Create Your Personal Guiding Principles

Posted on July 30, 2008

Personal Guiding Principles are a set of rules you have chosen to live by. Personal Guiding Principles help you make and stick by your decisions and actions. They help you make sense of your life and keep you in balance. Your Guiding Principles become ingrained in you so that you never doubt yourself when you feel backed up against the wall by other people’s opinions. Your guiding principles should make you strong, build your self-esteem and confidence. Talk about building a solid foundation for your life, guiding principles are a key ingredient to creating your ideal life.

An excellent example of guiding principles can be found in a great book by Don Miguel Ruiz, called The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, A Toltec Wisdom Book. His book includes four amazing guiding principles: Be impeccable with your word. Don’t take things personally. Don’t make assumptions. Always do your best. You can choose to use these four and add a couple more or just create an entirely set for yourself.

Create guiding principles that ignite the power in you to push yourself to be all that you can be. Create a set of beliefs for yourself that give you superhuman abilities, like, “I will work effectively each day to create my ideal life making sure I honor my commitments to myself and my goals.” This particular gem has kept me glued to my desk for 20 hours now. Please don’t feel sorry for me, 14 of those hours I had writer’s block, watched two movies, one cartoon, no two cartoons (I love Cartoons), three meals and many other things all done at my desk. The sun is rising now, no, the sun has risen, but I also promised to blog Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays by 7am, so guess what I am honoring that commitment too. Now if I could only make one this powerful for the gym.

Back to the important stuff, your guiding principles, use them as a guide to keep you on track. Whenever you are not living or honoring your guiding principles it will be reflected in your life, look around you and you will find clutter in your home, your schedule is overbooked, you get writer’s block and a sense that things are not as they should be. I suggest you keep your guiding principles close by and the moment you feel yourself slipping, simply go back to review your principles, and get yourself right back on track.

To create a set of guiding principles, you can choose those that already exist in your religion, your favorite spiritual literature, or create your own. Your guiding principles can be: I will not cheat. I will finish what I start, and my favorite, “I choose to love myself.” I have faith in God and I choose to form my own opinions about everything.

Anything can be a guiding principle as long as you use them to create more stability in your life. You use your guiding principles as a guide to help you navigate though life. Your principles give you more than confidence, for example, I choose to stand behind everything I say and I don’t need to justify my stance.

Do Something
List your guiding principles, next to each one write what they mean to you and how you would use them. Then ask yourself, “Can I build a solid foundation for my life with these guiding principles. Note: Your guiding principles can change as you change, you can add more or remove some as you grow and get to know yourself better.

Thanks for stopping by and feel free to share some of your guiding principles with the rest of us.

PS
My writer’s block was not about the blog, this part is fun for me. I have simply had a lot of things hurled at me in the last few days and everything seems to have a “NOW” deadline on it. But I have accomplished all I set out to do yesterday, today, a couple hours sleep and I will be back at my desk with goals for today.

See you later…
photo credit: Perla*

Filed Under Know Who You Are, Living Eternal Vigilance, Nuture your Spirit, Science of Getting Rich, Self Improvement, Self-Help Tools

PLEASE & Thank You

Comments

4 Responses to “Create Your Personal Guiding Principles”

Robert A. Henru on July 31st, 2008 2:47 am

Hi Tabs, thanks for stopping by at my site.
One guiding principle that I put on myself is pretty much based on my religion, Christian.
It’s “seeking wisdom but leaning on God”
Not easy in doing it, sometimes I found myself depend too much on wisdom and disappointed when it doesn’t work.

It’s based on the following verse “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge Him and He will make your path straight.”

I’m quite open with wisdom even from non-Christian speaker or writer, but I always learn not to depend on it more than God.

My two-cents,
Robert
John Rocheleau - Zen-Moments on July 31st, 2008 10:42 am

I like your thoughts on this. It is powerful to develop a set of guiding principals.

They are like the foundation of a building; depending on their nature and how they are put together, they determine the structure of everything else to follow.

Guiding principals ground us in an unshakable identity of who we decide to be — and who we are it is a choice.

John
Tabs on July 31st, 2008 12:41 pm

Robert,
Thanks so much for sharing your powerful guiding principle with us. I feel that believing in something greater than yourself is like building a foundation of concrete with piles dug 20 feet into the ground. (Forgive my metaphor, i love architectural shows.)

You have to lean on God, the Universe and All, regardless of life’s disappointments because if you don’t how do you move on? With God behind me I can only fall forward. Every thing i learn and everything I do is because God blessed me with it.

I best stop before I go into “full preach mode”.

Thanks again for sharing,

Tabs
Tabs on July 31st, 2008 1:03 pm

John,
Thanks for stopping by. I completely agree with you that guiding principles determine the structure and strength of a personal foundation. You are right, the value of a guiding principle is that it does to some extent determine who were are and what we do with our lives.

The key (and knowing this is a choice) is getting one’s self powerful guiding principles to create an amazing life. It is incredible knowing that anyone can decide at anytime to adopt guiding principles that can change their lives now.

Thanks for sharing, your comments has made it to my “Ponder this Seriously” list today.

Cheers,