Creating YOUR Personal Philosophy

It certainly isn’t easy to create a personal philosophy, but it’s certainly worth it. These philosophy statements provide us with a moral compass towards our ideal lifestyle. It helps us to live intently and purposefully.

So today I’m going to help you understand what a personal philosophy is and walk you through the step-by-step process to create yours. By the end of this article, you’ll have produced something highly valuable that you can use to guide you through your life choices!

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What is a Personal Philosophy?

Before we can dive into creating your personal philosophy you must understand what it is. Stated simply, your personal philosophy aims to combine your values and beliefs so that you can use these statements as a moral compass to guide your decisions and your actions in your everyday life.

Your personal philosophy identifies what’s important to you and what’s not. They determine what triggers you and what doesn’t (if you’re a keyboard warrior this article may even trigger you in some way). These philosophy statements influence what you’re motivated to achieve and what you couldn’t care less about. I’m sure you get the idea by now.

Because these personal philosophies are attempts to understand who we are at our very core they tend to transverse nearly every single aspect of our lives and have huge influences on the people that we eventually develop into.

So overall, your personal philosophy outlines your most important worldviews through a few key points, values, and beliefs that you hold in order to provide you with the necessary self-awareness to effectively interact with others and your environment so that you can get what you want out of your life.

An important thing to take away from these personal philosophy statements is that they are always going to be under construction. As our mindsets mature and as we slowly have eyes opened to the world around us we’ll take on new important beliefs and values that will influence who we are.

Because we are constantly, growing, learning, and evolving as people our personal philosophy will also constantly be growing and evolving alongside us.

So don’t worry about developing the perfect statement because chances are it won’t be long before you feel a need to tweak it.

Different Kinds of Personal Philosophies

There are two main types of personal philosophies that we can talk about.

The first one is likely the one which you are more familiar with. This is what I like to refer to as the umbrella personal philosophy. This personal philosophy applies to you and your life in a more general and universal approach.

The umbrella personal philosophy is what I described above already. It provides you with self-awareness, acts as a moral compass, and influences your daily decisions and actions. It helps you live according to your beliefs and values in a way that allows you to attain happiness and personal fulfillment.

The other type of personal philosophy which you may be less familiar with is the micro personal philosophy or the contextual personal philosophies. These are personal philosophies that vary slightly from the umbrella philosophy and incorporate more specific beliefs and values to a particular context.

For example, you may have a personal philosophy regarding your family life and environment that varies from the philosophy you have towards your career and your work. Yes, there may be commonalities between them, but simply due to the different contexts, different values and beliefs rise to the forefront.

An example of a contextual personal philosophy from my life is my leadership philosophy. Here my goal is to lead by example. Never ask a team member to do something that I wouldn’t do myself. And to not only work hard towards accomplishing the goals but to work hard for the other members of the team supporting them as well.

Why Your Personal Philosophy is Important?

“Your personal philosophy is your greatest determining factor in how your life works out.” -Jim Rohn

Though the above quote may be a slight exaggeration it’s clear that our personal philosophy is always going to be an important influence over our lives.

As I said above, it transverses nearly every aspect of our lives, influences our decisions and our actions, and impacts the person we become. Our personal philosophies outline what we stand for in our lives. It helps us to be more mindful and understanding of the things that we want in our life as well as the things that we would like to avoid.

This is why it’s important to dedicate the necessary time and effort to ensure that the personal philosophy you establish reflects who you are at your core, what’s important to you, and what you want your ideal lifestyle to look like. Because as soon as you know what you want from your life and what you want to avoid you can stop simply chasing highs in life and begin to actually pursue the things that will bring you true happiness, meaning, and fulfillment.

Our personal philosophy statements thus help us to distinguish our values from those of society and other individuals and provide us with the justification and validation we seem to require in order to begin pursuing our own path rather than simply following the path of other successful individuals who have paved the way before us.  

Overall our personal philosophies enable us to sort through all the madness of our lives and serve as a guide helping us to live with true purpose and intention.

Your Personal Philosophy Definition

Now that we’ve covered what a personal philosophy is and why it’s important it’s time for us to begin figuring out your unique individual personal philosophy.

So if you have one it might be super helpful for you to write this out on a pad of paper as we go through this. If you don’t have a pad of paper then any sheet of paper is fine, just don’t lose it otherwise you’ll have to do this again next time you go to define your personal philosophy

How this is going to work

Now that you’ve got your pen and paper its time to get to work.

