Is the way you are ranking your values in your mind or the way you have defined them causing you any conflict? Are your values aligned with your goals or misaligned?

Do they help you to achieve your ultimate dreams or do they hold you back? You know, if there are certain areas in your life where you have consistently not gotten desired results, it can almost always be traced back to a values conflict with your goals.

But now more importantly, I want you to see if your values have sabotaged your success up to this point.

I once worked with an accountant who had big dreams and grand plans about setting up his own partnership. But he could never bring in much business with his current partnership and he felt frustrated with himself.

See when I analyzed his values, I find out exactly why. His number one "Towards-value" in life was success and to him, his definition of success was when he set up his own practice. And that explained why he wanted it to do so badly.

That is what drove him to have all these plans and goals. Unfortunately, what he did not realize was that his "away-from values" was sabotaging him. His top "away-from value" was rejection and his number two "away-from value" was failure. But it was not so much the values but how he defined it. He felt rejected the minute someone rejected his ideas of services.

He also defined failure as "when I do not reach my goals". Do you see the big conflict here? No wonder he could not reach his goals. See, on one hand he wanted to succeed by bringing in more business, and by setting up his own practice.

But on the other hand, he never took any action to solicit for more business or he never took any action to come out with more ideas because he was so fearful of rejection and failure that he wanted to move away from it. So he felt stuck and frustrated all the time. It was until he changed his values to align with his goals that he really got what he wanted.

Thus, it is imperative that we are clear on our values and set them up the right way.

Therefore if our values are not aligned with what we want to achieve, we may find our self held back, being unable to attain our goals.