Have you ever had conflict among the things you value most in life?
Values that have their own personalities and their own agendas, and begin to take you out of the equation.
Recently, I’ve been running into this issue.
While I value relationships with friends and family, it’s been conflicting with my value of education. Through my job, I am able to learn so much at such a fast pace to a point where it overtakes every other aspect of my life. I will work ten hours a day to continue soaking up the knowledge and reaching for the achievement. I will sacrifice talking to people that I love most to finish a newsletter, and I will ignore my need for relaxation to get things done that I deem as important.
And while education through my work gives me joy, it doesn’t give me sustainable joy that I receive through relationships, personal time, and relaxation. So, since joy is my third core value, this presents a problem in the balancing act of my life.
Do I continue to pursue work as a focus in my life with the added bonus of giving back to the community for education, or do I make it a smaller part of my life so I can continue to experience joy and the cultivation of relationships in my life?
Is it possible to pursue the benefits of all three?
I’m scared that as I let go of my work little by little, I’ll also lose a part of myself.
They always tell you to follow your intuition at this point, but I think my poor intuition is confused, too.
What do you think? Do your values conflict, and if they do, what do you do about it?
Photo uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons.
