Part 1: "Values"

Have you ever wondered why some people are so "successful" and why others that seem to have so much potential are not "successful"? Notice that I put quotes around the word successful. We're going to learn in a minute that someone else may be perceived as being successful by you or me based on our belief system but that person we believe to be successful may be miserable inside. So, how do we define success? It must be different for different people. Look at the number of professional athletes and entertainers that seem to be "successful" but sabotage their lives. And then we wonder, "Why? They had so much going for them. They were so successful." We've all experienced that.

Well, I'm here to tell you that everything we achieve and everything we feel in this life is because of our values and our beliefs. I learned about this concept of values and beliefs a number of years ago from a tape set I listened to by Anthony Robbins. And of all the tapes in the set, this one tape on Values and Beliefs impacted me the most. Now I want to share with you what I learned so that you can use this information to make positive changes in your own life.

Let's start with Values. Pain and pleasure are the controlling forces that drive our lives. We have learned to give labels to different levels of pain and different levels of pleasure. Those labels are what we call Values. What if I asked you, "Which would you rather have; success, adventure, outrageousness, love, comfort or feelings of security?" If I asked you to pick only one of those, which would you pick? It's different for everyone. We have all learned in life to take different words that we call emotions and give them levels of importance. We value different emotions at different levels of intensity. We all have a hierarchy of Values that is guiding our ever day focus.

We don't pay attention to every single thing that is going on around us every second of every day of our lives. What we pay attention to, or focus on, is based on our Values. They tell us what states of mind to pay attention to that are going to lead to the most pleasure. However, there are also Values that lead to pain. These are the states of mind that we pay attention to that we feel are going to be the most painful and we avoid at all cost because they lead to pain.

There are the two types of Values in our lives. They are "Moving Towards Values" which are states that would lead to the most pleasure if we were to experience them and these are the Values we will try to move towards. We also have a set of values that we are trying to avoid. We call those "Moving Away From Values". These are the states that would lead to the most pain. These are Values we are trying to move away from. Even those states we do not value equally.

Similar to what I asked before, if I said to you, "Which of these states would you do the most to avoid; frustration, anger, physical pain, the feeling of humiliation, embarrassment or the feeling of being depressed?" Again, not only would you pick one that you would do the most to avoid, but you would also put them in a hierarchy of importance of which ones would you do the most to avoid down to the least.

Now, you need to understand that your brain will do virtually anything it can to avoid major painful experiences and it's trying to do anything it can to gain pleasure. In fact, your brain will do more to avoid pain than it will do to ever gain pleasure. So with every experience that comes up in your life, your brain decides whether it is going to do it or not by first evaluating or "valuing" the experience. What your brain does is decide if this experience is going to lead to pleasure or to pain? It looks at what you think is important in life based on the associations you have made in your brain on what to move towards or the states you'll do a lot to gain.

Let's look at a quick example. What if you asked someone to go sky diving with you and at the top of their list of "Moving Towards Values" was adventure. They would probably be excited to go. It appeals to their values or what their brain has linked up will lead to pleasure. However, if at the top of that person's list of "Moving Towards Values" was security and the thing they would avoid most or their "Moving Away From Value" is physical pain or fear, do you think they would want to go? Probably not because remember, your brain will do more to avoid pain than it will to gain pleasure.

Now think about this. What if you've got this person whose number one value in life is security and way down at the bottom of their list is adventure and one day you swapped them. Would that change their personality at all? You better believe it would. It literally changes the priorities of their life. It changes the way they look at and evaluate everything. It can literally change their destiny in life. Imagine this too. A person could literally have two different value systems within themself pulling in opposite directions. That's what causes a lot of people to sabotage themselves and never realize success in their life. You can change your values though, design new values so that they literally pull you in the direction you really want to go in life. However, that's a topic for another lesson, another day.

How do we find out what our Values are? First thing you have to do is ask a simple question of yourself. It's a different question for different types of Values. If you want to find your "Moving Towards Values", ask yourself:

What's most important to me in __________________?

Now fill in the blank. Maybe it's "life" or "my finances" or "my family", etc. Make a list in every area of your life you desire. However, be careful when you answer these questions. If you ask yourself what is most important to me in life and your answer is family, you have answered with a "Means Value". What you want are your "Ends Values". In other words, why do you want family? You want family because of the states you think you will experience by having a great family. Maybe the states are love or security or closeness, but family is a "means" to an "end". Again, what you want to find out are your "Ends Values", the states you want most.

The second step is to find out what Values or states you are trying to avoid or your "Moving Away From Values" because remember, your brain will do more to avoid pain than it will ever do to gain pleasure. So make a list of those feelings or states that you will do almost anything to avoid. If you are having trouble with this part, think of some of the feelings you have experienced in life that you really hate and don't want to experience. These are your "Moving Away From Values".

You want to know your Values so you know what your brain is paying attention to most. If you change your Values, you change your destiny because you change what you focus on and pay attention to. You change what you notice, how you behave and what you act on. It takes you in a whole new direction and ultimately, a whole new destiny.

You have to start with figuring out what your Values are because you may find some conflicts. For example, success may be at the top of your list but health isn't even there. Do you think you can be successful without focusing on being healthy? This is the kind of thing that's going to give you some clarity. You need to know what direction your brain and body are being pulled in life. Where your current Values, the things you pay attention to as being most important, have come from are the result of a mismatch of human experiences. These are experiences of you doing things and having pleasurable experiences and painful experiences and your brain just making a jumble of neuro-associations.

Your Values could have come from a multitude of different people. Bottom line is though that they come from pain or pleasure. Throughout your life, you have been rewarded and rejected from parents, other family members, friends, acquaintances, etc. And get this, the reward or rejection you experienced from these people were based on their Values. So your Values are instilled in you based on all of your life's experiences. Who you were around growing up and even today has shaped your Values. And your Values continue to change and shift as you go through life. Are you kind of getting the picture now as to why it's so important who you hang around and what you allow into your brain? You've heard that advice all your life haven't you? Your Values are being affected all the time. The key is your awareness, to make sure you know what is shaping your value system because remember, your brain will do more to avoid pain than it will ever do to gain pleasure.

Once you know what your Values are, that's great. Even if you don't do anything to change your Values, there's something you must do to take control of your destiny and your life. That is, you must understand the power of your Beliefs to impact the quality of your life. We will discuss Beliefs in Part 2.

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Gary Crowell