It is important to carefully consider your values for several reasons: (1) they could guide your life minute by minute towards noble goals, rather than your life being controlled by self-serving motives, customs, accidental occurrences, bad habits, impulses, or emotions. You have to know where you are going before you can get there. (2) Values and morals can not only guide but inspire and motivate you, giving you energy and a zest for living and for doing something meaningful. (3) Sensitivity to a failure to live up to your basic values may lead to unproductive guilt or to constructive selfdissatisfaction which motivates you to improve. (4) High values and some success meeting those goals are necessary for high self-esteem. (5) Professed but unused values are worthless or worse--phony goodness and rationalizations for not changing. We must be honest with ourselves, recognizing the difference between pretended (verbalized) values and operational (acted on) values. Of course, no one lives up to all their ideals, but values that only make us look or feel good (including being religious) and do not help us act more morally must be recognized as self-serving hypocrisy.
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Thus, self-help is not just for overcoming problems; it also involves learning to become what you truly value, achieving your greatest potential. That is why your values and strengths should be considered along with your problems. For every fault or weakness you want to lose, you have a valuable strength to gain; for every crude emotion to control, you have an opposing good feeling to experience; for every awkwardness, a helpful skill to acquire; for every denial, a truth to be found. Optimally, you will identify your problems, as in chapter 2, but also decide on lofty goals that are worthy of your life. I would like to help you find out where you truly want to go. Then, I hope you and I become sufficiently discontent with our shortcomings and dedicated to our highest goals so that we are motivated to achieve our greatest potential. Trying to be good is important, perhaps more important than solving personal problems. Both are self-help.
Moral development teachers often say that becoming moral requires enough emotional development to feel guilty when we do wrong, enough social development to accept our responsibility for behaving in agreed upon ways towards our group, and enough cognitive development to be able to place ourselves in another person's shoes. But just because you develop some of these qualities, it doesn't guarantee that you will develop a wise and effective philosophy of life.
As Steven Covey (1992), the author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, points out, many people set goals and strive for years to achieve one after another, only to discover when they get to the end goals that they didn't want to go there. He says, "no one on their death bed ever complains that they should have spent more time in the office." In a new book, First Things First, Covey (1994) says everyone and every family (and every organization, every nation, etc.) should have a well thought out "Mission Statement," a set of values, or a guiding philosophy of life. At the end of life, intimate relationships and how you have dealt with others are the things that count. I recommend his books.
Are we Americans becoming more moral? Perhaps in some ways. Reportedly, more and more people are volunteering to help the poor, the sick, and the elderly. For the first 80 years of this century, US citizens have gradually paid more taxes (that is doing good!) but more recently political conservatives have been encouraging us to hate taxes. In addition, there is a lot of evidence we are backsliding morally, e.g. a few years ago 9 out of 10 defense contractors were under criminal investigation. In 1990, when tax payers were required to give the Social Security numbers for every dependent, seven million names disappeared! More evidence of backsliding:
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