Choose your values, honor your sense of self

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Comments

[Dave]

I love the openness involved with Adrian's advice on transforming and changing one's values. It would seem that most people who are standing at the crossroads of change are in a vulnerable position though. I think influence should be filtered through their own soul. Hence, Rosa's advice makes sense to me.

I have been tuned into the subject of values for about ten years. I am not sure over this course of time if I've changed my values as much as clarifying and drawing focus on ones that've been in the cooker all along. Sometime over the last four months a value of mine came into crystal view. There were fragments of this value in the Dave-stew but I never had a name for it until recently. Naming this value has proved to be a very rewarding experience.

I still believe that Adrian's point is important. Some could possess very harmful values in need of change. The existing values need to be uprooted and replaced.

Okay, this discussion has evoked a problem / conflict?? that I need to go work out in my head. It IS one of the benefits I derive from hanging around folks in the Ho'ohana community.

[Max Leibman]

I think I'm closer to your approach--there's more value in examining the values we already have, and building strength out of strengths, then trying to challenge and change values.

Now, not every piece of baggage we carry is valuable; there is such a thing as a defective value, and some things do need to be challenged and overcome.

At the end of the day, though, I'm with the "strengths psychology" crowd--it does more good to unearth what's there, focus and clarify it, and build on what's already good.

[Rosa Say]

Mahalo for adding your thoughts Dave, and knowing you as I do, I am very sure that the “problem/ conflict ??” you’ve hinted of will soon be revealed as a very welcome learning opportunity for you.

Aloha Max, welcome to our Ho‘ohana Community; thank you for reading and joining in on our talk story here. I’ve clicked in to your new blog SUPERORDINATE, and you are off to a magnificent start, with your own values speaking to us with marvelous clarity and focus!

As you’ve both suggested, values and innate strengths are so intricately and undeniably connected, especially when one defines “strengths” as your predictable patterns of behavior (with all credit due for that definition to Donald Clifton and Marcus Buckingham in First Break All the Rules). Whether we speak of strengthening those we have, or consciously striving for those we admire, we will always gain more clarity and certainty about who we are when we focus on our values. We will always enlarge our capacity four-fold: intellectually, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. And personally, because I believe that all values in their pure form are good, I feel that evolution of sense of self is a very good thing; it adds to our health and well-being.

I may be the eternal optimist, admittedly a moniker I don’t shy away from, for I do prefer to believe that when we deliberately build on them, our stronger, beneficial values will always trump the “challenging baggage” we may have with some others.