Title: Personal Growth: How to Align Your Values and Your Life | Psychology Today
Headings: Personal Growth: How to Align Your Values and Your Life
Jim Taylor Ph.D.
Personal Growth: How to Align Your Values and Your Life
Are your life and your values in synch?

Content: Yes, recognizing the values you were raised with and coming to understand the values that make you happy is the easy part. The real challenge is learning to embrace your true values and create a life that is in synch with them. Your life to the present, though perhaps causing you dissatisfaction and unhappiness, is nonetheless familiar, predictable, and, in a perverse sort of way, comfortable. You have lived this way for many years and your life habits are deeply ingrained. article continues after advertisement
Living your life in accordance with your newly identified or clarified values means discarding values, beliefs, and ways of life that have been a part of you for your entire life. However unhappy you may feel now, the prospect of change and the uncertainty and instability that accompanies it can be intimidating, if not downright terrifying. At some point though, you must tell yourself that your life as it is now is no longer acceptable. You just need to decide that enough is enough and that it is time for a change. Once you make that commit, learning to live your new values will be easier because you will have, at that moment, exerted a new force on your life and begun the process of changing its course. It will also be easier because living your values will be self-rewarding;