Honoring Your Values

So far in this season we have made some big decisions on who we want to become.  We have selected some lofty goals that will take all year to reach.  We have even figured out how to break that progress down into months, weeks and days.  But it is worth noting: unless those goals align with your core values, they aren't worth the effort.  Have you ever accomplished something big, only to feel like it didn't matter like you thought it would?  Have you ever abandoned a goal because it just didn't seem important anymore?  Well, there is a reason for those outcomes.  Once we identify our core values, and make sure to only pursue life goals that serve them, everything changes!  The drive to accomplish them never diminishes.  Because we know that it is about more than doing a thing; it is about becoming exactly who you want to be.  It is about goals that honor your values, and there is nothing quite as fulfilling as accomplishing those!  

- Why do I sometimes abandon my goals?

- Why do I sometimes feel accomplishments don't pay off?

- What are my core values?  What matters most to me in this life?

- Can I cut out some things I am pursuing that do not serve those values?

- How does getting this right make hard work easy and stress free and rewarding?

Transcript

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Hello, welcome back for season two of the Excel Stillmore Podcast. I am your host, Chris Emerson, and I'm here to encourage you with tips and strategies to help you build stronger relationships, deepen your faith, and just get the most out of your life. Thank you for joining. Let's get started. Okay, welcome back to episode three for this second season. Today I'll be asking you to look inside of yourself a little bit, do some self-evaluation on what matters most to you in this life, what is your value system, what do you care about the most? Because it turns out that in order to be successful, the goals that you set, the things that you strive for, must be consistent with your core values to truly be of benefit to your life. We're going to talk about all that today, and I'm glad you've joined. It may cause you to alter your goals for the year. There may be a point in the next 15 minutes when you're thinking, Chris, you really should have opened with this. If I had thought about all of this first, I probably would have set different goals. But in my defense, you might remember that when we started all of this season two, the first thing you were invited to do was decide who you wanted to become. When you look at the end of this year and you see a better you, what does that better you look like? To round out our recap of those first two episodes, once you decided what mattered to you where you needed to improve, then you chose a tangible next level achievement goal. Then we started praying that God would support us in that specific endeavor. We broke that big year-long progress into 12 pieces, set up monthly checkpoints. That was episode one. We came back in episode two and talked about how winning the week is the secret to meeting those monthly rung checkpoints. And of course, making incremental growth and change each of the seven days in those weeks, all of that begins to roll together into a momentum, a natural stress-free flow toward goal achievement. But here's where it gets interesting, and where we may have to put a however in the middle of everything we're doing. If all of that is not aligned with my core values, then I may start to notice that by now, late in January, and magnifying every day, that I really don't have the passion for this goal that I thought that I had. It gets a little harder, habit forming is difficult, you reach your first bit of adversity, and you're wondering, why am I wanting to bow out again? Well, one of those reasons is this. Because it's just not that important to you. It may be important culturally, like I'm supposed to be working out every day because that's what people say I should do, or I'm going to wear a tie to work every day for a year and see if it changes my life. Or I'm going to start day trading stocks so that I can make an extra $3,000 this year or something. And it all starts to feel very tedious and it loses its importance because it never really had that much importance for you. Yet if you have these same types of goals that absolutely strike the perfect chord in accordance with who you are at the center of your being, then you have this extra mound of motivation behind it, pushing you towards it because you actually know that this goal that you're working towards, it's bigger than the achievement of the goal itself. It's a development of who you believe you need to be. That is an incredible difference in goal setting. Now, today we have to kind of figure out who are you meant to be? What are your core values, and then measure up everything against it. Because I'll tell you this if there's one thing worse than failing to achieve something, it's working all year, making the sacrifices, getting out of your comfort zone, and getting it done just to realize that it didn't actually do much for you or end up mattering in the end. Maybe there was a lot of stress and you thought the stress is worth it, the discipline is worth it, I'm going to get this done, and then you do it and you're like, meh, I don't know. That wasn't quite the payoff that I expected. If you've ever experienced success that didn't feel like success, I'm going to tell you why that is. That success did not honor your values. So we're going to work on that today and get this all headed in the right direction. I'm talking about internal desire, passion behind the project, and winning the week all the way through to a successful year. So let me tell you a story about a man named Hal. I came upon his presentation a few years ago, and it's really had a major impact on my life. Hal Elrod is about my age, and he's written a book, actually, at this point, a bunch of books, but his first book was called The Miracle Morning, which you've probably heard me talk about. It set things in motion for me. He talked about how he gets up earlier