Live Your Life Philosophy
Living your personal philosophy is how it brings value to your life and the world. How you choose to live your personal philosophy determines the value it will bring to your life and what you will bring to our world.
Knowing some of the common experiences that people make their personal philosophy part of their life, hearing about their transformational experiences with theirs are great ways to understand what it means to live your personal philosophy.
One important part of living your personal philosophy is keeping it in sync with your life and the world. This part of LifePhilosophy.net includes information on each of these.
Fully Living Your Personal Philosophy to Enrich Your Life
Your personal philosophy is based upon your perspective on the world including your thoughts and feelings about the things that are most essential and how life should be lived and the world should be. Because of this, even before you began developing it, parts of it were undoubtedly at least influencing your life. Once you started actively thinking about and working on developing your personal philosophy that influence became more active. From that time on the influence of your personal philosophy has grown. The extent to which your personal philosophy becomes an active part of your life determines how much value it will bring. For some this comes naturally, for others actively working to make your personal philosophy part of your life is needed to fully live it and to fully realize the value it can bring.
Some of the ways that you can life your personal philosophy fully:
Understanding some of the ways that you can actively make your personal philosophy part of your life can help you live it more fully. Below are some of these ways. In addition to these, On Terms of Your Own: The Pursuit of Being and Fulfillment in a Challenging World includes further depth for understanding your personal philosophy and making it an enriching part of your life. It also introduces two new concepts for more fulling living your personal philosophy, life paradigms and ways of being. Consider it as an additional resource.
Continuing to expand and connect with your perspective on the world and life
The initial parts of developing your personal philosophy necessarily involve connecting with your perspective on the world (expanding) and yourself (connecting). A key part of keeping your personal philosophy in sync with you and your life is to continue to stay connected. Many find that the experience of actively staying connected is transformative in itself.
It is easy to be consumed by the pressures of life in a complex world or to seek to isolate oneself from them, especially considering the dramatic crises that confront us. It is also possible to become obsessed with pursuing a narrow focus or throwing one’s hands up about the whole thing and disengage. These extremes lead you to become disconnected with either the world, yourself or both. Actively staying connected with the world, your perspective on it and yourself is a key part of fully living your personal philosophy. Sustaining this connection keeps you in touch with the basis for your personal philosophy, that which is essential to you. By continuing to stay in touch with your perspective on the world and yourself, you are effectively tapping into the basis for your personal philosophy and making it an active part of your life.
You use yours as a source of personal meaning
An important characteristic of a well-developed personal philosophy is that it encapsulates what you place value in as well as your personal sources of meaning. Both can be difficult to keep top of mind and to stay in touch with. Since your personal philosophy makes your complex thoughts and feelings more tangible, one important way of living yours more fully is to draw upon it to make them an active part of your life. Using secondary ways of expressing your personal philosophy can be especially effective for drawing upon it. Symbology and ritual have been a part of the human experience since prehistoric times and they still retain their moving capability.
Actively draw upon your personal philosophy as you make decisions
The decisions you make are often influenced by immediate and irrelevant factors that do not reflect what is important. Actively using your personal philosophy when making decisions in your life can help you make better decisions for you.
Your personal philosophy can help you make practical decisions about the things you do, resolve moral dilemmas and even help with major life decisions. Using yours in this way, as a practical life tool, reinforces the importance of developing it to be broadly applicable and for making the investment in developing it well and not shortcutting the process.
Beyond helping you make better decisions, using your personal philosophy for decision making in your life makes it real through the results of your decisions. That is, as you make decisions that reflect your personal philosophy, the outcome of those decisions embody your personal philosophy. As the outcomes of those decisions carry on in your life, the value of your personal philosophy grows along with them.
Discussing your personal philosophy with others
If you are comfortable doing so, discussing your personal philosophy with others is a great way to make it real in your life. The knowledge others have of you is what they have developed through their interactions and their own perspective on people and the world. This process is not always the most reliable and people can have misperceptions about you. Sharing your personal philosophy with others can help them understand you, the things you do and the decisions you make. This can be especially valuable when the things you do or the decisions you make do not align with those that others do or make.
Be better equipped to develop and live your personal philosophy.
Read:
On Terms of Your Own:
The Pursuit of Being and Fulfillment in a Challenging World.
Sharing Your Experiences with Your Personal Philosophy
In the Live Yours Fully section we looked at how discussing your personal philosophy with others can help them understand you and the things you do. Beyond helping others understand you and the decisions you make, sharing your personal philosophy and your experiences with developing and living it can be rewarding, freeing, affirmational, empowering and simply enjoyable. If you are comfortable doing so, please share your personal philosophy and your experiences developing and living it.
Ways to share your personal philosophy and your experiences with developing and living it:
By living your personal philosophy, you make it real in your life and for the world. Living it undoubtedly is the best way to share your personal philosophy, but others might not realize that you are doing so. If you want to help them understand yours and the value it brings to your life, sharing it and your experiences with developing and living it will help you do so.
Sharing in person
Beyond making your personal philosophy part of your life, the best way to share your personal philosophy with someone else is to talk with them. There is a lot of complexity involved with your personal philosophy and in-person dialog allows for the interaction needed to help others understand you and your personal philosophy in the appropriate depth.