In this article, I’m going to help walk you through the process of developing your umbrella personal philosophy. If you want to go a step further and define some of your micro/contextual personal philosophies all you’ll have to do is simply repeat the steps in this post but relate them to the specific context you’re developing the philosophy for.

Just so you understand, this is going to be a give and take process. You’re not just going to write down a few sentences on a sheet of paper, clap your hands, and be done with it. It’s going to take some time of reflection and tweaking. You’re going to have to test things out and decide which of these beliefs and values resonate the most with you at your core.

If you’ve never done this before, this may be challenging. But stick with it, because you will come to develop a better understanding of yourself then you’ve ever had before.

As you begin to identify which values and beliefs are most important to you begin slowly piecing together your personal philosophy. Keep in mind that what you have now is likely not perfect. It’s inevitably going to change as you grow. (At least I hope as you grow… you’re on a personal growth and development blog after all…)

Questions to ask yourself

There are two big categories of questions and then many questions which stem off of these categories. We can ask ourselves these question to get us thinking about what our personal philosophies might be:

1. What are you most passionate about in your life?

• • • What makes you feel alive?
    • Is there something that regularly drives you forward?
    • What are you most motivated to do most days?
    • What achievements do you most value in your life? Why?
    • When you’re faced with challenges and obstacles what motivates you to overcome them?
    • What brings you a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment in your life?
    • Why is a particular belief important to you?

1. What is your ideal lifestyle?

• • • Are there certain activities you’d like to engage in daily?
    • What’s your career life like?
    • How close are your relationships with others around you such as your family and friends?
    • What are you doing that makes you feel like your life is a continual success?

Both of these are important types of questions. Answering them will help you to begin getting a feel for what your personal philosophy might be. Your passions and ideal lifestyle should be reflected within your personal philosophy

As you answer these questions try to avoid simply providing generic responses. Don’t just say you want to be rich and successful. That’s a great goal, kind of, I guess. But it provides you with absolutely no sense of direction or improved self-awareness.

Everyone wants something slightly different from life. So it makes sense that your personal philosophy would also be unique from most other people’s. So take the time to reflect and provide answers that truly resonate with you.

Identifying Commonalities

Now that you have some answers you can begin identifying common elements and themes between them. The commonalities between your answers to the previous questions are likely ones that resonate with you at your core and serve as focal points for your personal philosophy.

To help you identify some common values I’ve created a list that you can pull from. This list contains some commonly identified values in people’s personal philosophy statements:

Now, this is just a list to get you thinking. There are countless values that might be relevant to you and your life. These are just some of the most common ones.

Begin by selecting the 8-10 most relevant values either from this list or other lists online. Then I want you to narrow that down even further to the top 3-4. These are what I refer to as the non-negotiable values. They are things that you live by and things you would be least willing to compromise on.

Remember your personal philosophy is a condensed overview of your beliefs, perspectives, and values so you can’t include them all. They can’t ALL be the most important.

This process won’t be easy. But it will force you to get you to really reflect on who you are and what’s important to you. This is where self-awareness begins to stem from.

Once you have these values, combine them with your core beliefs about your life and how you want to live. This is what will drive you towards a life of meaning and fulfillment.

Devise Your Personal Philosophy Statement

Now that you’ve identified your core values and beliefs it’s time to create a cohesive personal philosophy statement that reflects them in a simple and straightforward manner. This can be one of the tougher steps, so have patience.

Here are a few things that you should try to remember about your personal philosophy as you go about establishing your first draft:

1. The personal philosophy statement should reflect your key worldviews, beliefs, and values.
2. It should be concise, no longer than 3 sentences. Anything longer and I know it’ll turn into something you’re not willing to read regularly.
3. Also, don’t make it an impossible statement to live up to. That’s only setting yourself up for failure and why even bother with all this if that’s the outcome. So be realistic.
4. Remember, your personal philosophy is going to change over time as you grow and evolve as a person. So don’t worry about making it perfect. Perfectionism will only paralyze you from ever creating one, and that’s far worse than having one which isn’t perfect.
5. You won’t have the perfect philosophy statement in a few hours, that’s just not how this works. It takes time, so don’t rush it.
6. Start the process today and you’ll find over time you’ll naturally go back to tweak and refine your personal philosophy into something that becomes increasingly meaningful and motivating for you.
7. The end result should be something that’s highly valuable to you and that will serve you effectively as you move forward throughout your life.

