Living by What Matters: Aligning Your Life with Your Core Values
Reflections: The Alignment of Values
The Beacon Training and Life Coaching Growth Matrix includes four key elements:
Increased Self-Awareness
Alignment of Values
The Gift of Space
Owning Decisions
In this reflection, we’ll focus on the second element: Alignment of Values — the practice of living intentionally by what matters most to you.
If You Don’t Direct Your Life...
If you don’t direct your life, somebody else will.
Instead of living by what you most value, you will be pulled by other people’s agendas, their schedules, and their expectations of you.
Stephen Covey describes this well in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — specifically Habit #3:
“Putting first things first means organizing and executing around your most important priorities. It is living and being driven by the principles you value most, not by the agendas and forces surrounding you.”
Identify Your Values
Before you can align your life with your values, you have to know what they are.
What do you value most?
Family
Faith
Friendships
Finances
Health
Education
Goals and dreams
Attention or affirmation
Material success
Fun or freedom
Creativity, service, stability?
Make a list. Start by writing down what matters most to you. Once you can name your values, you can start to build your life around them — not the other way around.
Let Your Values Guide You
Once you can articulate what’s most important to you, let those values become your guiding principles. When you:
Plan your daily activities
Fill out your weekly calendar
Dream about your future
...do so with your values first. Make your schedule revolve around them.
Schedule around your values, don’t try to fit them in later.
The “Big Rocks” Metaphor
Our friend Tony uses a powerful visual in his teaching: a clear jar, big rocks, small rocks, and sand. If you try to fill the jar with sand first, the big rocks won’t fit. But if you start with the big rocks — your priorities — everything else can fall into place.
This metaphor has stuck with us, and it illustrates alignment so well.
Use a Compass, Not a Map
I like the idea of a compass more than a map or GPS.
Why?
Because we may not always know the exact destination — but wherever we’re going, we want to be guided by our deepest values, not just trying to “get somewhere” quickly.
Let your values be the compass that steers your life.
A Thought Experiment: The Genie Test
Imagine you met a genie who offered you three wishes.
What would you ask for?
Would your wishes reflect the things you truly value — or what the world has taught you to want?
Reflection: What Are Your “Big Rocks”?
What do you think?
How does it make you feel?
Steven