How you share your personal philosophy probably will depend upon who you are sharing it with and the context in which you are sharing it. As things come up in discussions that are in alignment, or are out of alignment, with some aspect of your personal philosophy, bringing it directly into the conversation can help others understand your perspective. If you have developed yours well, you know your thoughts and feelings behind that part of your personal philosophy and have depth to bring into the discussion.
Laying out your entire personal philosophy is something that likely will take time and multiple discussions. It is an endeavor that you can and should do with those that are close to you. Hopefully, while you were developing yours, you had the opportunity to discuss one or more aspects of it with them and it is not a subject without context. If not, setting the stage by explaining what personal philosophies are and why they are valuable in one’s life as well as your motivation for developing yours can be helpful. You can always direct them to LifePhilosophy.net if they have a lot of questions about personal philosophies that you don’t feel like diving into.
Share through social media
As events occur in your life that are connected to or the result of your personal philosophy, consider sharing through your favorite social media platforms. If you are comfortable with doing so, it can help others better understand you and get to know you.
As you share through social media, consider including the hashtags #personalphilosophy and #lifephilosophy to make it easy for other people interested in personal philosophies to find your post or for it to find them.
LifePhilosophy.net is active on Facebook and LinkedIn. Sharing your experiences through these platforms is easy.
- Post to your Facebook page and direct it @LifePhilosophy.net, or
- Or you can post to the LifePhilosophy.net page directly. (Please note: we review all posts to our Facebook page.)
LinkedIn is a great platform for sharing your experiences relative to your livelihood and key interests. To share through LinkedIn:
- Go to your LinkedIn home page,
- Click on create your post using the “start a post” box that appears at the top of your feed.
- Don’t forget to include #PersonalPhilosophy or #LifePhilosophy hashtag so that we at LifePhilosophy.net can pick it up in our feed.
- Include #LifePhilosophyNet to direct it to us specifically.
Keeping Your Personal Philosophy In Sync with You.
Although personal philosophies generally do not change drastically or suddenly, they are not cast in stone and are not dogmas. In the Deeper Dive of the Life Philosophy Learning Center, we looked at how it is important that your personal philosophy evolves as the world changes and as you grow as an individual. By keeping your personal philosophy up to date as you grow and the world changes, you will continue to realize the value of it in your life.
Ways to keep your personal philosophy current.
There are two primary ways to keep your personal philosophy current, ongoing and periodic updates. While both are better than letting your personal philosophy get out of sync with you, your life and the world, keeping yours in sync on an ongoing basis has real benefits.
Keeping Your Personal Philosophy In Sync Through Periodic Updates
The most common way people keep their personal philosophies up to date is through periodic updates. Though this is easier to do, there are downsides to this approach.
There are generally two reasons that prompt a periodic update to your personal philosophy. The first is the realization of a significant change in you or your understanding of the world. These changes include personal growth or change, learning something significant about the world that is essential to you or major changes in the world that affect your understanding of it. These changes need to be integrated into your personal philosophy for it to continue to be in sync with you and your perspective. The second reason that can prompt an update to your personal philosophy is that you realize that it is out of sync with you but are not sure why. This happens when you do not regularly keep yours up to date and it can be difficult to realize what is happening. Here too, the underlying cause is a significant change in you or the world, but it somehow escaped your active realization. Some of the signs to watch for are that you no longer actively use your personal philosophy in your life or that you no longer are realizing value from it.
Periodic updates to your personal philosophy follow the same process for developing the initial version of your personal philosophy. Typically, the new aspects of your personal philosophy add to those currently in it. Though, it is important not to give too much importance to your current personal philosophy, especially if parts of it have become out of sync with you. You may realize that as you reevaluate what you find essential, parts of your personal philosophy are no longer essential and need to be updated or removed altogether. One of the challenges with periodic updates is the large amount of change that can be involved in these cases.
Keeping Your Personal Philosophy In Sync on an Ongoing Basis
The best way to keep your personal philosophy up to date, is to make expanding your perspective and connecting with what is essential to you an ongoing part of your life. Doing so not only keeps your personal philosophy in sync with you, you also enjoy the benefits of staying connected with the current state of our world.
Keeping your personal philosophy current on an ongoing basis is largely about making each of the necessary parts of developing, knowing and living one part of your life. This results in you knowing when you develop a new and significant aspect of your understanding about the world or yourself, refining it and integrating it into your philosophy. Essentially, with this approach you are always working through each of the steps in developing your personal philosophy: expanding, connecting, refining, expressing and living. Doing so is something that it may take a while to master.
At first you might have intermittent periods where you don’t actively keep your personal philosophy up to date, then something significant happens that you realize you need to integrate into your personal philosophy. Over time, as you become more accustomed to and proficient at this approach, your updates become less periodic and more seamless. The ways of being for developing, knowing and living a personal philosophy introduced and developed in On Terms of Your Own were created to make this process more intuitive to achieve.
Whatever approach works for you, keeping your personal philosophy up to date will help you realize the ongoing value of it in your life.
If you are encountering challenges living your personal life philosophy or need someone to talk to about it, consider consulting with an experienced Life Philosophy Guide.
