Finding Community Values through Chaos (COVID19, George Floyd Riots)

So, things are rough right now. I mean, like, I’m a media junkie, and I’ve got a lot of time at home. I’m on my phone and on the computer, and watching the news, and it’s bad everywhere. Like, there’s the virus to contend with, and of course, there’s economic devastation, and watching the American media right now with all the civic unrest in the midst of what is systemic racism, it is tough to watch. In fact, it leads me to some level of despair, where you can feel defeated. What’s the hell’s the point of it all? Well, this video is about getting in touch again with what the point of it all is, what gives us meaning and purpose in life. So, stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So, stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So, what is the purpose of all this? What gives us meaning in life, especially in the midst of all the chaos in the world right now, and the frankly, the horrible things that we’re having to put up with? And I’ll tell you, it is difficult. The stuff in the America, civic unrest, it’s scary. But there is a way to find meaning, and positive psychology has some really basic science about finding our purpose in life.

It’s one of the main ways that we can get happier, or at least more content, this sense that we know what we’re about as an individual, what gives us the reason why we want to wake up, and that’s all about our values. When we truly understand our values, and I mean truly understand our values, we get a sense of purpose in life. We get a sense that we know what it is we want, we know what makes us tick, what makes me as an individual different than other people, and yet having some similarities that are important. And I’ll get to that, and I’m going to leave a link below to a values exercise that can help you identify your top priority values. Because when you really know them, not only does it give you this zest for life that you know what it is that you’re about, but you also get a basic purpose that gives you a reason to get up and say, “This is my set of choices today. This is why I’m designing my day the way I am.”

Sometimes, if there’s like a fork in the road and you have to choose between this thing or that thing, knowing your values really well helps you find exactly which direction to take. And if that is true for us as individuals, it must also be true for us as a social community. When we think about our values that are clearly contended with in American life today, where there seems to be a discordant conflict of values, I think when we think about what people want in basic values, we can go from the individual to the kind of corporate being, and we can recognize that everybody wants some things very similarly one to another. Of course, people want peace, of course people want a sense of community, everybody wanting the love of their family, their neighborhood. People want to have a sense of relative order in their lives, and of course people want good health. And these kinds of similarities that bring us all together, they are based in our values.

So, if we come to know our own personal values, we can certainly start identifying with the community values as a whole, and the things that seem to tear us apart, in fact, we can find there’s more in common than there is that tears us apart. And gosh, if there’s ever a time to reflect on this kind of thing, this is the time. And I guess I have one last little thing, besides going to the link and figuring out your own values, is take a break from the media. Limit your media intake to 20 minutes, a half hour per day, because it’s just going to bring you down. And I don’t, I’m not saying be uninformed, be poorly informed, but limit the amount of information that you need to take in on this stuff, it’s really hard on ourselves.

So, if you like this kind of content, please like the video, share it with your family and friends, and subscribe to my channel. And you get a new video like this every Sunday morning. Thanks for watching.