than he needs to in the morning and he sets aside that one great hour and he gets his mind in the right place. We've talked a lot about that in season one. And Hal gets a large chunk of the credit for that. His story is amazing. When he was a young man, a teenager, he was in a car accident. They did not expect him to live. They did not expect him to be able to walk again. And not only did he live and walk again, but the testimonials of his attitude were off the charts. His attitude was, I'm not going to feel sorry for myself. I will use this opportunity to show what I'm made of. And he really approached everything like that. I remember him saying, I gave myself five minutes a day to feel sorry for myself, and I used the rest of the time trying to work through this. He ended up saying, after just a few days, I minimize that to 30 seconds. Why waste five minutes? He said. And eventually I just got rid of that line of thinking altogether. Hal is just awesome like that. So he achieved these incredible things in his business. He went on to start the Achieve Your Goals podcast, which is terrific. And listen, he had another big setback along the way. Three years ago in 2017, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Talk about throwing a wrench and everything you're working on. And yet there he was. I was listening. He was talking about his attitude about that. I mean, it's almost like he was glad he had cancer because he was going to use that as an opportunity to show how to stay positive and focused and work hard and defeat the problem. And so far that's going pretty well. He does have to take a lot of chemotherapy, which I'll talk to you more about in a minute. But overall, he made it through two atrocious years car accident, cancer diagnosis, and yet he always had this optimistic outlook. So I was as surprised as anyone when I heard what his title was for the last podcast episode of 2019. The episode was titled Why 2019 was the worst year of my life by far. Now I thought he must be kidding. I mean, this guy had made it through terrible years. His book was selling all over the world. He was traveling around doing conferences, making money. I saw pictures of he and his wife and his kids in Austin, and it just all seemed so good. And how could it be the worst year ever? So I tuned in. And while I will sum it up for you here in just a few minutes, you're invited, you're already a podcast person, you're invited to subscribe to the Achieve Your Goals podcast and listen for yourself. But here's what he talked about. He said, you know, by just about anyone's standards, you would probably consider 2019 to be a great year. I achieved a tremendous amount of goals. And yet I also had growing anxiety all year long. He said I was ultimately diagnosed with anxiety disorder. I spent most of my free time curled up in a bed somewhere. Being successful was no longer bringing me joy. And he said, to be honest, there was a point where I didn't even want to live anymore. Now, you have to understand, I'm listening to him say this and I'm totally floored. How is this possible? I would say that everything about this man's life has been the opposite of what he's explaining to me from the inside out his entire life. And here's what he went on to explain. He said, first of all, there were some variables I could not control. Three years of chemotherapy had given me what's called chemobrain, and he describes how it causes him memory loss, and he's not as sharp as he once was, and he feels a little bit trapped in his own head sometimes. And he said, that was a big part of it. I couldn't control it, but it was my new reality, and it started to cause some problems. So he said, I met with a friend at his house one night, and I told that friend, look, I can't control the effects of chemo brain, but is it possible that there's something under my control that I have been doing that has been lending to this overall feeling and the challenges of this year? And so I want to explain to you very quickly what he did because you're going to be asked to do it as well. His buddy pulled out a whiteboard right there in the living room, and he said, Hal, I want you to tell me what are your three highest values, the things about you that matter more in this life than everything else. He made a list, and the first thing he put on the list was his health. He said, I value my health even above my family, because if I die, I can't help my family. So, first of all, I need to be servicing my body and my health. Secondly, of course, was his family, the people that he wanted to be around for. And third on the list was security, you know, success and money in the bank and all those kinds of things. He called this process know yourself, an honest assessment of what is most important to me at this point in my life. So he's looking at a whiteboard and he's staring at himself. Now here's where it became interesting. He started looking at much of the work he had done this year, and it was inconsistent with this chart. A lot of the traveling that he had done, the long plane trips, being away from proper dieting and some of the things that he needed, had been detrimental to his health. He had set these goals to give speeches and run these enormous seminars all over the world. And while he had done it, he had done it at the expense of his highest value. And because of that, even when he achieved the goals, there was anxiety and a lack of fulfillment. He had signed his first official publishing deal. Before that, he'd self-published everything. So this was a very exciting time, but it was also filled with lots of deadlines and anxiety and pressure. Now he's at home with his family, but he can't be with his family. He's due a certain amount of pages he had to turn in. Well, he did it. He wrote the pages, he met the deadline, they published the book, and he was utterly unhappy. Why? Because the accomplishment of that goal did not fit his core values and in fact took away from the things that mattered most to him, his family. Now you might categorize all that stuff under that third thing, which is security, but the truth is