Hello and welcome.
I want to talk today about the concept of discovering four of your main values.
And the reason why four is important is because I think about it in terms of two ways.
One being any structure,
Any building has four main foundational walls.
Without a strong foundation,
The structure above is less likely to be stable during the storms.
Okay that's one way I look at this.
And the other way I look at it is a tree.
I believe that an adult tree has four main roots.
There's a lot of little roots but there are four big ones for an adult size tree.
And those roots keep the tree upright when the blizzards come or the hurricanes or the tornadoes.
Without deep roots,
The tree is never going to make it.
And so then we think about ourselves as human beings.
If I'm just going through the motions of life and I'm not aware of four things that are the most important to me,
That make me the best version of me,
I'm less likely to have a very successful and happy life and I'm less likely to have meaning in my life.
So I like to take this time,
Especially this time of year,
To think about what are four things that I would identify as being my walls or my roots.
Because I'm a tree girl,
I tend to visualize trees more than buildings.
But whatever works for you.
Think about a foundation of a home when one of those foundational walls gets too wet or it starts to get old and crumbly.
The entire structure of that building is going to be at risk.
And when the tree is vibrant and alive and then all of a sudden one of the roots starts to die off,
The tree is less likely to stay upright when life gets really challenging and the storms come.
So the first step that we have to do is identify what are four values that would be my roots.
What are four values that would be my walls,
My foundation?
You can look up a list of values.
You can google it.
You probably already know what's important to you.
Things like faith,
Family,
Productivity,
Service,
Love,
Hope,
Optimism,
Thankfulness.
There's so many that are important to us.
Compassion.
I was speaking with a gentleman yesterday,
Leaving a legacy for his family is really important.
And that drives his decisions and his thoughts and his words.
And I loved that.
That was one of his roots is to know that at the end of his life,
He's left a legacy.
So our values are going to vary person to person.
But typically,
I have found that the values that are most important to us have been most important to us our entire life.
And we know that because when we go out of our values,
We feel it in our bodies.
We feel like the roots are dying.
We feel the trees unstable.
We feel the walls are caving in.
We feel out of it.
We feel not in alignment.
And so the work,
Especially I think this time of year before we head into busy seasons,
Is to really identify what are the four main things that sustain me?
What are the things in my life that have to be in place for me to be my best self?
One of mine is gratitude.
If I stop being grateful,
And I take for granted little things,
Or I am not deeply thankful for the life that I have,
Or the tiny moments that I have,
Or the colors,
Or the hummingbird that's spending time with me outside,
If I'm not grateful,
Then I'm less likely to be able to endure some of the storms that will inevitably come because we are humans.
So gratitude is a big one for me.
Hope is another big one for me.
Hope to me is walking towards something good and showing up every day with hope that maybe today will be a better day than yesterday,
Or that hope that the world will heal.
Hope that life will continue to teach me and to offer me opportunities to grow.
Hope is important to me.
Another one that's really important to me is love.
And that is love for myself,
Love for others,
Love for animals,
For nature,
Living from my heart space,
To not have bitterness take into my heart,
Like to truly live from love.
And love is very important to me.
And then my final value or root or wall that I strive to live for is service.
I believe that doing kind things for other people is just part of who I am.
And I can look back at my life when I wasn't necessarily nurturing those roots,
And I was less steady,
I was less resilient.
And so I've made a commitment over the last 10 or 15 years of my life to really know my values and to really know what is important to me,
So that when life does show up,
And I go through a hard challenge,
Or a season of my life becomes very challenging,
I know that I can fall back on my foundation.
I know that gratitude and hope and service and those values are going to be what sustains me.
I know that about myself.
I know that serving others is incredibly important to me.
I know that walking towards something good,
Hopefulness,
Is very important to me.
I know that gratitude is very important to me.
And I know that living from my heart is the ultimate.
And when years passed,
I was not aware of these values.
I can see where my choices were so far out of alignment with those values,
And my life was less than ideal.
My life was very,
Very hard.
And so learning about myself and discovering and unearthing these values has really helped me to be able to be in alignment with those in the way that I make decisions and thoughts and the way that I speak and the way that I act.
And it all comes together when we know.
And so I think one of the greatest things we can do for ourselves is to sit with ourselves and ask ourselves,
What is most important to me?
And without that in place,
Do I feel whole?
Do I feel stable,
Secure,
Content?
And then you identify those four values,
Walls or roots,
However you like to visualize this.
And then the next step would be,
Are my choices in alignment with those values?
Because if they're not,
Then we have to make an adjustment.
For example,
If faith is one of your values,
It's important to me.
Faith is very important to me.
But if faith is one of my values and I stop believing in myself and in others and in spirit and in universe,
In God,
And I doubt and I have fear,
Then I'm not in alignment with faith at all.
So that root's going to die and I will be less stable when life shows up.
If love,
Which is one of my values or my roots,
So important to me,
If I start to be judgy and hate,
Then I know that I'm out of alignment.
So it's really important to know these things.
I think having an understanding of who we are,
Not what we do or what we look like or what our achievements are,
But really going inside and learning about ourselves and the qualities of us on a spirit level,
I think it's so important because then that transfers in a humanness in how we show up and interact with other people.
So sit with yourself.
Ask yourself,
What is most important to me?
And jot it down.
Maybe draw a tree.
Maybe draw four roots.
Maybe draw a house with a foundation.
What are your walls?
What is most important to you?
And then we start to look when we have identified those of,
Am I in alignment?
We often know when we're out of alignment.
We feel it in our gut.
We feel it in our frustration.
We feel it in our unhappiness.
And so look at yourself.
Look deep inside yourself and find those four values and then the next step is living them and you will see your life magically unfold into greatness.
It's such a beautiful self-discovery.
So I hope that you'll take the time to do that and really dive into who you are.
It's great work.
