How Important Are Life Values?
Values are not characteristic traits you decide one day to drop into your life. They are present already at the core of your being. They define who you are. Values are the umbrella under which everything else fits. Your life values are what you will ultimately pass on to your children and grandchildren.
On your Journey of Life, it is vital to know and identify your values. As your Life coach, I can show you that values are important, fundamental beliefs that are the anchors in our lives. They are what matter most to us in the end. Values are the non-negotiable characteristics that define us. They map out the roads you will travel during your Journey on this earth.
Working with a Christian Life Coach you will learn how to be true to yourself, the people around you and ultimately your God. As your Life Coach, I understand it is important to define and acknowledge each value you hold. I will then walk with you as you take the time to align your behavior and daily actions with your spoken life values. If they are not in sync, you are living in conflict with your values and that will result in non-effective time management or non-fulfillment in your own life. The result will be living in inner turmoil, always apologizing or justifying your behavior to a degree and never feeling a level of satisfaction or accomplishment.
An individual stays at the same level of non fulfillment when they say their value system is one thing, but their consistent actions don’t parallel it or their behavior doesn’t line up with their spoken life value system. I am here to help in this area of your life.
Yes, Values are important as life itself.
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How Time and Life Values Are Inseparable
There is an accumulative value to investing small amounts of time in certain activities over a long period of time.
Some common examples of these areas of our lives that will benefit from investing small amounts of time on a regular basis are exercising and staying fit, having a great marriage, fine tuning athletic abilities, becoming skilled at personal hobbies or becoming an accomplished instrumentalist. In each area if you put forth effort in small amounts of time it will produce huge value or have a huge effect over the length of time. The small deposits of your time will be an investment in your future and can change your life and how you live it. A few minutes a day in prayer and in Bible reading will change how your whole day goes and the perspective of it and how you view God.
Although there is very little value in any one segment of time, you will not notice
valued change in any one deposit of time for any of these events. Like eating with your family one time in 3 months has almost no value. It just doesn’t cut it. But eating with your family almost every evening for 3 months has a huge accumulative value in conversation and quality time spent together. Another example is going to church, if you go 3 times a year; it has very little valued effect in your life. Going faithful for nearly every Sunday for a year, is life changing. This applies to doing something for your spouse or any relationship you value. If you do something nice or special maybe twice a year for that person, that is not investing into your future. However, doing something nice or thoughtful once a month or once a week brings personal closeness and an accumulative value that has a positive, lasting effect on your relationship.
Neglect has an accumulative effect as well.
If you neglect your spouse knowingly for five days a week, don’t except the next two days to be wonderful or even good for that matter. Neglect has a negative accumulative effect. If you ignore your health for a solid year, it will have an accumulative negative effect. If you have 3 children and you spend time with two of them but you choose to neglect the 3rd child for six months, you will reap negative results for the accumulative neglect for a lot longer than six months. In neglecting any important arena of your life, you are sowing a negative effect in the future which can be irreversible at the time you so desire it to change. And if you try to do things to change the error of your ways, it won’t effect that stage of your life, it will however, accumulate value for the future. If you neglect your health by smoking, it may not affect you now, you will only reap the accumulative results years later in the future.
There is rarely any immediate consequences for neglecting any single installment in life.
Missing one dinner with your family, doesn’t mean your family will begin to fall apart. Missing one sporting event with your kids doesn’t mean their world will stop revolving. Missing one Sunday at church doesn’t mean you are backslidden and away from God. Missing one day at work, doesn’t mean you will be fired. However, it is an accumulation of these missed installments of time that makes your family fall apart, makes you have no influence into your kid’s life when they are young adults or have a family of their own. Accumulative neglect of God’sWord, will make you ineffective as a Christian. (Lukewarm) Accumulative days of missing work will make you unemployed one day in the future.
There is no accumulative value to the “Urgent” things we allow to interfere with the things that are most important.
If you have a goal of regular exercise that you have maintained for a period of time and then you allow that time to get used up by alternate things and you stop exercising. You can add up what those alternative things were that you replaced exercising with, and there is nothing that holds true value that can match the value you received from the exercising. Mostly, you won’t even remember what you did do in place of your goal. Perhaps, sleep in, do things around the house, spent time on the computer, talk on the phone or eat breakfast with a friend. These are things that you did, but had no value in your life in an accumulative area.
Eating dinner with your family around the table has great value in the lives of your children and in some homes is a lost activity. When kids grow up they look back on that as valued time. For those who always excuse the value of eating dinner together and instead often are absent at dinner time excusing it by playing golf, working late, traveling, eating out with the guys are risking maintaining value placed on those things in later years. It is impossible to measure accumulative value in any and all of those activities that took you away from the accumulative value of eating dinner together regularly with your family.
A. If you allow urgent things to take precedence over the time you should be committed to dating your spouse while you are married, you will not reap the benefit of that value in the future years.
B. Same with practicing your instrument. If you continually choose to do other things instead of practice, then there is no value in the things you choose to replace your practice time with.
C. There is incredible value in protecting the time you spend in God’s word and with God himself and no value in what you do with that time if you choose to let urgent things steal that time away.
D. Attendance in church every week accumulatively has GREAT VALUE that is beyond measurement.
In the critical arenas of life you cannot make up for lost time. There are areas of life you can “cram” for. Such homework, tests, last minute exams, applying make up before a date arrives. However, you cannot “cram” in a relationship with your kids, you cannot “cram” in a relationship with your spouse, and you cannot “cram” in a relationship with your Heavenly Father. These require small deposits all along the way. If you miss these opportunities they are just gone, there is no reclaiming the time. You cannot make up for them by “cramming”. In physical exercise, only consistent, small deposits, results in large effect over time. You cannot skip exercise for 6 months and then cram in exercising ten hours a days for a week to make up for it. Your body isn’t able to handle it. If you don’t eat for a week, you can’t make up for it, by continuously eating (gorging) for a twenty four hour period to make up for all the lost meal times. It is not possible to make those meals up. You needed to eat them at that time, for that time. If you don’t go to church for a month, you can’t make up for that by attending all three of the morning services and think you are good. That specified time is just gone.
Stages of our life are temporary and if we are not making the increments of deposits in and at those specific times daily / weekly, then we loose the value we would have had in the future. It is gone forever. You can’t go back in time to regain that value and your personal life journey will not be as fulfilling as your hopes and dreams are that it will be without the discipline of applying time to your values.
You can start over from “here on out” and that means, then, you would be building value for your future. But the value for the time you are in will be gone forever. Anything you try to do to make up is only an investment for the future, because you cannot make up for lost time in the past.
Principle is: In the key areas of life there is an accumulative value in the small weekly/monthly deposits along the way.
The Bible uses scripture like…. redeeming the time, make good use of every opportunity and use your time wisely.
Message: Don’t let urgent things steal away your time from the important things to build on for your future. You cannot get it back….EVER, that time is gone. The good news is, it is never to late to start reclaiming your life for the present and the future, taking you to a whole new level!
