The art of living starts with this one simple thing

The Art of Living is not easy in our modern culture. There's a lot of noise that interrupts our attention to what matters - social media, marketing, consumerism all draw us away from what is important to our lives. But when you start connecting in with what matters to you, you can use that as an anchor to make decisions in your life.

The art of living starts with clarifying your personal values.

Only you know what your values are based on your life experiences and the cultures you were exposed to. Whether it's our parents or familial culture, our ethnic culture, our community, or even our workplace culture, we are constantly assessing how to fit in.

The biggest mistake we make in cultivating and designing our lives is living to other people's values.

Most of us unconsciously do this so don't be too hard on yourself. Society espouses certain values that we understandably as children, pick up on quite intuitively. Without anyone having to explain to us, we just inherently know how to belong and fit in. This keeps us safe and accepted. But as adults, fitting in and belonging become two very different things. As we start to get older and develop a stronger sense of self, we may find that fitting in actually sacrifices our sense of belonging. More importantly, we realise it is more imperative to belong to ourselves. This is a healthy process of differentiation! I know that journey well. It's taken me a long time to belong to myself, and it's an unfolding process that never ends. It's important to know that this is a journey and be committed to the self discovery process. Knowing yourself and knowing what's important to you (aka your values), is the critical starting point to how to design an authentic and beautiful life. For me, through different life transition points, or thresholds that I've crossed, I've found that my values have changed over time. I think that's pretty normal. And as we develop as adults, we should be evolving! It's a myth that we stop growing as adults.

Don't settle for that myth. Our evolving values are great indicators of growth. (Just think of what mattered to you ten years ago as compared to now). That's not to say we should be changing them every few weeks or months, but that our guideposts change as we mature.

I sat down recently to reflect on my own values. A few years ago I would have told you I valued wisdom and balance. Wisdom because I sought deeper answers to life. Balance because of my deep need to reconcile the polarity of growing up eastern and western. These are still important to me, but two things are even more important to me now.

When I checked in with myself now, I landed on inclusion and truth. Inclusion speaks to a lot of how I practice my life and my profession in that it really matters to me that all voices and people are included. I've always been drawn to difference because I myself have felt very different growing up.

My parents were working class immigrants. We grew up in a primarily caucasian town as one of the few asians. I worked really hard to fit in as a child, and as I grew older, I realised that through assimilating, I had lost a piece of myself and my culture.

I've worked hard in my adult life to reclaim those parts of me and to realise that the asian parts of me that weren't accepted when I was young are cherished parts of me. I also welcome those differences and parts from others. I find difference really nourishing and make a real effort to surround myself with different people, places and things. Which brings me to my second value - truth.

Welcoming and accepting my own and other people's truths goes hand in hand with inclusion. For others to really feel included, we need to be able to welcome their truth, no matter how different it is to our own.

I've often felt the disingenuous invitation of "inclusion" to really mean - "I'll accept you as long as you conform to what I need you to be." But being true to yourself and speaking your truth demands radical inclusion. This is something worth seeking and not always easy to find. In my coaching practice, I put these values to great use. I love hearing people's stories - as those diverse stories help to create great possibilities around how to live life. (Hint: there's no single right way to live life!) And they greatly inspire my own quest for designing a beautiful and authentic life. And so if you're finding yourself lost in a place where you don't know what kind of life you want to craft, I encourage you to start with investigating your values. And secondly, find different people, places and things to inspire some sort of imagination, or wonder of what a beautiful and authentic life could look like. But don't copy someone else's story. Use it as strength and courage to design your own. Good luck on your journey. I'll be walking alongside you.