Find Your Balance Point

Clarify Your Priorities, Simplify Your Life, and Achieve More

Brian Tracy, Christina Stein

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781626565746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Accomplish what matters most Because we all have too much to do, it feels like our lives are out of balance. But Brian Tracy and Christina Stein argue that imbalance results not so much from doing too much but from doing too much of the wrong things. They provide a process that enables you to sort out what is most important to you from among the many activities you could focus on. When you can efficiently identify and accomplish what really matters to you, you've found your balance point.

CHAPTER ONE

Determine Your Values and Start from the Right Place

In the pages ahead, you will learn how to discover who you really are; what values drive your beliefs, attitudes, and actions; and exactly what you need to do to create a plan that ensures a life of passion, purpose, and self-direction.

Clarity Is Essential

The starting point of designing a wonderful life is for you to develop absolute clarity about who you are and what matters to you. This means that you must be clear about your values. It seems that successful, happy people know what their values are and what they stand for, and they refuse to compromise them. Most of the great men and women of history have been admired because of their character, because of their adherence to a set of values that enabled them to overcome incredible adversity and go on to accomplish extraordinary things. And this can be true for you as well.

Everything happens for a reason. Success and happiness are not accidents. Failure and underachievement are not accidents either. There are definite reasons for everything that happens, and most of these reasons are contained within yourself.

Fortunately, you can control the things that you think, say, and do, and by controlling them, you can design the kind of life that you want and create the kind of future that is possible for you.

When you become clear about your values and what is truly important to you, it becomes easier to make a plan for your future. People who know what they want and are clear about what they are working toward feel engaged and inspired by their lives. Developing clarity about your values is the essential first step to creating a happy life. When you become clear about these values, you will start operating from your own personal balance point.

What Are Values?

Your values lie at the core of your character and your personality. Values are the foundation of your self-concept. They are like the axle around which your entire life turns. They are the primary drivers and motivators that push you forward. They determine who you are and who you are not, what matters to you and what does not.

You’ve heard the saying “life is a journey.” Let’s use that idea to help illustrate the role that values play in your life. On your life journey you will travel to many destinations. Just as you wouldn’t just jump in your car and drive or hop on a plane and fly off somewhere, you wouldn’t start without a clear destination. Your values largely determine which destination you choose. Do you prefer warm weather or cool weather? A city vacation or a seaside holiday? Luxury or budget? Are you interested in museums and other cultural experiences? The destination you choose and the trip you take will be a reflection of what is important to you, very much a reflection of your values. These values lie at the core of the person you really are inside, your self-concept.

Your Self-Concept

Your self-concept is your bundle of beliefs and ideas about yourself and your world. It is how you think and feel about yourself and every part of your life. It is the central or master program of your subconscious computer. Your self-concept precedes and predicts your performance and effectiveness in everything you do.

According to humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers, your self-concept is made up of three parts, like three overlapping spheres, each touching the other. These are your ideal self, your self-image, and your self-esteem. Let’s look at each of them in order.

Your Ideal Self

Your ideal self is a combination of all the values and virtues that you admire in yourself and in others. It is a picture of the perfect person that you would like to be at some time in the future. Your ideal self is your vision of the very best person that you could possibly become.

Your Self-Image

Your self-image is the second part of your self-concept. This is the person you see on the inside and think of yourself as being. It is often called your “inner mirror”—you always behave on the outside the way you see yourself behaving on the inside.

You might identify yourself by your physicality, by the social roles you play, or by your personality traits. All improvements in your outer life begin with an improvement in how you think about yourself—your mental and physical self-image.

Your Self-Esteem

The third part of your self-concept, your self-esteem, is perhaps the most important part of your personality. This is the “reactor core” of your personality, the energy source and center that determines the power of your personality. Your level of self-esteem is the foundation of your self-confidence, the most important quality of all for success in a busy, competitive world.

Your self-esteem is defined as “how much you like yourself.” The more you like yourself, or even love yourself, the better you do at anything that you attempt. And the better you do at your work and in other areas of your life, the more you like and respect yourself. Each aspect feeds the other: the more you like yourself, the better you do, and the better you do, the more you like yourself, in a continuing upward spiral of higher performance and higher self-esteem.

Your self-esteem is greatly affected by the relationship between your self-image and your ideal self. The more consistent the person you see yourself as being today is with your ideal self—the person you would like to be in the future—the higher will be your self-esteem.

The greater the distance between the person you see yourself as being today and the person you want most to be, the lower will be your self-esteem and self-confidence. When you are clear about your values and your ideals and you live every day in a manner that is consistent with those values, your self-image will move closer toward your ideal self, your self-esteem will increase, and you will feel a tremendous sense of self-respect and personal pride. This is our goal for you throughout this book.

The link between your self-image and your ideal self is why it is said that all problems in your personal life can be solved by a return to values, to the very best that is in you.

Select Your Values

What are your values? This is a great question! How do you determine what your values are today, and how do you decide what values are most important to you going forward?

There are two ways to determine your current values. The first is to look at your behaviors or actions on a day-to-day, hour-by-hour, and minute-to-minute basis. Your true values and beliefs are most often expressed in your actions. What you say or hope or wish or intend to do or be in the future does not really matter. Only your actions in the moment tell you, and everyone around you, what you truly value and who you really are deep inside.

The second way to assess your values is to look at how you behave under stress. When you are under stress or pressure and you are forced to choose one action or another, your choice will express your true values.

For example, ask yourself, “If I found out today that I had only six months to live, how would I spend my time?” Your answer to this question will tell you what is most important to you in life at this moment.

You can also determine what you truly value by looking at what makes you the happiest and what qualities you most respect and admire in others.

Clarifying your true values is not eas...