guide for achieving vertical alignment
In the face of ever-increasing pressure to adapt, psychologist Stefanie Stahl offers a solution: identify and live by your personal values. These core principles can serve as an inner compass, providing orientation when external factors are unreliable.
To embark on this journey, follow these five steps:
1. **Identify Your Core Values**: Reflect on moments in your life when you felt most alive, energized, and connected to a sense of purpose. Consider what is deeply important in your life, such as relationships, work, hobbies, or causes you care about. Explore common values like honesty, integrity, compassion, courage, freedom, love, or wisdom, and notice which resonate with you personally. You can also take a core values quiz or assessment to help clarify your values.
2. **Define and Write Down Your Values**: Clearly define each value in your own words to ensure they feel authentic and meaningful. Identify specific times these values have shown up in your life, as well as moments when you felt out of alignment with them.
3. **Align Your Vision and Values**: Develop a personal vision or ideal future that harmoniously aligns with your identified values. This alignment creates authenticity, integrity, and clarity, boosting self-esteem because you live in accordance with your true self.
4. **Live Your Values Intentionally**: Set intentions guiding how you want to embody your values in daily life rather than focusing on specific outcomes. Recommit regularly by reflecting on how living your values makes you feel and take actions to increase those feelings. Establish goals or habits that support your values, and practice mindfulness and boundary-setting to stay true to your values amid external pressures.
5. **Create a Plan for Implementation**: Make your values a priority by integrating them into decision-making and lifestyle choices. Monitor your alignment with your values to reinforce self-awareness and continually improve your sense of self-worth.
It's essential to remember that some values may be unconsciously adopted from parents or culture and may not align with your life. Stahl encourages regular questioning to identify which values truly belong, as adopted values often feel like a duty.
In situations where old patterns kick in, referring to a personal value can help, such as honesty or fairness. Values like compassion, honesty, or friendship not only give orientation but also strengthen self-worth. Acting according to consciously chosen values unfolds their psychological power, helping you stand tall inside, not against others, but for yourself.
For more guidance, the University of Brunswick offers a PDF with instructions and a value list to find your personal values. There are also various providers with card sets to help you find your top personal values. By following this structured process, you develop a reliable inner compass that guides you toward authenticity and enhanced self-worth.
- User can seek assistance from science and service sectors by exploring education-and-self-development resources, such as the University of Brunswick's PDF or value card sets, to clarify their personal values in health-and-wellness, mental-health, and personal-growth domains.
- By intentionally living by core values like compassion, honesty, and integrity, an individual can foster mental health and well-being, while also supplementing their education, and consequently, promoting overall personal growth.
- To build a fulfilling life, users can integrate their personal values in various aspects of life, like health-and-wellness, work, or personal relationships, to create a balanced, self-developed, and meaningful service to themselves and others.
