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alues indicate the direction of your creative and emotional intelligence. “Know thyself!” is written above the oracle at Delphi. “Be yourself! You are not what you do, think, desire!” is a famous quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche, who offers a helpful yardstick if you want to break free of the fetters of your illusions.

By what yardstick, from which perspective do you act and decide? To know yourself is not so much to know who you are. That is the province of psychoanalysis. To recognize and to know yourself means to know what really matters to you and what you really want to do.

You are exactly to the same degree happy and contented as you are in tune with your values. People who are fulfilled within themselves and live with their values don’t experience disappointments and are the happiest on earth, regardless of how much money they have.

If you can be in perfect harmony with your own inner truth – i.e. do what you are – your mood will become light and joyful. Nietzsche called this state “exhilaration”, which arises not out of pure naivety but out of conquering dogmas and dictates.

To break another taboo: a lot of modern neuro-scientific research has come to the conclusion that most decisions are made on the basis of emotion. Your feelings decide for you.

Then a mental process starts up which looks for logical reasons for your decision. That is the inner dialogue that you conduct with yourself: often you hear an inner voice that approves or disapproves. Plato spoke in this context of thinking, the “silent dialogue of the soul with itself”; Sigmund Freud spoke of the “super-ego”, Adam Smith of the “impartial spectator”. If you are not clear about your values, unforeseen feelings accompany your life.

If you draw up clear, lasting values for yourself you are capable of perceiving and deciding. Your actions are in tune with your being. Success always arises out of the basis of clarity. As long as you have no clear perception of reality, your business will remain stuck in fantasy or pessimism.

But whoever discovers their own true values has already found on the conception side of the performance scale what they find on top of the action side: the motives for going into service for other people and finding complete self-fulfillment. That is why the overlap between total collapse and enlarged self-perception is a terrific experience – and often the beginning of a unique and true life.