Personal Philosophy Example Case Study

To help make sense of this whole process I’m going to run through a quick personal philosophy example from my own life.

What are the things that I’m most passionate and motivated about?

Learning how to continually learn and improve myself and how I can pass that information on to others so that they can also experience the same personal success and fulfillment.

What is my ideal lifestyle?

I would like something that is stable but also provides me with opportunities for growth and learning as well as the flexibility and freedom to be spontaneous, creative, and explore and pursue the things that I want to do in life. This includes things that I do on my own as well as things with my partner.

Identifying the core values and beliefs

From my answers to the above questions, you might pull out a few different values and beliefs.

The values that stand out the most to me, however, are continual learning, personal development, spontaneity, and creativity.

The main belief I could pull from those answers is that I believe it’s important that we as individuals have the opportunities in life for new experiences which enable us to grow and develop into the people that we want to become.

Devising my personal philosophy statement

Even from this point, you could still come up with a few possibly philosophy statements. The important thing, remember, is that it resonates with you.

So here’s what I came up with based on the above values and beliefs:

My personal philosophy is to continually strive for growth and personal development by putting myself in situations that encourage creative problem-solving. Through these experiences, I will enable myself to live the spontaneous lifestyle that I am seeking and continually learn through my actions. Additionally, I will also be able to help others to do the same by sharing my experiences and insights to help them also develop into the people that they wish to become.

Putting All this Personal Philosophy Stuff into Practice

The message that I’ll leave end this post with is that once you’ve made a personal philosophy, don’t let yourself forget it. Force yourself to live it on a daily basis. That is how you will slowly begin to see positive changes in your life.

Try to regularly ask yourself whether your current actions, goals, and life directions align with your personal philosophy. Are you on the route to living the life you want?

Your values and actions won’t always align, and that’s OK. That’s not the point of the philosophy statement. But you should notice that generally, they do tend to align more often then they don’t and that you’re slowly progressing towards a life that is meaningful and fulfilling to you personally.

So start thinking about how you can begin living this philosophy statement. What actions do you need to be taking? What changes do you need to be making in your daily life? How can you live a life that is the most meaningful and fulfilling that it can be?

Try to schedule these actions that align you with your philosophy statement. This will force you to make time for the things that are going to make you the happiest in life. Additionally, it will help you to keep yourself accountable to your personal philosophy statement.

An excellent strategy is to write out or type out the philosophy statement. Then you can paste is somewhere that you’ll regularly see it.

At the very least, this philosophy statement should serve as a regular reminder. It should remind you that this is your life and it’s your job to make the absolute most of it. Nobody is going to do it for you, regardless of how important you may think you are. So get out there and take action!

Final Thoughts

There are a few important things that I really want you to take away from this post.

The worst thing we can do with our lives is to passively go through the motions of daily living aimlessly. There’s nothing worse than living unfulfilled because you’re too lazy to figure out what truly matters to you.

Also, don’t be afraid to take a shot at creating your personal philosophy even if it seems far from perfect! If you’re anything like me, you’ll have to take a bunch of shots before you get things right. It’s not easy but it is certainly worth the effort in the long-run.

That’s the beautiful part of life design, your steps and decisions can always be revised. You can make changes freely as you go about creating your best life. No decision has to be absolutely final. Again, your personal philosophy will grow and evolve alongside you.

The important thing is that your philosophy will help you to begin moving forward. It will help you to become more proactive in your life. It’s going to direct you towards meaning and fulfillment as defined by your values and beliefs.

So get over your fear of making these small and insignificant mistakes. Instead, be more worried about your fear paralyzing you so much that you actually stop growing and progressing entirely! Don’t let fear prevent you from taking these important next steps towards your dreams.

So take the time and invest in your personal philosophy. If you do this, creating your best life will come much more naturally!

What’s Next…

Now that you’ve established a personal philosophy we can move onto the next step. Next, we are going to be talking about some life design habits and tips. You can use these to fast-track your growth and development!

That’s going to be a great one so watch for it in your inbox. That’s assuming you’ve already subscribed and are a member of the excellence addiction community. If you haven’t subscribed, what are you waiting for?

Until then, stay excellent!

Regards,
Mark

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