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: Having answered these questions, you can now dig beneath the surface of those activities, experiences, and people, and identify the values that underlie them. One client, Wendy, a financial analyst, had enjoyed the visual arts since childhood, but her parents had discouraged her from pursuing them because “they wouldn’t pay the bills.” When I asked Wendy to answer the above questions, she realized that her love of the arts was the only thing in her life that she felt a deep connection with. Through careful consideration of her values, Wendy discovered that the inspiration of creation and the physical expression of her creativity were fundamental values that she was never able to express in her career. With this insight—this epiphany!, as she put it—Wendy was able to more actively pursue this passion with greater clarity and purpose, and, for the first time in her life, felt greater alignment between her values and her life, and found a greater sense of balance and contentment. An important part of this reconstruction process is to reframe success in a way that is consistent with your true values. Success for those whose values and lives are out of synch with each other often have bought into the definitions of success imposed by popular culture, for example, wealth, status, popularity, and physical appearance. In contrast, those who are able to align their values with their lives create their own definitions of success, such as living a life true to their values, setting and achieving meaningful goals, or making the world a better place. Living Your Values
You may be thinking, “This whole reconstruction thing seems pretty easy.”