Values Over Valuables - What Is Your Legacy?

This is my guest post today from www.simplemarriage.net.

Which do you think people value more: a financial or non-financial inheritance? Or, to put it another way, if you lost a loved one, what legacy would you want to have from them?

The statistics may surprise you. A few years ago, Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America conducted a survey of over 2600 baby boomers and elders.

According to the survey, participants felt a non-financial legacy was 10 times more important than money and other assets. Think about that; the response overwhelmingly favored a personal heritage over worldly goods, values over valuables.

77% of boomers and elders personally felt values and life experiences were very important parts of an inheritance. How exciting to realize that virtually every single person has the ability to leave a meaningful heritage for their loved ones!

Which types of values are the most important to leave as your legacy? They include your personal values, ethics, religion, memories, heritage, and family stories. Not coincidentally, these values are all elements of an Ethical Will.

While an Ethical Will is non-legal and non-financial, to your family it is priceless.

Leaving a legacy your family will treasure can be as simple as writing them a love letter or capturing your words in an audio or video recording. Whatever you decide to do, here are some of the topics you can include:

• Your History – Past and Present
Remember all the great stories you used to hear when you were a kid? Some of them might have been fantasies, like bedtime stories, but many of them were probably true. For me, the best stories came from favorite family members and friends. I recall everyone sitting around the kitchen table while Grandpa talked about farming, or Uncle Morris told a tall tale about raising pigs. I was fascinated, hanging on their every word. Those are among the stories I want to pass down to my young grandchildren and even to future generations.

Have you started a genealogy or family tree? I love to visualize a bare oak tree with the roots exposed as in this diagram. That forms the heritage and structure of a family, which includes all the dates, places, and names. Now consider all your family stories – those are what flesh out the tree, including the leaves and blossoms that make it interesting. If your family is like mine, those stories flesh out all the fruits and nuts of a family, too. They are the quirky, personal stories that everyone loves to hear.

• Life Lessons and Achievements
Think about your own life. Everyone experiences and responds differently to life lessons. That is why they are such an important element of your Ethical Will. What have you learned during your life, when, and from whom? Your life lessons often shape who you are and who you become.

What have been your proudest accomplishments and why? What can your descendants learn from your successes and missteps? Which achievements by your family have made you proud? How does having confidence in yourself lead you to more successes?

Think about the wisdom you can bequeath to your family. Flesh out your advice with stories and examples. What advice do you want your friends and family to remember? How can you help them in some way?

• Personal Values and Beliefs
Your personal values are unique to you, and they may vary from time to time. Every person responds differently to the influences in their lives and what life dishes out to them. Examining your own personal values allows you to figure out not only who you are, but who you want to become.

Your values are determined by your heart, your family, your friends, your religion, and your community. They may be as ingrained in you as DNA. Consider which personal values and beliefs you want to include in your Ethical Will.

• Hopes for the Future
Voice your hopes for the future, for you, your family, your community, and your world. Which hopes and dreams are most important to you for your vision of the future? What do you look forward to sharing with those you love?

As you start working on your Legacy of Love, relish the thought that your values are more important than any valuables you may leave behind.

To whom do you plan to write your first Ethical Will?

Personal Values Writing Workshop

Are students in Ireland very different than students in America? Yesterday I had the pleasure to find out when I conducted a Personal Values Writing Workshop to a classs of 16 year old girls in a Dublin school. They all had lovely Irish accents which made it just a bit challenging to understand when they spoke softly.

In the course of this trip abroad, I've managed to catch a miserable cold. By the time of this workshop, my voice was almost gone and I seemed to either squeak or croak when trying to talk. Needless to say, my presentation was not quite as dynamic as usual. Fortunately, the young women were all well-behaved and I didn't have to yell. LOL

The workshop started out with a discussion about Personal Values, why they are important and from whom we learn them. At first, the girls seemed a bit reluctant to respond, but before long they offered their own ideas more willingly.

Each of the girls selected a few of their favorite Personal Values from a sample list of about 30, then wrote a short story about why they were important to them and how they had learned them. There were several recurrent themes throughout most of the stories, such as friendship, loyalty, honesty and respect. Those same values seem to resonate with American students as well.

One thing that surprised me was that none of the girls wanted to read their own writing. Rather, they volunteered to read someone else's story, which has not been the case in any of my other writing workshops. The Principal explained later that in Ireland, all children are required to learn Gaelic in addition to English. So they have less time available to work on speaking and presentation skills. From just the little that I saw on street signs, there doesn't seem to be any similarities between the two languages, as there is in French or Spanish.

