Determine Your Family and Personal Values

What are your values with regard to your family and other important people in your life? What are your unifying principles? What do you stand for in your relationships? What do you believe is proper behavior in your treatment of others? What do you feel is most important in the character and behavior of both you and others when dealing with other people?

When you are treating other people in a manner that reflects your highest values, you can feel it inside. You feel happier and more confident. You experience higher levels of self-esteem and self-respect. You feel greater peace and contentment within yourself. As a result, you live and work in greater harmony with the people around you. When you are living consistently with your values, every part of your personal life flows more smoothly.

Earlier I asked you to consider what you would do, how you would spend your time, if you found out today that you had only six months left to live.
Everyone who considers this question seems to answer it in very much the same way. They say that they would spend as much time as possible during that six months with the people they love and care about the most. All thoughts of material or financial goals seem to evaporate instantly when you know that you will not be around very much longer.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, "The mark of a first rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
One of the exercises in Zen teaching is to envision living for a hundred years while contemplating dying within twenty-four hours. Your ability to hold these two thoughts simultaneously enables you to focus with greater clarity and calmness in the present moment.

The best way to live your life at home with your family is to balance the two thoughts, that of living for a long time and that of dying in the very near future. By holding these two thoughts in your mind simultaneously, you will treat people differently and better. This mental balancing act will immediately improve the quality of your relationships with the people closest to you.

Your values are expressed in your behaviors, especially when you are under pressure or exposed to temptation. When you are tired, irritable, stressed, afraid, or at a low point in your life, you often say and do things that are completely unexpected. You often express values and beliefs you did not know you had.
Some values you might choose to guide your relationships could be love, patience, kindness, sincerity, dependability, forgiveness, respect, and encouragement.

If the members of your family were interviewed and asked how you truly felt about them, what would they say? From the way you treat them most of the time, what would your family members conclude about your fundamental values concerning them?

When I got married, I chose the value of unconditional love to be the organizing principle in all my family relationships. In more than twenty years of marriage, I have never deviated from that basic value with my wife and four children. If you were to ask any member of my family about my values regarding them, they would tell you that, whatever else, I love them unconditionally, 100 percent of the time, no matter what.

In addition, I practice truthfulness, dependability, respect, and patience. I am definitely not perfect, but my decision a long time ago to live by these values with my family has been one of the most important choices I ever made.

Choose the values you believe in the most strongly. Define those values in terms of the behaviors you would engage in to express those values. Resolve to treat all members of your family so that, at a later time, they could identify your values, even if you never told them what they were.

Above all, put an "X" on the most important of all your values, the one value that can have the greatest positive impact on your relationships. Hold fast to that value in all your interactions with the people close to you. Never deviate or compromise. Practice the value until it becomes automatic and easy. This can be one of the most important focal points in your life.