"One's own self is well hidden from one's own self; of all mines of treasure, one's own is the last to be dug up." ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
A group of women, attending one of my first seminars ever, sat pouring over a list of values that I so cleverly provided for them in an effort to save time by showing them a vast amount of possibilities. The idea was to decide on what values and the accompanying emotional states of mind, were most important to them as a way of shaping their goals with what they really wanted most in life. HAAAA! The joke was on me. What I had done, thinking I was being ohh so helpful, was tantamount to what one of those restaurants with a 20 page menu does to it’s patrons; create too many choices resulting in anxiety over being asked to choose just a few of the enormous amount of tempting items. After about 15 minutes of watching them highlight value after value, many of them redundant in underlying meaning, I decided to put a simple question out there that to my surprise resolved the issue immediately.
What emotional states would you most like to avoid in life?
Boom, boom, boom, the answers poured out in quick succession:
Humiliation, ostracism, disrespect, hate, fear, greed, manipulation, entrapment…
The list went on. After we defined what those avoidances looked like to them, we were able to reverse engineer what it was that they really wanted, what it was that really mattered to them. It was amazing and eye opening first to create the list (which surprisingly didn’t look much the same as the original long list of value states they had initially selected), then to recognize where all of the pieces fell into place throughout each of their lives. Even more surprising still was further discovering how they internally prioritized each of those values when cross comparing them all side by side. Many of my attendees found that their initial top chosen value (as a state of being) was actually about 4th or lower on their list and other hidden emotional necessities lay closer to their top priorities.
If you were to create your list and take a good deep look at it, you may just notice that those top value states and their opposing avoidances have been the driving force for decisions you have made throughout your life considering that we naturally move away from pain and towards pleasure. How can you use this information? By cultivating all your innermost desires into an energizing purpose that pulls you and learning how to release the stuff you don’t need that used to be part of what got you to move just to avoid it.
(Excerpt from Happiness on Tap: How to Rock What You've Got in Life, 2012)
