5. SELF-VALUES

If you don't know what is important for you,
_____ you will let yourself be walked over

And if this is the case, you will not let your basic needs be met.
Signs of this may be:

• You often become sad, irritated, angry or frustrated,
  but you find it difficult to put words on why.
  
  
• You don’t know what your basic needs are,
  and/or you find it difficult to assert them.
  
  
• You are often heavily influenced by the expectations and desires of others, and you sometimes feel uncertain in ethical dilemmas.
  
  
• You are not clear about what is important to you and what you really want out of your life.
  
  

___ A consciously held value base
___ is like a stable house foundation

Companies and institutions often have a clear "Value Base" in writing, a document they want every employee to understand, sympathize with and live up to.

But, on the level of individual persons, the Value Base is often not something one has made oneself aware of. Even if most people have personal values, and know what they regard as important, they have sometimes not made this really clear to themselves.

This can lead to difficulties in asserting themselves with respect to other peoples' values, basic values and needs, even when these violate their own.

To have established one's personal Value Base and to always be aware of it, and to know and be able to assert one's basic needs, is like a stable house foundation: the house stands steadily even in a severe storm.

The ground under the house foundation needs also to be steady

"The ground under the house foundation" can stand as a symbol for the levels below: Self-esteem, Self-awareness, Self-assurance, Self-beliefs. To be reasonably ready on these levels constitutes a sufficiently steady ground bedding for the "house foundation", but by themselves they are not sufficient - in order to be able to build "the house", the house foundation wall has to be built first.

It is also so that work on this level will further strengthen the levels below. One may say in general, that there is an interplay between all the levels of the Self, and working on one level strengthens all the others as well.

One's personal Value Base is really personal

The basic needs one has are really basic, and cannot be "made up". They need to be discovered and to be respected by oneself. Not until one does this can one expect that others will respect them.

The basic values one has can be results from external influence, so it is important that one makes oneself aware of them, and decides whether one wants to continue having them or if it is so that one has uncritically "swallowed" opinions and beliefs of others.

We at PsykosyntesForum and Life Leadership Coaching strive to help you become aware of your inner values and your basic needs, and many of the methods and courses we offer include tools for this (in alphabetical order):

• Coaching can help you to become clear about what you value in life, so that you prioritize this over what others think, over "musts", "shoulds", etc.
  
  
• My Mission focuses on the eighth level, Self-Mission, which will be described further down in this guide. This e-course is mentioned here because it contains a section which is about discovering what awakens your passion, the things that are extra important for you.
  
  
• Relationship Coaching always includes exploring needs and values, which ones are shared and which needs one does not share, needs that have to be met anyhow.
  
  
• Release the Emotion: Emotions signal needs. Positive emotions signal that a positive need is met, negative that they are not met.
  
  But, the emotions come not from the needs in themselves, they come out of one's thoughts about the needs. These thoughts may be realistic, and then one has to act on the emotion.
  
  But sometimes the thoughts can be results of subconscious conditioned reflexes without no real connection to reality, and one may then end up in negative emotional states like powerlessness, resignation, depression, etc. In these cases one can benefit from learning to just release the emotions.
  
  
• Saying NO. The e-course Eliminate TimeThieves includes a section where you can learn to pose three important questions to yourself each time someone asks you to take on a task, so that you can say NO when you need to do so.

The level SELF-VALUES is OK when

• You accept all of your emotions, and you know that they stand for your basic needs either being met or not met.
  
  
• You know what you need, and you can communicate your needs in a clear and constructive way.
  
  
• You are guided by an inner compass that shows you your important basic values. In ethical dilemmas, you intuitively feel what is right for you.
  
  
• You always know what you want to prioritize for yourself, and you have a clear sense of how you want your life to be.