Principles

Your Principles Require 100% Commitment and Dedication

There will be times in your life when you are called upon to stand up for your principles, especially if you have principles based on your core personal values.

These moments need not be major, life-defining incidents. Rather, they often crop up during mundane day-to-day activities. When you take action in accordance with your principles, often called living up to your principles, the glow of self satisfaction can be immense and is reward enough in itself.

However, when you do not act in harmony with your principles, a little piece of you dies inside and your soul becomes uncomfortable and agitated. 

7 Key Elements of a Project You Life 

A lot of the literature we read and the stories we hear while growing up feature characters struggling or learning to formulate their principles and act accordingly. One common lesson in most of these stories is that principles are not situational, something many people forget when becoming adults and entering "the real world."

Principles are the rocks upon which your decisions for action should be made. Your principles help ensure that you live up to your personal values, and thus need to be  solidly entrenched in your psyche and persona. As Edward R. Lyman wrote:

Principle ─ particularly moral principle ─ can never be a weathervane, spinning around this way and that with the shifting winds of expediency. Moral principle is a compass forever fixed and forever true.

Your principles require 100% commitment and dedication. They are not something to be pulled out of your wallet or purse and used to pay for your experiences in life like some kind of values credit card.

One of the best ways to Live A Determined Life will be, to paraphrase Shakespeare's famous line, to thine own principles be true. 

This article is partially excerpted from the top-selling personal development book Project You: Living A Determined Life, available at Amazon in Kindle and paperback formats.