This is a series of thoughts addressing the theme of excellence based on a famous quote from Rita Mae Brown, the American novelist and activist. She stated that “You cannot invest your life’s spirit into a compromise” and over the next few weeks I want to visit some of the key components of this viewpoint and how it relates to your practice.
Your values are the drivers of your life. We often take on our values and their subsequent hierarchy of power in a totally unconscious way throughout our life. This leads to the repertoire of behaviours that we do which result in the results we have.
People often don’t take stock of whether the values they are running are useful in a given circumstance. If you are up for being enlivened write down the things that you admire in yourself and others (these are your values) and put them in priority order. When you have a pretty good idea of the order of your values ask yourself if they are the most useful in producing the results that you wish for your life and practice.
In order to create a set of values that enliven you, you may like to choose the values that will lead to the behaviours that will get the results that you want.
Write up as many ways that each of these values will take you to your higher purpose and then retest the hierarchy again.
When you are functioning from a set of values that enliven you, you produce outstanding results.
