move away from and avoid and those you move toward.

The first are the important negatives in life that make us afraid or worried.  We protect ourselves by avoiding them. We need a few of these in our lives. As an example we all have a value for Safety.  We avoid danger. It is important to know our negative values so that we can quickly make decisions to avoid them when we have to make a choice.

The second type of values are the ones that we move toward.  We want more positive values in our lives because they are our desires and help us fulfill our physical, emotional, and social needs.  An example of a “toward” value is Love. Most of us want to move toward more love in our lives.  By listing our positive values we can set goals to take action and move toward fulfilling those values.

 

Take Action Now — Tiny Action!

Look at your list of values and pick one or two that are most important to you. Choose your highest values and decide to do something to make your life better starting today, starting right now!  Set a small goal that relates to your highest value. Try to find the smallest, next step that you can take right now. Or set a specific appointment with yourself to take this first step toward your goal and your value as soon as is physically possible.

This is the principle of taking lots of Tiny Actions. These are easy to do because they are so small. But you will feel good about accomplishing them, getting them out of the way, and getting the ball rolling.  Then you can do another action because each one is so easy. Do a number of these and they add up quickly. Your life will thank you for it.

 

You Deserve to Live a Happy Life

I know, easy and great, right?  Why didn’t anyone ever already teach you this stuff?

Happiness doesn’t come so much from momentary pleasure, or from doing activities, or attaining possessions. Happiness comes more from working toward achievable goals that serve your own personal values.

If you know your values and do a little work on them every day, you will be feel satisfaction along the way.  And that will make your life happy. Exciting to begin with!

As you achieve the goals you set, you will see that they move you toward the things you most Value, and that will make you even more happy.  Even more exciting!

Finally, (and this is the best part!)  the most important happiness comes when you look back on your life and realize that you have lived according to your values and achieved many goals that made a difference.

 

Learn A Lot More

If you would like to Play the Game of Life at a higher level every single day, please consider coming to join us at The Weekly Wisdom Game.

A community of mutually supportive, emotionally intelligent players meets every Saturday in San Pedro area of San Jose, Costa Rica to support one another, do community service, and learn skills and games that grow our ability to live the good life of well being.

Please come join us!  We need people like you with good Values!

 

To Register and save your space at The Weekly Wisdom Game:  http://wisdomgamecr.com

For more information LIKE our Facebook Page:  https://www.facebook.com/WisdomGameCR

 

You Up For a Challenge?

If the people around you are not as good as you, it might keep your ego from being hurt, but it is costing you money and holding you back.

To get better ride with people who are a little better than you are.

The better your peers are the better you will become.

It has been said that first rate managers hire people who are better than them and that second rate managers hire third rate staff because their egos can’t take the challenge of subordinates showing them up all the time. Well new research from the University College London has discovered that if you work with people who are better than you it causes you to do better and even get more raises.

These improvements come from both the increased competition you feel with your coworkers and from the added advantage you get from being able to learn from the people around you who are even better than you are.

So if your bored by your work and by your co-workers, it may be time to find a better place to work that challenges you more.  Cushy jobs are rarely rewarding and in the end they don’t pay as well either.

 

  • Thomas Cornelissen, Christian Dustmann, Uta Schönberg. Peer Effects in the Workplace. American Economic Review, January 2017

 

Engineering People Can Be Tricky

Designing a solution takes time, mental power, and effort.  To engineers and tech people this is obvious when talking about physical reality.  Building a new product or solution you start by analyzing what you are trying to accomplish.  Then you you research and design the new product to meet those specifications.  Finally you convert those designs into a set of processes that build and deliver the needed solution in an efficient manner.

Checking system tolerance

People engineering uses feedforward and feedback to maintain system control and stability.

Scientists, engineers, and tech people are good at this sort of work.  Unfortunately, it is not just THINGS that need to be created.

In fact, I don’t know about you but on the technical projects I work on, problems are about people as much as about things.  Human solutions are generally necessary before engineering solutions will actually work.

Think about the people issues you have to deal with every day.

  • Bosses that never listen to your good ideas, or
  • executives who randomly change the goal or interrupt the project or
  • make promises to customers with deadlines that no one could keep.
  • Subordinates that want to “fix” things without understanding why you’ve done it this way for the past 6 years.  Or
  • bosses who don’t know how to let go, who hover over you or nit-pic constantly so that you don’t have a chance to do your job.  Or on the other hand
  • bosses that you only hear from when things go wrong.

Individual contributing engineers and techies tend to be passive responders.  But leading technical teams means looking around at what needs to be done and taking a proactive action to move the team and the organization forward through solutions to these problems, toward the goals that it doesn’t even know it has yet.  And that means selling those ideas to others.

Do you know how to do people engineering?  Can you elaborate the technical specifications (values) of your top team members?  Do you recognize their process tolerances?  How often do you need to run quality assurance samples on your best colleagues, and the least experienced?

People are not really machines.  But they are systems with consistent patterns of inputs and outputs.  You can learn to engineer people systems, but you have to adopt variation control procedures and feedforward mechanisms.  Otherwise people systems go chaotic.

Making the change from individual technical contributor to team leader starts with upgrading yourself.  Take a hard look at what you do and do not understand about leadership.  Now is the time.  There are skills, behaviors, distinctions, and ways of measuring performance in dealing with people just as there are in engineering and technical individual contributor roles.  Be honest with yourself.  You went to school to get the basic ideas and vocabulary of engineering, science, and technology.  But you have learned your profession on the job.  Self study can take you a long way when you are ready to learn how to lead others.

 

A Call For Honest Conversation

I would like to hear from you what differences you have noticed between engineering systems and engineering people.  What is similar?  What is different and difficult?

If you want to learn then you are going to have to be honest and admit what works and what doesn’t yet work for you.  Let me hear your thoughts.