Importance of living by principles in life

Importance of living by principles in life 

What are principles?

Principles are defined as rules of personal conduct. In other words are defined as standards of rightness or morality that direct an individual to have good behaviors and be able to distinguish between good and evil or right and wrong.

Principles often work hand in hand with values and both are essential elements that make our character and personality unique from others in existence. Let’s look at this example to introduce this concept:

Mika is a new employee in the company and one of his values is teamwork. Mika has a principle that he will always prefer teamwork instead of individual work because of his value of teamwork.

Getting back to the point is that values are fundamental beliefs that a person is holding while principles are what dictate your actions and behaviors and they are born out of values meaning you have to have values first in order to make them your rules that we call principles. Principles are kind of rules and laws which are strict and they apply to organizations, individuals or even countries.

Importance of principles 

You’ve probably came across a person calling himself or herself “A person of principles” if not, it’s not a big deal, I will break it down for you why most people embrace a life with principles, and they are proud to call themselves “I am a person of principles”.

Hey look, in our daily routine, we have to make multiple decisions. If you don’t have principles it will be really hard to make right decisions because you don’t have rules as a driving force to navigate you in figuring out what’s wrong and what’s right to do. Principles help you to draw up a strong conclusion of what decision to take because you already know the reason as to why you are making that decision.

Taking you back to the first example I gave you about Mika, I will further give you this example to make it easy for you to understand the concept better. Assume Mika is assigned a task to complete by his manager in the company, and has been asked that if he prefer to complete the task as an individual or with a team. Remember Mika has a value for teamwork, then it would be really a piece of cake for him to decide what he wants to go for. He will obviously go for team because it’s his rule or let me say a principle that he already established beyond doubt for the fact that he already know the reason as to why he prefer it. This is the power of living by principles, they truly help us to make quick decision in our life.

In addition to that, principles will help you to remain in a right track, because they will help you to identify what’s right and what’s wrong, restricting you to make countless mistakes because you know what’s wrong and what’s right to do in life. Moreover living by principles describe you as a decent and highly disciplined person because you have moral standards which will also earn you respect and credibility from people surrounding you.

What are the easiest ways I can set my values and principles?

Don’t worry too much, if you don’t know your values and principles. What you need to do is, answer these questions given below:

Question 1. Think of the time you overcome an obstacle that seemed insurmountable, write down how you did it, and what tactics you used and you are proud of.

Question 2. Think of the time someone compliments you because of the great job you have done, write down what you embraced when you were doing it. (Is it fearlessness, courage, honest, respect, hope or relentlessness?) think of them.

Question 3. Think of the time you were happy or satisfied because of the result of any of your undertakings. Jot it down and how you manage to win and what was the driving force to do it?

After answering the above questions that will help you discover important tactics to deal with different situations and has helped you win in your endeavors, now single out the main things that have helped you out, for example respect or fearlessness. Those will be your core values, since you have singled them out with no doubts. Now with practice and time those values will surely become principles of your life which you will live by and you need to embrace them every day to direct your actions and decisions.