By Teal Swan
The new, beautifully designed The Inner Compass Deck by Teal Swan has a very simple yet crucial aim: to help you discover what matters most to you.
We all deserve to live unconditionally according to our values, applying them to our work, relationships, mental health, and everyday life.
Think of your honest, authentic self as true north, and this values deck as your compass, guiding you to what you want to be in the world, what you want to do, and how you want to go about doing it.
THE NORTH STAR (also known as Polaris or the Pole Star) is famous for holding nearly still in the sky. It appears this way to us because it is located so close to the north celestial pole, which is the point around which the entire northern sky turns. The North Star, as its name suggests, marks the way due north and, as such, acts as a guiding light for many. Travellers have used its brightness and prominence in the sky as a navigational tool for centuries.
Like the North Star, your values can be used to guide you and keep you on the right path. When you do so, you allow your inner compass to point you to a destination that is both purposeful and uniquely meant for you.
Overall, life experiencing satisfaction, happiness, wellbeing, and fulfillment really boil down to figuring out what you value in life.
Prioritizing and then living unconditionally according to those values – no matter what. You can think of this process as following your own personal North Star or inner compass.
Each card in The Inner Compass Deck represents a different value, along with a description of that value, and is designed to help you to locate your own inner compass. Later in this booklet, I will give you some specific ways of using the cards, but for now, let us consider what we mean by “values.”
WHAT ARE VALUES?
A value is something you believe to be most important, worth something, and useful at your deepest, most authentic core.
YOUR VALUES ARE about how you want to be in the world relative to others and to yourself, what you want to do, and how you want to go about doing it. In your heart of hearts, what do you really want? What really has it worth? When the things we do and the way we behave in the world – toward others and ourselves – match our values, we experience life satisfaction. The complications fall away as we purify and streamline our lives in the direction of our true values.
For most of us, there is a big difference between what we value doing and what we are actually doing; how we value acting and how we actually act. We feel as if something is wrong but can’t put our finger on exactly what, and so we don’t know what to do about it.
If we value spending time connecting with our family, for example, but we work a 70-hour week, we are not living according to our values. If we value being creative and artistic but take a job in accounting, we are not living according to our values. If we value being useful to others and doing something of meaning but sit on the couch binge-watching TV shows, we are not living according to our values. If we value pouring all of ourselves into the pursuit of an achievement, but we give up on our goals to please someone else in our life, we are not living according to our values.
The people who are happy on this earth are the ones who are actually doing what they value doing and acting how they value acting. They do not have the experience of being pulled in many different directions because they are able to acknowledge their values, prioritize their actions accordingly and let the chips fall where they may. When we are clear about our values, everything in our lives becomes simpler.
The hardest part about defining your values (so as to live according to them) is to be brutally honest with yourself about what they really are. We live in a society that tells us that some values are more acceptable than others. Some make us “good,” while others make us selfish or “bad”. As a result, we have lost touch with our actual values and are failing to follow our own inner compass, our own North Star.
To realign with our inner compass, we need to be willing to consider that we may have values that we have been conditioned to believe are not acceptable to have in comparison to others. This is especially true when we are expected to self-sacrifice. Essentially, other people expect us to have the same values that they have and thus prioritize our actions according to their values.
Value conflicts within couples are one of the main causes of incompatibility. Obviously, if values are reflective of our true desires, and our true desires are taking two people in opposite directions, and toward opposite ends, there is no way to keep the relationship together. The conflict will just keep mounting until there is a rupture beyond repair. This is yet another reason that it is so critical to figure out your values so that you can find a partner whose values are consistent with your own, instead of trying to talk people into having the same values as you.
PRIORITIZING YOUR VALUES
Ideally, we would all design a life in which we are able to make space for all our values, where we could engage in one without taking away from another.
Values are all about clarifying our priorities. However, they dictate what we decide to do and not do.
This universe, being a time-space reality of expansion and, therefore, growth, loves to put us in a pinch and make us decide what we really want, to choose between our priorities. And if we don’t make this choice consciously, we will make it subconsciously. The problem is our subconscious often prioritizes what provides safety as opposed to what gives us the most personal fulfillment. For this reason, in order to experience life satisfaction, we not only need to prioritize our top values but, when push comes to shove, we need to ask ourselves: “If I could only satisfy one of these values, which would I choose?”
So, look at your life and be really honest about how you are not living in alignment with your top value or values. What changes could you make today to fix this? If you don’t know what your true values are, life will teach you. It will put you in all kinds of value-clarifying situations and, one by one, they will show you what it is you don’t want and, consequently, highlight what you do want with glaring colour.
LIVING IN ALIGNMENT WITH YOUR VALUES
Changing your life to live according to your values (and therefore priorities) involves risk, and for this reason, it is tempting to put it off and tell yourself that you will do so at some point in the future.
For example, imagine that you value spending time connecting with your romantic partner. In order to really do that, however, you believe you have to make enough money to be able to quit your job. This situation requires that you live out of alignment with your values today, constantly working to make enough money to quit so that you can live in alignment with your values one day in the future. This will not work. There is no true future in this universe; there is only now.
When we live our life in accordance with our values, we are sending out a message to the universe about what we really want, about our actual commitment, and about where we are choosing to put our energy. When we do this, the universe will respond by committing those things to you in return, not tomorrow, not next year – today. For this reason, we must do today as we would do in the future. That is the only way the future will look different and be the one that reflects our genuine values. There must be no conditions set on living in alignment with our values. No exceptions.
Keep in mind that your values may alter over the course of your life in response to your experiences and your changing desires. As such, you must let them change and alter your life accordingly. Living unconditionally in alignment with your true values is a lifelong practice – meaning it never ends. You will constantly have to check your inner compass and make sure that you are heading in the direction of your North Star. It’s worth the effort, however: your values are the foundation of who you are and what you stand for. Knowing them and living by them is the difference between just going through the motions and really living.
