Do you know why you do the things you do?

Everything we do, we do because on some level it has value for us. Even the things we hate doing.

While we consciously know that we shouldn’t drink too much, over-eat or do drugs, and our conscious mind is screaming “Nooo, I don’t want this!” our subconscious mind says “Yes, this is good, more of this please”.

Why?

• Because it’s in our subconscious mind we have all our habits stored, and when we are not living in congruence with our core values, we are having this inner conflict with ourselves. We are living our life on auto-pilot, without even knowing it.

• Because there is an emotional reason for our “bad habits”; on some level they make us feel good, or at least we think they will.

And the more we scream “no” to something, with strong emotion (such as guilt, fear and resentment) we are only attracting more of the same energy into our life because the subconscious mind only gives us what we feed it with our conscious mind.

There is no exclusion in the universe; whatever we have our attention on, whether it’s something we like or don’t like, we are including it in our energy vibration.

How do we change these habits then?

Every change begins with awareness of course. We have to actually acknowledge the “problem” we are having, such as drinking too much etc. That’s the first step.

And then we have to become clear about what is important to us and if we are violating our own values.

We need to create clarity about what’s really important to us and live by them. Some things require more inner work than other, but we have to begin somewhere, right..?

The problem is not going to go away by itself. We need to take the first step in the right direction.

A very simple exercise (yet powerful) I want to share here is to write down three of our major life areas where we all have had some sort of challenges around at some point in our lives, and work with them, because when they begin to change, every area of your life will begin to improve. So lets begin with these three areas:

• Health
• Relationships
• Money

Write five values on each area that is most important to you. Don’t write them like life is for you now, like for example if you have a crappy relationship with someone, don’t write what’s wrong with it. Instead write what your ideal relationship would look like in terms of values.

So, an example:

Relationships: Different values could be for example openness, accountability, trust… etc etc.

Write five things you value most in all three areas, and then look at your list and look for similarities between your values and the last step is to rate them so that you have only 2-5 values in total left.

=so your 15 values becomes 2-5 in total. You pick the ones that are absolutely most important to you.

Those are your core values, and the more you can live by them and everyday practice to make all your decisions in line with them, the happier you become. It’s not about waiting for others to change so that your relationships are no longer crappy.

It’s for you to think that “Hey, I value being truthful, it’s very important to me, so that’s what I’m going to go for in my relationship from now on” for example.

Because it doesn’t matter how you look at it, we are all constantly making decisions based on what we value most.

So if you chose to stay in a crappy relationship, when you don’t see any progress coming and you feel drained to be in it, but you decide to stay; it only means you are living your life based on someone else core values and ignoring (or not even aware of ) your own.

It means you’re not being true to yourself and you’re not valuing your own well-being.

Not everybody values the same things, and what can feel totally wrong for you, might be what’s important to another.

We have to live up to the standard we are setting for ourselves and be true to ourselves first in order to find true and lasting happiness.

Isn’t having integrity an attractive quality with people? I think so!

So, the more we practice living in alignment with our core values, the faster we teach our minds to new habits that serves us better, and soon enough we have upgraded our minds and our life looks much brighter than it did before!