Written by: Ben Warnes, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Everyone from businesses and organisations to leaders and individuals has their North Star, their belief system personal philosophy, so to speak, which helps to align their values and drives them to their full potential.
The importance of developing your personal philosophy cannot be underestimated – it allows you to create a roadmap for success, helps in creating boundaries, good habits, passions and motivations, etc. – all of which come together to help you go where you want to be.
However, you need to first identify with yourself and where you are right now. And once you’ve done that, you can focus on what developing your personal philosophy actually is.
What is personal philosophy?
Your personal philosophy defines the actions needed to guide and/or encourage you to live a more purposeful and meaningful life. It clarifies everything from your belief system to your core values to what you stand for.
By self-reflecting and understanding your core values, you can essentially create a success roadmap for life – synchronising the values and actions needed to create a framework that maximises and optimises your chances for remaining accountable and focused – by reminding yourself of the underlying triggers and motivations.
Understand your “High-level goals” Goal
If you’ve ever had the chance to work with a Transformational Coach or a Personal Philosophy Life Coach, then you likely know that personal philosophy is built on multiple layers. The lower layers comprise smaller day-to-day goals, which feed into the next level of goals – which, in turn, feed into mid-level goals, which in turn again, feed into higher-level goals. This effectively creates your personal philosophy.
The simple diagram below demonstrates how one set of goals feeds into the next as part of your life philosophy.
Just to give you a quick example: your lower-level goals may be relatively simple goals regarding your diet, day-to-day curiosity, how you spend time, how you maintain your physical appearance, etc. All of these feed into your mid-level goals, such as your health, ongoing education or relationships. These build further to help you achieve your high-level goals, which eventually culminate in your personal philosophy.
It’s worth noting that low-level and even mid-level goals can appear to be innate at first. But until you think through this process carefully and do a little self- reflection, you may not realise how the smaller goals act as a stepping stone to the larger ones and eventually form the basis of your personal philosophy.
5 questions to ask yourself when developing your personal philosophy
What core values describe me best?
Your core values lay the foundation of who you are as an individual. By understanding these values, you can establish your moral compass and then align your values with actions to successfully achieve your goals. Now, think about why these core values are important to you.
Write down your core values with a description of how you perceive them – then add a few sentences on how you want to create the actions that help to align you with those core values. What habits must you develop to relate to those values?
How do I measure success?
What do words like “success” or “empower” mean to you? Everyone wants to be successful but success looks different to everyone. Try to understand success as it relates to you, and not by necessarily following someone else’s model of success. Then think about the actions you need to achieve it.
You can even dissect your success into different areas, metrics and timeframes, such as family and work now or family and work one year from now, etc. This will empower you to define success but only according to the unique metrics and challenges you have set out. This will then help you to come up with an outline for achieving success.
What am I passionate about?
Excited to wake up each day? What gets you excited? What gives you a sense of satisfaction and achievement at the end of each day? List out your passions and motivations.
What are my strengths?
Identifying your strengths and understanding how they will translate into the actions you take will help you further understand the things you excel at and the things you need to improve on.
Create a list of traits that help you thrive. Add these strengths to your personal philosophy as they will allow you to flourish and create a ‘flow state’ that will contribute to your successes.
What does meaningfulness mean to me?
Looking at a dashboard of instruments in front of you, each dial would undoubtedly hold a differentlevel of importance, depending on your unique journey.
Needs are much the same and each person will have their own unique set of needs that, once discovered, allows us to be the most fulfilled version of ourselves. List what those needs are at the moment and how you want to successfully meet those needs in the future.
Take your answers and link and connect your values, goals, strengths and needs and metrics of success into a few sentences that define your answers. Then condense these sentences into one sentence that sums up your life motivation and goals. This is your personal philosophy.
Journeying from where you are to where you want to be
With time, your personal philosophy will evolve and you may redefine it in small ways the more you grow, learn and adapt on your journey.
By developing your personal philosophy, you will effectively point yourself in the right direction, and every small step will take you closer to your ultimate goal. It will prepare you in a way to make your actions more deliberate and driven, where you will learn to establish an inner guidance mechanism and learn first-hand about creating boundaries. All of this combined will help you keep track of where you are in life and where you want to be or should be.
Ben Warnes, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Ben Warnes is a Transformational Leadership and Life Coach. He employs his signature LMA Coaching Framework with his clients to help them understand where they are and partners with them on their journey to where they want to be.
He has an MBA in Leadership and Management and is a certified ICF and EMCC Transformational Coach. An advocate of Flow, Mindfulness and Positive Psychology he is dedicated to helping others find their Meaningfulness. He is the founder of the Listening Mindset Action (LMA) Framework, developing it to coach remarkable people to achieve incredible goals. He believes no goal is too small and no dream is too big.
Having started his first business at the age of 14, he has worked for blue chip companies and started multiple successful businesses in London and New York. He still runs Westongate a successful high-end property development company in Surrey England. Ben knows from experience the path to success is littered with obstacles and believes the obstacle often is the way.
He is currently working “Find your meaningfulness,” a framework for maximising potential life satisfaction and fulfilment.
