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YOUR VALUES

„Live your life, as if you’re gonna die.“

William Shatner

(singer, actor („Star Track“)

What are values?

A woman is sitting with a cup of coffee in front of her and has nothing more to lose. She is divorced, a single mother, has no job, gets no support from her ex-husband and no child care. She gets 69 pounds a week from welfare. She looks at her sleeping daughter. She can’t give her anything. She can barely pay for the cup of coffee.

It was the beginning of a unique career. Today she is one of the richest women in the world.

This has nothing to do with blood sugar or with your value as a “useful member of society”. “Values” in the sense used here are the motives for our actions. We all live in a system of values that we are more or less conscious of. Our parents and teachers, as well as our ancestors and the culture in which we live, have created values out of which our way of life has arisen. Cultures are complex systems of values that first make an action possible within a social space. Everything that lies outside this framework is the atavistic and the bestial in us.

There are absolute values and personal values. Absolute values are those which last through generations. Personal values are the principles which make your life worth living. They are the foundation of our actions. You have to dig very deep to be aware of these personal values. Or you have to fall far.

This is where we have got to: in the eye of a maelstrom that rages around you while within everything appears placid as you are pulled under remorselessly by an unseen power. Personal values are not to be found outside you, but deep within you. Whoever has discovered the values that move them to the depths of their being, has secured the instructions by which they can attain the greatest satisfaction.

As the above example shows, there is frequently a great crisis at the beginning of a discovery of values. Only through it are our deepest interests revealed to us. But then we find the principles that will guide us for the rest of our lives.

Whenever the old fears and worries appear, we can rely on our values. This is why values are the first step into action and into the beginning of what can be called a career.