“If your vision of life is centered around your highest values, you will align yourself with your dharma far beyond your daily life: love, creativity, service, spiritual growth, Devoting yourself to your highest values, be it beauty or whatever, combines purpose and inner growth like nothing else.” ~Deepak Chopra
I wasted almost ten years of my life. Please don’t make the same mistake as me.
On my 40th birthday, I was lying in bed and woke up completely at 5am to find that my throat was congested.
“It’s a new decade,” I thought without much excitement.
Staring at the ceiling, I tried to remember what I had accomplished in the last ten years. I searched in vain for a memorable moment to remember, but panic began to fill my heart. I thought, “I wasted my 30s.” “One eighth of life.”
Have you ever felt like your life was gone? Have you wasted precious years that you can never get back?
Perhaps you’ve been so busy with your hamster’s running wheel that you’ve been so busy with work and daily chores that you didn’t realize how quickly time went by. Maybe you’ve thought about traveling, writing a book, or learning to play the guitar, but you’ve been putting off projects for a ‘someday’ that never came.
I don’t feel well.
That morning I realized I had made a mistake. I spent most of his 30s pursuing his one goal: building a business. It became an obsession, consuming all my time and energy, to the point where I forgot about nurturing relationships, traveling, and other exciting things.
When I turned 40, I had few friends, no hobbies, and I couldn’t help but feel ashamed of myself.
Later I discovered that this could have been prevented by doing it differently. It’s about living the good life most days and adopting simple habits to avoid future regrets.
That’s what I want to share with you.
How can I live a good life every day?
A few months after my 40th birthday, I listened to a podcast by Hal Elrod, author of Miracle Morning. There he was sharing his perspective on how to live your best life every day.
He noticed on certain days after spending time with his daughter, working a little bit on his own business (life’s work), connecting with his wife, exercising, and eating healthy. Relaxing after dinner, he thought: “Today was the best day of his life.”
He then asked me why I was thinking this now when nothing really special happened that day, because I hadn’t had a child, never been married, and hadn’t booked an elite clientele. I wondered. So what made the day so great?
The day was filled with what was most important to him, his highest values: family, relationship with his wife, healthy lifestyle and inspiring people (his life’s work). rice field. He realized that living a good life, a life without regrets, ultimately boils down to living in line with our most important values every day.
It shocked me. This was my solution for not wasting another 10 years for him. Value-centered life.
Let me show you how you can implement this into your daily life.
Step 1: Identify your top 5 values.
Your top values are what you consider to be the most important and meaningful in your life. They come from your personal beliefs about what it means to have a good life.
Below are some questions to help identify your best value.
- What do you need in your life to feel fulfilled, or what is your life missing that you need to feel fulfilled?
- How would you like to spend your time and what more would you like to spend your time doing?
- What do you enjoy spending your money on?
- If your life were to end now, what would you regret not doing, achieving, experiencing, or becoming? If you could, how would you spend your time? What would you focus on?
- What will you say you had a good life when you turn 100?
I encourage you to identify your top five values. Because if we center our lives on just one core value, we run the risk of feeling dissatisfied or even regretted in the future because we are not developing other values that are important to us.
That’s what happened to me when I focused solely on building my business (which is my value of doing meaningful work) and neglected other areas of my life.
Another example is a friend of mine who has two children and takes being a good mother very seriously. But after several years of taking care of everyone else and not taking care of her own needs and other desires, she quit art, put her career on hold, and took less care of herself. began to resent her family. She was giving and giving, but she was not filling her cup with respect for the needs and desires of others.
So focusing on one value for too long can create an imbalance in your life. That’s why Step 1 of our value-centered lifestyle is to identify your top five values instead of your top one.
Step 2: List actionable ways to honor your most important values.
Once you’ve identified your top five values, turn them into verbs and make them actionable. For example, if one of your values is meaningful connections, you can describe it as “deep and authentic connections.” Each value statement begins with a verb.
Then specify more precisely how to practice each value. For example, the value of connecting deeply and truly is:
- Being fully present when interacting with someone means giving them your full attention
- Listening with the intention of understanding, not just answering
- share your honest thoughts and feelings
- open and vulnerable
- Keep in touch with close friends and family by regularly messaging and calling them
- Schedule time weekly for social activities
Try to write at least 5 actions for each value. It will help you in step 3.
Step 3: Do something every day to embody your highest values.
The final step is a daily routine centered around your values.
Each morning, review the list of actions you created in step 2 and decide what you will do to honor your most important values.
In my personal diary, I wrote: First, write down your top five values as a reminder, then write down what you will do that day to enhance each value.
It doesn’t have to be complicated. For someone like me who values meaningful relationships, it might just be a nice comment on a friend’s post. For self-care, I might go to a yoga class. We may shoot Tik Tok videos for purposeful work.
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This simple daily habit helps us pay attention to and nurture the most important things in life. Every day, even if the day wasn’t perfect, we’re more likely to feel fulfilled because we’re focused on what’s important to us.
This simple practice was a game changer for me (thanks to Hal Elrod!). Hope this helps you too.
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