Discover Your Life’s Core Values & Operating Principles - Taylor Pearson - #199

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is Taylor Pearson, and we are talking about yet another blog post which I fell in love with at the beginning of the year and tracked the author down online to force him to come onto Modern Wisdom. Your life is directed by the core values and operating principles which underpin it. Whether you've written them down or not, whether you even know what they are or not, they are the wind in the sails of your life. And upon reading Taylor's blog posts at the start of the year, I realized just how much of a profound effect it had on me to force myself into purposefully manifesting, actually getting them out of me. And I just wanted to bring it to you guys. If you're in the right place to hear this, I genuinely believe that the exercises which Taylor takes us through today can really, really impact your life in a massively positive direction. And they're free. My advice would be that once you've finished listening to this episode, head to Taylor's website, check out the exercises and give them a crack yourself. I'd love to find out if they have as brilliant of an impact on you as they did on me. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Taylor Pearson. Before we get into today's podcast, I have to put a disclaimer out. It is absolutely sweltering in Newcastle, so I'm wearing a vest. Got loads of stick last time I wore a vest, but it's not a lack of care about this podcast. I'm super excited to sit down with Taylor Pearson. It's just too warm, you know what I mean? Under a bunch of lights, and it's challenging today, but Taylor, man, welcome to the show.

**Taylor Pearson** (1:46)
Pleasure to be here, glad you're saying cool.

**Chris Williamson** (1:49)
I'm trying, well, the problem is in the UK, it's only hot for like five days of the year, so no one has air con. But to not have air con in a house in America would be ridiculous, right? But over here, it's like, why would you have air con? It's cold, like seven and a half months out of the year, and so it is what it is. So today, we're gonna talk about core principles and values. You've got a couple of blog posts which just blew me away when I read them at the start of this year, and have been a huge influence on me. And I just wanted to give you the opportunity to tell the audience about why core values and operating principles are so useful, why they're so important, and then kind of give us some insight into your thoughts on them. So to begin with, do we all have core values and operating principles? Because you've got this big list on your site of 37 operating principles and your five core values and all this stuff. If someone hasn't written them out, do they still have them guiding their actions?

**Taylor Pearson** (2:46)
Yeah, I think at some level, you all have intrinsic. We all face decisions every day. You have like whatever mundane decisions. Am I going to have a salad for lunch or a burger for lunch? You have, you know, who or whatever, who am I going to marry? Who am I? You know, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? Blah, blah, blah. And you're just there's some algorithm, so to speak. You have some internal way where you're like waiting. What's going on in that decision and choosing it one way or the other. So, yeah, to me, it's something that I think everyone has to some extent internally. I found externalizing them, you know, sort of like making them explicit where I can kind of read them. And one can like help me be a little bit more self-reflective, right? Like is this actually something that I think is important? Do I want to do this? And then, you know, oftentimes also just I find out I'll sort of treat one area of my life one way, another area of my life another way, right? And so, you know, when I sort of like put all those things out on paper, it forces me to be a little bit more like, oh, like actually this is like a bit hypocritical. And, you know, I could apply this to there and that to there.

**Chris Williamson** (3:46)
So, you use the learnings from certain areas of your life to progress your understanding and insights in different areas of your life?

**Taylor Pearson** (3:56)
Yeah, I think, you know, to start maybe the General Operating Principles, the way that kind of like originated for me, and I'm sure like everyone who has this experience is like, you do something dumb, you make some mistake, or you have some like significant learning, you're like, wow, I really hope that in the future, like I don't do that thing that way again. Like, this is the correct way to do that is actually this other way. And like, that's what I should do. And I guess I found myself like, just, you know, despite thinking that I would then just like proceed to make the same mistake in some slightly different way at some point in the future. And so kind of the way my General Operating Principle started was like, okay, I, you know, this thing, like, I want to remember this, so I'm going to write it down and I should put it in a place that I can look over once a week or every other week. Typically around sort of like when once a week I'll plan out my week and kind of what, what am I going to prioritize, what is the decision I'm going to make? And I'll read through that. And, you know, very frequently it's like, oh, like I'm about to make that mistake again, you know, for the 14th time kind of thing. But if, you know, if I have it there and it's written and I can look at it, I go, ah, like this, you know, I can notice that I'm doing this thing again and I can be a little bit more deliberate about it. So having those externalized sort of written down has been really helpful for me.