Path Week 1: Align your values

The Philosophy for LYF provides a path to your better life. The path is broken into steps. Each step you take is an incremental improvement of where you were before. And each step you take builds off the previous steps to reinforce what you have changed.

A week is suggested for each step—long enough for you to meet the objective of each step, but short enough to keep you moving forward and gaining experience in each key concept.

This post provides more detail and a template for Week 1. If you haven't recorded your life's baseline yet, go back to Week 0 and start there.

Week 1 focuses on aligning your highest-priority values to the core values in the philosophy: goodness, open-mindedness, gratefulness, respectfulness, and courageousness. (Click here and here for a refresher on these core values.) If you do not think these core values are your most important values that underpin any other values you have, this week is to give you the time to make them your core values. Otherwise, you will not have the foundation to steer your life in the right direction and achieve an elevated life.

Remember that the five core values for an elevated life do not change throughout your life. The emphasis of how you manifest them through your deeds of goodness may change depending on where you are in your life.

Step 1. When you wake up each day, remind yourself to live the day with the values of goodness, open-mindedness, gratefulness, respectfulness, and courageousness. Emphasize these values and keep them ever-present in your mind as you think, speak, and act throughout the day.

Step 2. Before the end of each day, write down a brief summary of when you expressed (quietly or visibly) the values of goodness, open-mindedness, gratefulness, respectfulness, and courageousness. These can be in your thoughts, decisions, and actions. Use the Week 1 template, one for each day.

Also, write down situations where you went against one or more of these core values. Did you treat yourself badly or treat others badly? What other values do you hold that over-powered the core values needed for an elevated life?

Complete your notes each day by writing down what you can do better tomorrow to make the philosophy’s core values your core values.

Step 3. At the end of the week, review all of your notes. Do you see a pattern in how you lived the core values? Are they primarily toward yourself or others, or both? Where did you fall short of living these values? Did you improve or strengthen in making goodness, open-mindedness, gratefulness, respectfulness, and courageousness your core values?

If you have some values that continue to over-power the five core values, you need to make some decisions (hopefully, from a perspective of goodness). If you want to make your life better, if you want to get beyond where you are today, if you want to experience an elevated life, then you must make the five core values your top values on how you live your life. Rejecting, reducing, and removing some of your existing values can be very difficult. Recognizing that these existing values are holding you back from true wealth and true worth and from experiencing elevations and an elevated life can be a motivator. You must practice the core values every day until they become your core values, your top values, and embedded in your life.

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