Importance of Values and Principles in Your Life

What are Values?

The values we exhibit, guide us in every situation. You can tell a lot about a person, and what they will do, based on the values that they believe in. It is also true that each one of us holds dear a different set of values and that is completely fine. These differences make us the individuals we are.

What are principles?

Principles and values often go hand in hand and both are crucial elements that make our identity. Let's use an example to introduce this concept:

Zaid is a new recruited in the company and one of his values is teamwork. Zaid has a principle that he will always prefer teamwork instead of individual work because of his value of teamwork.

Values are just your beliefs but principles are what decide your behavior and actions and principles are born out of values. Principles are strict, kind of like rules and laws and they apply to individuals, companies, and even countries.

Importance of Principles and Values

In our daily life, we have to make multiple decisions daily. It becomes really hard when you don’t have any key points based on what you are going to make that particular decision.

For example, if a person is assigned a project from his company, now he has been asked that if he wants to work within a team or as an individual. If he has a value of teamwork, then it would be really easier for him to decide that yeah he wants to go for the team. This is how Principles and values help us to make any decision in our life.

The above example looks very small, but when you start making small decisions based on your values and principles, it becomes your habit. After that, you will start implementing these for much bigger decisions. It will let you stay on the right track with the right values and principles.

How do I set my Values and principles?

No worries if you don’t know what are your values. First of all, you need to find answers to these questions given below:

Q.1 Think of a time when you were happiest, write down what were you doing, were you with other people, and what factors contributed to your happiness.

Q.2 Think of a time when you felt really proud, write down why were you proud, did other people share your pride, and what other factors contributed to your feelings of pride?

Q.3 Think of a time when you felt satisfied or felt a sense of achievement, write down how and why did the experience give your life meaning?

After answering the above questions now google the list of values a person can have. After getting the list to implement these values on the answers to the above questions. These will be your core values. Now with time and practice of these values, they will become principles of your life.

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