Intellectual Foreplay Question of the Week: What are your values, what do they mean to you and how to you prioritize them?
Love Tip of the Week: The key to getting into new territory so that you don’t have to pass that way again is to learn. Pay attention to what the experience has taught you—about yourself, use your values as guideposts and make new decisions based on what you have gained from the journey.
Will I Ever Learn?
Dear Eve,
I feel like I keep making the wrong decisions. I think I learn from a mistake and then a year later I find I’ve come full circle and I’m dealing with the same issues again. Do you have any advice on how I can make wiser decisions so I don’t have to keep making the same mistakes?
Thanks
Aloha,
Let’s look at values clarification. All of us have values—principles we believe deeply in, but few of us have taken the time to write them down, define what they mean to us and prioritize them. I encourage you to do this.
There are often many ways to get where you want to be, but some of the routes to getting there are out of integrity with your value system and some may be out of your control. For instance, let’s say your definition of success is to have a million dollars. Some of your options for achieving this are to earn it through work or wise investments, inherit it, steal it, or win it.
However, if your values don’t include stealing, then acquiring the money through robbery won’t make you feel successful. It is out of integrity for you. Inheriting or winning the money would be wonderful, but may still not make you feel successful if your value system honors hard work more than luck. In any case, while being kind to your relatives or buying a lottery ticket is in your control, winning is not, nor is having a wealthy relative. If your values don’t honor gambling, then taking your goal to Vegas won’t be in integrity for you either, and again, is not entirely in your control. This brings you back to earning and investing. If you acquire your goal by being out of integrity, you will find that the goal doesn’t make you happy. In order to stay in integrity (and thus happy about your choices), knowing your values and committing to them will serve as excellent guideposts to help you make decisions along the way.
Take the time to list your values and prioritize them so that when two important things come in conflict (family and work or spirituality and recreation, or marriage and freedom, for instance) you will know which one to choose.
Also, while it feels like you are going in circles and returning to the exact same issues again, the reality is that you are moving in spirals, not circles. With spiral motion there is the additional dimension of depth. Imagine you are on a roller coaster going in a spiral pattern, rather than a ride that simply goes in a circle on a flat track. With the roller coaster, you pass the exact same scenery, but you have a different perspective of it because of the of the element of height. What creates that dimension of “height” in life is age as it relates to gained knowledge, experience and insight, i.e. growth. When you make a decision that has a certain set of consequences, you cannot help but grow (gain a new perspective). Then, if/when you make similar mistakes in another situation, you are in a position of seeing it differently and thus are able to learn from your new perspective.
When you find yourself making “the same mistakes,” ask yourself what it is you need to learn that you missed the last time. Often, the mistake we make is thinking that what we are learning about is something outside of us like the other person—“I learned he wasn’t trustworthy” or about the situation, “I learned that online dating doesn’t work.” Instead, see what you are learning about yourself. “I learned that I need to trust my intuition.” “I learned that a more complete online dating profile and greater clarity in my emails would yield better results.” That is where the real lesson is.
