I've read many books that stress the importance of understanding your personal values, getting clear about what's most important to you in life. But at the time of this writing, I haven't yet come across a source that covers this incredibly useful concept with sufficient depth. Most of the values coverage I've read takes you through a process of eliciting your current values and then leaves it at that. But I want to take you much deeper into this rich subject and show you how to intelligently connect your values to your goals.

In Part I, I will guide you through a step-by-step process for eliciting and prioritizing your personal values. It's entirely possible you already have such a list because this is a common exercise you'll find in many personal growth books. However, I still encourage you to read through this process because you will deepen your understanding.

My second goal is to explain the process of living with integrity to your values, so you learn how to consciously use your values to make decisions and take action. There's no point in discovering your values and then filing them away and forgetting about them. This will be covered in Part II.

Why Do Values Matter?

The main benefit of knowing your values is that you will gain tremendous clarity and focus, but ultimately you must use that newfound clarity to make consistent decisions and take committed action. So the whole point of discovering your values is to improve the results you get in those areas that are truly most important to you.

Values are priorities that tell you how to spend your time, right here, right now. There are two reasons that priorities are important for our lives.

The first reason is that time is our most limited resource; time does not renew itself. Once we spend a day, it's gone forever. If we waste that day by investing our time in actions that don't produce the results we want, that loss is permanent. We can earn more money, improve our physical bodies, and repair broken relationships, but we cannot redo yesterday. If we all had infinite time, then values and priorities would be irrelevant. But at least here on earth, we appear to be mortal with limited life spans, and if we value our mortal lives, then it's logical to invest them as best we can.

You're free to decide what "best" means to you. The very idea that some possible permutations of your life appeal to you more than others means that knowing your values will be of great benefit to you. On the other hand, if any life you might live is as good as any other to you (whether prince or pauper, Olympian or obese, saint or sinner), then you can stop reading - you don't need this information. But most people can certainly envision lives that are more preferable to them than others.

The second reason priorities matter is that we human beings tend to be fairly inconsistent in how we invest our time and energy. Most of us are easily distracted. It's easy for us to fall into the trap of living by different priorities every day. One day you exercise; the next day you slack off. One day you work productively; the next day you're stricken with a bout of laziness. If we don't consciously use our priorities to stick to a clear and consistent course, we'll naturally drift off course and shift all over the place. And this kind of living yields poor results. Imagine an airplane that went wherever the wind took it - who knows where it would eventually land? And the flight itself would likely be stressful and uncertain.

So for these two reasons - limited time and a typically low index of distraction - consciously knowing and living by our values become extremely important. Values act as our compass to put us back on course every single day, so that day after day, we're moving in the direction that takes us closer and closer to our definition of the "best" life we could possibly live. The "best" is your own ideal, but generally as you get closer to this ideal, you'll enjoy increasingly positive shades of "better" even if you never reach "best." And this makes sense because many results in life exist on a continuum. There are some discrete entities like being married or not married, but your health, financial status, relationship intimacy, and level of happiness are generally continuous, meaning that they can gradually get better or worse. It seems reasonable that more health, happiness, wealth, intimacy, inner peace, love, etc. is better than less.

But here's the interesting part: Since our time is limited, and since it takes time to move along the continuum through the various "betters," we usually cannot instantly achieve the state of "best." We can't land our plane just yet - it's still in flight. Moreover, everyone has a different definition of what "best" means to them. For some people, good health is an absolute must. For others, being compassionate is what's most important. And for each of these values, every person is at a different point along their own continuum. So imagine that there are a bunch of planes in the air, each in a different starting location and each having a different destination airport. You can't then plot the same course to land every plane at its "best" airport. Each plane requires its own individual course.

For a more human example, everyone is in a different state of health right now, and everyone has a different ideal for their "best" possible health. So the course each person takes from their starting point to their own best state of health will be unique.

Because of these individual differences, some of your "planes" will be much farther from their airports than others. If you want to weigh 150 pounds and you currently weigh 155, this plane is within sight of its airport and is approaching the runway. If you want to become a millionaire and you're flat broke with a low income, that plane is much further away.

Because you can't do everything at once, you have to prioritize which planes are most precious to you. You may not be able to land them all within the span of your lifetime because you probably don't know how long your lifetime will be; nor can you be certain how long it will take to land each of these planes. But realize that the closer you get each plane to its airport, the better that area of your life will be.

Now let's begin the process of