Eight very practical benefits of knowing your purpose and values

In a time of change, when every short term issue can 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:

1. Fewer Problems and Distractions
   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 — and that frees up your time and resources.
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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 resources and time.
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3. Clearer Outcomes
   For the issues you do choose to engage with, knowing your purpose and values makes it quicker and easier to define the outcomes you want to create. Then 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 and Motivation
   People who know their purpose and values are more able to keep going in the face of obstacles and uncertainty. Because the more you know what really matters to you, the more enthusiasm you have to pursue it, no matter what else might be happening around you.
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5. Better Results
   The better you know your purpose and values, and the better you can focus on creating the results that matter most to you, and the more energy and enthusiasm you have for doing so, the more likely you become to achieve them. Better inner clarity on purpose and values brings better results in the outside world.
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6. A Greater Feeling of Control
   In a world of constant change, knowing your purpose and values allows you to choose how you respond to any situation. This puts you in control of the only thing you can control: yourself. This is true power: this is Inner Leadership.
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7. 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 today you immediately achieve half your vision: you start to live now in the way you want to live in the future. You start to live now as if that is already true. Now you can switch from planning and wanting to being and doing: manifesting the world you want more fully, day by day, starting now.
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8. More Freedom, Flexibility, and Adaptability
   Seeing your short term goals as ways to achieve your long term purpose helps you to adapt better to changing circumstances: now, when something doesn’t turn out in the way you wanted, you simply find new ways to achieve your same long term purpose. Now you can recover faster from setbacks and be more flexible to changing events. And this brings you greater stability, continuity, and flexibility.

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 in short term results.

Investing the time to define your purpose and values 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? Will you invest 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