What Really Matters In Your Life?

By Guest Author On August 28, 2009 Under How To Find Happiness

An important question for people to consider is “What really matters?” The answer could be the secret to unlocking your personal success and happiness. It could provide the momentum required to make changes for the better and these changes would carry a massive amount of motivation and energy behind them.

So what happens when you ask yourself the question “What really matters?” You might come up with various things. Maybe it is something about your family, career, house or even garden that really matters to you.

When you have thought of something, ask yourself ‘What is important about that?’ What is important to you about your family or your career? Maybe they give you joy and happiness, or a sense of achievement. Keep asking yourself what is important about that. In this way you will get to some higher purposes for yourself and what really matters to you.

For example, if money is important to you and you ask yourself what is important about that, you may say that it gives you and your family security. Again asking what is important about that may lead you to say security gives you a solid foundation to bring your children up in. And that may matter because you want your children to have the best possible life they can. This may be what you consider to be one of your highest purposes.

Clarifying what really matters to you in this way is a very valuable thing to do. Being aware of your higher purposes is very powerful. In the example above, knowing the higher purpose of wanting to provide the best possible life for your children might change how you do things on a day to day basis. If you had considered money to be important to you without considering why, you may have been working extremely long hours to make as much money as possible. However, this may mean much less time with your children and this could be in conflict with your higher purpose of wanting to provide the best possible life for your children.

Coming from the direction of knowing what is really really important to you may lead you to consider the different ways you can fulfill that purpose without conflicting with it. This will bring real motivation and energy to the things you do.

Try the following exercise for yourself:

1. Consider the following areas of your life – career, finances, relationships, fun/recreation and self development. Write down what matters to you in each of those areas.

2. Now look at your list of what matters to you and write down what is important to you about each of those things.

3. Continue doing this until you feel you have got to some higher purposes for yourself. You may find that the higher purposes from the different areas of life are the same or very similar.

4. Now look at these higher purposes and ask yourself if you feel that you are fulfilling these higher purposes. Also ask yourself if you are doing anything that may be conflicting with these higher purposes.

5. Then ask yourself how you could satisfy these higher purposes even more. Identify some changes that you can make to your life that will help you get more of what matters into your life.

6. See if you can commit to at least one of these changes and set yourself a target by when you will act on this.

This demonstrates a very powerful coaching method that can lead to some amazing changes. When done within a coaching session with a good coach it can lead to changes which can make a big difference to the clients life.

There is more for you to think about in the article Happiness, Beliefs and Thoughts where you can discover how your beliefs and thoughts affect your feelings.

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