Align Your Actions With Your Goals and Values
To achieve any goal, you must take action, but not just any action, your actions must align with your goals and values. It sounds easy and obvious, but for a lot of people taking the right actions is difficult, especially with there being so many distractions to contend with.
But let’s break this down further because the title suggests that there are two angles to this discussion – your goals and your values.
Let’s start with values.
What Are Personal Values?
Before you can even decide if your actions align with your goals and values, you need to know what your values are, but very few of us actually articulate our values. Instead we have a vague understanding that some actions feel right and other actions just feel a bit off.
So what exactly are values?
You can think of your values as a set of principles or standards that you want to live by, and, when you are living up to your principles and standards you feel good about yourself and your circumstances.
In contrast, when you are out of alignment with your values, in other words, you don’t reach your own self-proclaimed standards, it makes you feel icky in some way.
As I’ve already mentioned, the issue with values is that few of us actually articulate what our values are and so it’s easy to fall below the (silent) standards we have set for ourselves.
Examples of Personal Values
It’s not always easy to articulate values, but listing them as a number of “I am” statements can be helpful. For example:
• I am fair
• I am considerate
• I am hardworking
• I am passionate about
• I am approachable
• I am strong
• I am kind
• I am driven
• I am generous
• I am sensitive
• I am funny
• I am loving
• I am outgoing
• I am adventurous
• I am a bookworm
• I am intelligent
Of course, the list is endless, but the important part about creating such a list is that you find the words that resonate closely with how you really feel about yourself.
Living In Alignment With Your Values
Once you’ve got a feel for the values that represent who you believe you are, then think about whether you are actually living in that way. In other words, do your daily actions honour the way you feel you want to live your life?
Obviously, only you can answer that question. But a clue as to whether you are living in alignment with your values is how you feel. If you frequently come away from conversations feeling less than happy with your performance or with a different conversation playing out in your head, then that’s usually a sign that you are out of alignment with your values.
Now let’s look at another aspect of being more you than you are now which is to think about whether your actions are in alignment with your goals.
Taking The Right Actions on Your Goals
I passionately believe that when we strive to achieve our goals our self-confidence and self-esteem are improved because we demonstrate to ourselves that we are capable of that thing that we said (or thought) we were.
In contrast, every time we play small, hold ourselves back and don’t take the opportunity our self-esteem is damaged in small ways until we eventually lose confidence in our abilities and just stay where we are.
Of course, to align your actions with your goals, you first need to have goals, so if that’s something you still need to do, this post How To Choose Your Priorities will help you find and set your goals.
But for the purposes of this blog, let’s assume that you already have a set of goals that you want to achieve, but as yet, you haven’t made the kind of progress you were hoping for.
Working Towards and Achieving Planned Results
If you work with the assumption that you can only control your inputs but not the outputs, then that takes some of the pressure off for getting results that might be out of your control to some extent. However, that doesn’t disqualify you from examining your results to see if you need to change your inputs!
Lots of us think we’re working towards our goals, when in fact we’re just skirting around the edges. Doing a little bit of something here, procrastinating a little bit there and just ignoring the work that’s needed because “we haven’t got the time”.
But then we get to the end of the week or month and wonder why we haven’t made the progress we were hoping for.
And that’s where behaviours need to change so that your actions are truly aligned with your goals and are fully supporting the expectation that you will achieve the success you want.
So how can you make sure you are aligning your actions with your goals to achieve success?
Look For and Do The Hard Work
As harsh as it sounds, you must make sure you do the real work. In other words, avoid doing the “busy work”, eg, getting the right notebook, spending time planning and then just doing the small stuff.
Instead take a look at the things that are going to be a challenge to do because they are difficult or you’re not sure how to do them or maybe they’re going to take quite a lot of time.
In general, these are the activities that we avoid doing for all the reasons above while we tell ourselves that getting hold of a pretty mixing bowl is as important as learning how to effectively use a piping bag.
Choosing The Right Activities
The point I’m trying to make here is that once you accept that success is all about making the right choices out of all the daily actions that are available for you to take, the more into alignment you will move and the sooner you will achieve the goal you’re working towards.
You will also notice that each time you choose the right action over the easy action that you feel better about yourself. This is an indication that not only are you aligning your actions with your goals, but you are also aligning your values with your actions and ultimately your goals.
Take Action on Your Goals and Values
So what’s not to like? Take some time to consider where you want to be, say, a year from now and get some goals together and written down.
Think about the actions you’ll need to take to move you from where you are now to where you want to be and then, look at the list of values above (plus any others you might have thought about) and consider whether your values also align with your goals.
Aligning your actions with your goals and values will not only help you achieve your goals, but will also improve your self-confidence and self-esteem, so don’t delay!
What to do next…
> Read another post – Who Am I?
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