Shuffle your values
At or near the very center of who you are you’ll find your values. Values determine what’s important to you and what you fundamentally want. They provide a driving force to propel you forward or the breaks to hold you back. Almost nothing in life is permanent. Your values are not an exception. You can consciously change your values by design. The idea is that you change your values to support your desires for your life.
Shuffle your values to make adjustments to your inner autopilot. Your inner autopilot directs your subconscious behavior.
For example, let’s say you’re eating too much food and constantly gaining weight. You don’t know why or how to control it. You just find yourself eating when you didn’t intend to. The problem could have several explanations and solutions. One possibility is that your values are misaligned with what you want in life. You may need to value the results of not eating over the results of eating. For example, you might currently place a value on the pleasure food gives you, the distraction, the calming influence after a stressful day, or any of the other apparent benefits of eating food when you are not truly hungry.
The good news is that those values are changeable. When confronted with temptation, the mind will ask the question, “What do I really want here? What do I immediately get here?” What do you value more? Is it the short-lived, but instant pleasure you value? Or is it the far off, but great feeling of being fit and healthy? Get clear on what you value more.
Your values are just a hierarchy of what’s more than what. They are just a laundry list of items in order of what’s more important. If you truly value what’s at the end of your goals, your values will shift that direction and you will more likely get there. In this example, if you place such a high value on a healthy body and such a low value on momentary temporary pleasure, the outcome is obvious.
So, when you get stuck in life, reflect on your values and change your values to match and support your goals. You do that by selling the new values to yourself. Arguing for why one value is so much more important than another and why another is not very important at all. You must persuade yourself through repetition.