Creating Conscious Value Rules to Live With Abundance

In this article, we’ll create powerful conscious rules to overcome anxiety, limiting beliefs, and keep us living with an abundance of joy. Expect the exercise to take roughly 20 minutes. As a prerequisite, I recommend doing the Values and the Value Rules exercises first.

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

-Rumi

What are Conscious Value Rules?

Remember the value rules we created in the last exercise? Many people find that their positive rules are much harder to trigger than their negative rules. If we are trying to maximize joy, it would make sense to eliminate things that trigger our negative rules and do more things that trigger our positive rules. 

This mindset may seem potentially hedonistic at first. “Why go to work if it doesn’t fall under my positive value rules?” That is an important question to ask ourselves, as many of us are working jobs that don’t completely fulfill us. 

Naturally, there will always be times we simply must do things that don’t seem to fall under our positive value rules. Perhaps we are working that job we dislike just temporarily, to save up money to be able to do the things we actually love to do. 

This is where we can broaden our perspective and increase our mental flexibility by expanding our positive rule set and contracting the negative.

Conscious rules allow us to diminish our inner critics by creating new rules that will override our existing ones. When we have the power to create our own rules, we can choose to make our positive rules very easy to elicit, and our negative ones difficult. 

The benefits of this are potentially outstanding. Imagine you are thinking of writing a blog post, but your inner critic says “no, you’re not good enough, who will read it?” This is the common negative value of “inadequacy” rearing its head. As you mindfully notice the negative value coming up, you remind yourself “oh, I made a conscious rule to only feel not good enough if the three people closest to me tell me ‘you are a worthless jerk’”. That would make it pretty hard to feel inadequate!

I use this as an example because it was actually part of my thought process when I started making these posts.

Creating Conscious Value Rules

Creating conscious value rules is a simple, fun, creative process that can be as personal or general as you want.

For each of your top positive and negative values, imagine a few rules that would make your positive values easy to elicit and your negative ones difficult. Also try to make them easy to remember!  

Here are some examples to help jumpstart your creative juices:

Negative Conscious Value Rules 

Inadequate

●      I will only feel inadequate when the 5 people most close to me that I respect most would all stand up to me and say “Seva you’re worthless”

●      I will only feel inadequate when there is absolutely no way for me to reframe criticism to be viewed as growth

Restriction

●      I will only feel restriction when I’ve exhausted all options for freeing myself of a restriction

●      I will only feel restriction when I am physically, forcibly coerced into a situation and am not able to make the best of it

Meaninglessness

●      I will only feel meaninglessness when I have not learned anything or done anything nice to anyone for more than a week

Positive Conscious Value Rules 

Growth

●      I will treat every setback and failure as a part of growth

Freedom

●      I will remember that I have full agency over my life and have the power to change any situation I’m in

Love

●      I will notice every small, kind gesture someone displays to others or myself as an act of love. Even just a smile makes a difference.

Next Steps 

Hopefully, you are beginning to see the benefits these conscious rules can have on your life. They have certainly helped me to stay positive and overcome my limiting beliefs. 

Write down these rules somewhere where you’ll have easy access to them. Review them frequently until you internalize them. They will be floating around in our subconscious so that we can remember them as often as we can when they are applicable.  

With time we can reprogram our minds to break free of limiting beliefs, overcome fear, live with an abundance mindset, and reach our fullest potential.