he's already quite secure. He's got plenty of income from the things that he does. And so garnering extra income beyond security ultimately was a violation of all of his values. And I think that's something we all need to consider. The second section for him after know yourself was love yourself. And this is where he decided to cancel things. He canceled things no matter how awesome they looked to everybody else. He canceled things that got in the way of what mattered most to him. He canceled two massive trips, the most lucrative scheduled trips of his life in 2020 overseas, canceled them. Two enormous seminars that he had been successfully running in other states, he canceled them. It turns out that loving yourself is canceling the things that are eating up your thoughts, your money, and your time that are not consistent with who you want to become. And then lastly on that list, he said, be yourself, which gets back to the positive message that we're trying to make here. Once you have identified those core values, now let's set some goals. We have all kinds of reasons why we want to achieve them. And they're never going to just fade away into obscurity because our values will never fade away into obscurity. And anything that services them is worth our time. So you be yourself and you pursue the things that truly move you in the direction of what you know you were born to be. So Hal talked about how he's made shifts in that direction and he already feels better. Listen very carefully to this. He can't change the chemo brain stuff. He could have easily just kept plugging along, unhappy, blaming something out of his control. Instead, he looked at what he could control. He made some assessments, he made some cuts, he refocused his attention, and he's looking forward to a great year. Okay, we've got a few minutes left. How about you? Do you really know yourself? If I asked you on a whiteboard in order one through three to write down your highest core values, are you prepared to do that? I want you to do that. The Thursday blog that we email out and put on Facebook will give you a little bit of instruction on how that works. You need to decide what's worth pursuing. But listen, that's the easy part. Step two, love yourself. That's the hard part. That's where you actually have to make some cuts. You have to move things out of your life. You have to say no to things. But at least you'll know why you're doing it. It's not just, you know, I ran out of energy on that project or I overcommitted myself. That won't be your reason. Your reason will be I have really thought through how I want to use the weeks, months, and years that God has given me. I know exactly what I'm here to do, and those things are getting in the way. That's your reason for canceling and changing your goals. But don't forget the last thing: be yourself. Know yourself, love yourself, and be yourself. It may be that now is the time to go back and listen to episodes one and two again on building your ladders and winning the week because you definitely want to fill this year with progress and growth and change that you can celebrate for a whole variety of reasons. You're not going to fail, it matters too much to you. And when you succeed, there will be this depth of satisfaction in that that feels so good and really pushes you even further. Okay, so in this last minute or two, if you don't mind, I'll just tell you about my list. I sat down and reevaluated number one, do I know myself? And I listed three things. If you don't want to be biased by someone else's list, you may want to stop the podcast now. But if you're interested in a little more direction or you want to know about my journey, here's my list. Number one, I want a love-based relationship with God. I didn't just write down the word God, I wrote down the kind of relationship I want with Him. I don't want it to be fear-based. I don't want it to feel distant. In fact, the number one most important thing in my life is a love-centered fellowship with my Creator. Number two, peace and joy within my family. So I didn't just write down family, I wrote down the kind of relationship I treasure in my family, which is one wherein we have peace in Jesus and joy with one another. And then thirdly, I wrote down influence of encouragement upon others. I want to preach and teach and record episodes and have phone calls and emails and just try to help people get better. Now listen, I'll be honest with you. When I started looking at all of the things I had done in 2019 and what I had initially planned for this year, I knew some changes were needed. There were just some things that needed to be thinned out or even eliminated for the sake of what was at the top of that list and the two things that came below it. I had to love myself by saying no to what people around me probably think I should be treasuring most. This is about me and my relationship with God and family, not theirs. So as I've set these goals for the year, just like we talked about in previous episodes, I have a huge smile on my face right now because I believe that everything that I have laid out is most vital to pursue, will build a love-based connection to God like I've not had before, will help my family and the relationships in my family become peace and joy-based, and yet still third in line, still will allow for the ability to encourage people outside of that circle that God has allowed me to know in this life. It has created an excitement and an optimism, along with an extra level of discipline and drive. And I hope that you can experience that as well. So listen, build those ladders and win those weeks. Achieve your goals, but just make sure that all along the way and every time you are honoring your values. Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you enjoyed the program, please remember to share with your family and your friends. Also, you can go to excelstillmore.life to sign up for emails, order the three month journals, or just catch up on old episodes. So until next time, let me leave you with this whatever you choose to do today in the name of the Lord Jesus, excel stillmore.