A few of the girls responded quite well to my encouragement to write. In fact, one student wrote a lovely story in spite of her usually not participating fully in the classes. I was very encouraged to see that.

So the biggest difference I noticed between American and Irish students? It was their lack of confidence in their presentations. Otherwise, there were many similarities. As always, I was pleased to see their positive reception of my message.

Values to Live By

This post appeared on February 16, 2010, on Corey Allen's http://simplemarriage.com.

Values.

What do they mean to you?

When was the last time you considered the values that make up your character?

Are you trustworthy, loyal, fair, honorable or patient?

Are your friends and family proud of who you are? Why or why not?

What can you do to improve?

What are values?

Values are the ideals or principles of a given society and the personal qualities considered worthwhile or desirable. They are different for each of us and can vary from person to person and even for each person from one time to another.

We learn our values from our families, friends, religion and community. In turn, the people we associate with learn values from us as well. Are your loved ones learning the values that you want them to adopt? The world is moving so quickly that we need to ensure that our families and children understand what values are important to us.

Consider these quotes:

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil. ~ C. S. Lewis

As a man, I’ve been representative of the values I hold dear. And the values I hold dear are carryovers from the lives of my parents. ~ Sidney Poitier

What values are important to you?

Think of the traits you admire most in someone close to you, such as a parent or a best friend.

Do you share those same values? Most often, we tend to share similar values with the people with whom we associate. Obviously, that can be good or bad. With young people, it is especially important that they choose their companions wisely.

When I conduct writing workshops for high school students, one of the most frequently requested topics is Personal Values. It is always an illuminating exercise to have the students check off the values that are important to them. One person may select almost all of the values in the list, while others cannot seem to relate to more than one or two. What does that tell us about their character?

How are you passing your values on to your family?

Your actions speak louder than words. If you want your kids to be honest, what are you teaching them by your actions? Do you tell little white lies from time to time, fudge the numbers a bit on your taxes or fail to point out when a cashier gives you too much change?

If your faith is important to you, do you practice it with your family? Do you attend services regularly, or only when it is convenient or a major event, such as Easter or Christmas? If you ran into your minister, priest, imam or rabbi on the street, would he/she recognize you? Better yet, would you recognize them in their “street clothes?”

Children look up to their parents and tend to emulate their actions, whether we realize it or not. As an example, consider your reaction when a 4-year-old drops something and lets out a short curse. Will it be a mild expletive or something stronger that they’ve heard you say? With luck, it takes only a time or two for the parent to realize how much “little ears” pick up from us.

When my grandson expressed his frustration about something by using Daddy’s favorite swear word, Daddy and Mommy both started using a new preference of “Oh, snap!” At first, it struck me as pretty funny, but I was proud to see that exercising their values helped them to teach their children what was acceptable behavior.

It isn’t easy to be a role model for our children, but it is crucial if we want to pass on our values to them. So the next time you are tempted to cut an ethical corner or use words that you don’t want them to repeat, keep in mind that your kids are watching and listening.

Exercises on Values

Try these simple exercises on values. Look at this list of sample values and select the ones that are most important to you, or at least a few to start with. There is no right answer. In fact, your personal values may not even be on this list.

SAMPLE VALUES

activism
authenticity
boldness
can do attitude
charity
chivalry
cleanliness
communication
confidence
courage
creativity
curiosity
dignity
diversity
empathy
endurance
enthusiasm
excitement
fairness
faith
friendship
genuineness
God
gratitude
hard work
helpfulness
honor
hope
humility
independence
innovation
integrity
interest in others
inventiveness
joie de vivre
joyfulness
kindness
lifelong learning
listening
love
loyalty
motivation
nonviolence
open mindedness
organization
participation
patience
persistence
positive attitude
pride (not ego)
promptness
quality
resilience
resourcefulness
respect
responsibility
self-esteem
sense of honor
sense of humor
social skills
supportiveness
tradition
work ethics

Your Personal Values

1. Which values are most important to you? Why?
2. From whom did you learn these values? How?
3. Which values do you admire in people around you? Why?
4. In what ways do you act on your values?
5. How do your values help you make difficult decisions?

Once you have identified some of your own values and contemplated their importance to you, take the opportunity to open up a dialog with your family members. Discuss the importance of values with them and share your own experiences.

If you could instill three values into the people around you, what would they be?

I’d love to get your feedback on which values YOU consider important.