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What are Values?

Values are who we are. What we value determines what life means to us and what actions we take.
When we honour our values consistently, life is happy and fulfilling.

Two fundamental areas have an influence over the happiness we experience in our lives, and they are
our values and our beliefs. This section will set out to explain the importance of understanding the impact
that values can have on our accomplishments. Beliefs are covered in previous section.

Values are the supporting framework for our beliefs and are strongly connected to our identity.

Our primary principles and way of life are controlled by our values. They give us direction and motivation
to accomplish tasks and face challenging situations.

Why are our values so important?

It is only when we identify our core values, the things that really matter most to us, the processes
on which we base all of our emotions, decisions and choices, that we come to realise how
important they are in our search for happiness and peace.
Whether we are conscious of it or not, we have inner values that strongly influence our outward
behaviour.

Deep within each of us there are strong behaviour governing values and beliefs that have
always been there. Many of these values were embedded in us from the earliest stages of
childhood, partly from the influence of parents, siblings, elders, relatives, teachers and friends
and partly from our own experiences.

Our natural human inclination is for our actions and behaviour to be consistent with these
deeply held governing values. That is why we experience pain when our actions are not
consistent with our inner value system.

It is almost as if we have an inner blueprint that tells us how we should behave and react in given
situations and pain is a way of reminding us that we have acted in conflict to these values. Of
course this is fine when we still support and believe the values serve our best interests, but many
of the values become outdated or are not truly OUR values but those we have accepted as
being right for us because they were right for our parents or others. It becomes essential to
define the core values that serve us best.
A great deal of stress is unnecessarily experienced as a result of people failing to identify the
core values that mean most to them. They punish themselves for sins and transgressions that no
longer contravene their real value and belief system, had they only identified it.

By identifying and clarifying our true governing core values, we can access the power within
them to increase our personal effectiveness in life. A very real power becomes accessible to you
once you identify something that matters a great deal to you at soul level. The power and focus
this identification process reveals to you will help you eliminate uncertainties and move you
closer toward accomplishing the goals that are significantly important to you.

When our actions and behaviour is in line with our governing values, we finally experience the
inner peace we have been seeking. Such is the importance of values.