The hero’s journey
In conversation 1, Jim shared his values and committed to live by one.
In conversation 1.5, he shared problems with the challenge and how he overcame them.
In this conversation he shares how it worked. Listen to hear how persevering through challenges to live by your values leads to a better life.
Judge for yourself what you find from his experience. I heard:
- More time with his family
- Quality time with his family
- Fun
- Finding more challenges (why not, if they’re fun?)
- Things became easier than before
What are you waiting for? Commit to a personal challenge.
Start your journey of fun, ease, and peace of mind that Jim did.
Take off your wet socks
I introduce my wet socks analogy for not living by your values in this episode, which is:
Say you step in a puddle and get your socks wet in the morning. You can still go about your day. If you’re busy, you might not notice them.
It’s still a relief when you get home and take them off at the end of the day. Finally you feel fresh, clean air against your skin instead of wet sock. You look back and realize they’ve been annoying you all day. Making yourself busy distracted you from noticing them, but never made them go away. You wish you had taken them off earlier.
Living by your values after ignoring them feels like taking off wet socks. As with wet socks, you look back and realize that abandoning your values has annoyed you your whole life. Making yourself busy distracted you from noticing that you weren’t living by them, but never made it go away. You wish you had chosen to live by them earlier.
Denying that you’re abandoning minor values, prevents you from noticing big ones. On the other hand, fixing the little ones opens your eyes to others, which motivates you to fix them, then to fix bigger ones, and so on.
You may consider small denial not that big a deal, but once you take off those socks, you realize you could have long before. Living in conflict with your values means living without integrity. It eats you up inside.
Take off your wet socks. Enjoy the freedom of living by your values. The environment is a great place to start.