Eight very practical, short-term benefits of knowing your purpose and values

In a time of change, when short term issues seem urgent and important, thinking about your long term purpose and values might seem like a distraction.

But investing the time to find your purpose and values will bring you eight very practical short term benefits as well:

1. Fewer Problems and Distractions
   As Winston Churchill once said, “You will never reach your destination if you stop to throw stones at every dog that barks.”
   Knowing your purpose and values shows you which issues (or barking dogs) you can ignore. This frees up time and resources to focus on what matters.
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2. Clearer Opportunities
   Knowing your purpose and values also shows you which of the opportunities that come your way are worth pursuing and which to leave for someone else. Again, this helps you to prioritise your limited time and resources.
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3. Clearer Outcomes, Faster
   For the issues you choose to engage with, knowing your purpose and values makes it quicker and easier to define the outcomes you want to create. This means you can spend less time and resources planning what to do and more time and resources doing what needs to be done.
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4. More Inspiration, More Motivation
   People who know their purpose and values are able to keep going in the face of greater obstacles and uncertainty. Because the more you know what really matters to you, the more energy and enthusiasm you have to pursue it, no matter what might happen around you.
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5. Better Results
   The better you know your purpose and values, and the more you are focusing on creating the results that matter most to you, the more energy and enthusiasm you then have. This will make you more likely to achieve those outcomes. Better inner clarity on your purpose and values will bring you better results in the outer world.
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6. Immediate Results
   The future you seek has two parts: the outcomes you want to create and the way you want to live when you get there.
   By choosing to live in line with your purpose and values now, you immediately achieve half your vision. You start to live as if the future you want is already here. Now you can switch from planning and wanting to being and doing: manifesting the world you want, a little more fully each day.
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7. A Greater Feeling of Control
   In a world of constant change, knowing your purpose and values enables you to choose how you respond to any situation. This puts you in control of the one thing you can control: yourself.
   This is true power: this is Inner Leadership.
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8. More Freedom, Flexibility, and Adaptability
   Seeing your short term goals as ways to achieve your long term purpose improves your ability to adapt when things don’t turn out in the way you wanted: you simply find new ways to achieve your same long term purpose.
   This makes you more flexible to changing events and helps you recover faster from setbacks — which not only brings you greater freedom, flexibility, and adaptability but also more stability and continuity.

In a churning world, taking the time to define your long term purpose and values is a practical investment that will repay itself many times over.

It also brings you another step closer to becoming antifragile: able to use change to become stronger and more valuable.

Which of these eight benefits would be most useful to you today? Have you invested the time to find your purpose and values?

Adapted from Inner Leadership: a framework and tools for building inspiration in times of change.

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Photo By Hernán Piñera via StockPholio.net