Are Your Goals Truly Yours Or Borrowed Values?

Speaker 1 · 0:00Welcome everyone. Thank you for listening to the Mindfulness Exercises Podcast. Today I'm honored to welcome Dr. John DiMartini to the podcast. Dr. Di Martini is a world-renowned human behavior expert, educator, researcher, best-selling author, speaker, whose work has helped people around the world better understand the relationship between perception, purpose, values, and personal transformation. He's the creator of the DiMartini Method, a practical approach for helping people dissolve limiting perceptions, clarify what matters most, and move towards greater resilience and meaning and inspired action. Over the past five decades, Dr. DiMartini has studied across many disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, human performance, leadership, and well-being. And he's shared his work with audiences around the world through books, many books that have been translated into quite a few languages. Seminars, including one that he's going to be doing here in San Francisco soon. Documentaries, interviews, and educational programs. I appreciate the work that he does inviting us to look more deeply at how our perceptions shape our lives, how our values guide our behavior, and how even our challenges can become gateways to greater wisdom and purpose and service. Dr. Di Martini, thank you so much for being here. It's an honor to have you here, and I'm looking forward to our conversation today.

Speaker 2 · 1:47Well, thank you. Thanks for inviting me and have me on your podcast.

Speaker 1 · 1:50For listeners who are new to your work, what is the DiMartini method and what kinds of shifts is it designed to help people experience?

Speaker 2 · 2:00Well, DiMartini method is a cognitive series of questions that allow you to see what you've been unconscious of, to help you see the hidden order and the apparent chaos that you may be running your life with. I always say the quality of your life based on the quality of the questions you ask. And some of the greatest questions are the ones that make you equilibrate your perceptions, liberate you from the polarizations that we have in our perceptions, allow us to access unconscious information that's been sitting there that's intuitively trying to reveal itself. And now it comes to the surface by asking the right question. Then we're able to see things. For instance, let's say you meet somebody, then you're highly infatuated with them initially, you know, like a man meets a girl, a girl meets a man, or whatever your sex gender is. You are a little infatuated, like Michael Douglas with Glenn Close initially, and fatal attraction. And you're conscious of the upsides but unconscious of the downsides, and blind, ignorant, and unconscious of those things that are about to come to the surface over the next weeks and months. But you can have the wisdom of the ages without the aging process by asking quality questions initially to find out what they are because your intuition is trying to whisper them to you, but you're ignoring them with your impulses. By asking quality questions and making you aware of it, you're less likely to be vulnerable and gullible to the initial perception that can fool you. And the same thing on things you resent, or anybody you put on a pedestal or put in a pit. Di Martini method is a series of questions, very concise questions. I've been developing it over the last 50 plus years. Millions of people are using it, and it's basically a tool to help you be present and see a hidden order and see things on the way, not in the way. So you're a master of your destiny more than a victim of your history.

Speaker 1 · 3:46Beautiful.

Speaker 1 · 3:47I know you do a lot of work in helping people identify their highest values and helping people to live according to those values. Would you say that the questions help one to discern or discover what their highest values are?

Speaker 2 · 4:04Well, in 1978, as I was entering the professional school, I asked a question: why do some people walk to talk, some people limp their life? Why do some people thirst, some people flounder? Why do some people do what they say and others don't? And I identified that what drives human beings in the study of axiology, which is a study of value and worth. And I found that people have a hierarchy of value that's unique, like a fingerprint. It's evolving and changing, but at any moment it's unique. And whatever's highest on your value structure, you spontaneously are inspired to do. You don't require external motivation to do it. So that's where you're most effective and efficient at achieving something if you set your aim congruently with it. But as you go down the list of values and priorities, you progressively require more external motivation, reward to do it, punishment if you don't, to keep yourself on track with it. So it's less efficient, effective. So one is inspired from within, it's intrinsic. One is externally motivated, it's extrinsic. So when people set goals, if they're aligned with the highest values, they're higher in probability of achieving them. They also have a higher self-worth if they do. But if they try to set goals that are not, they're going to need constant reminders and out external motivation. If you need motivation to do what you say is important, it's not important. And external motivation.

Speaker 2 · 5:18So I have a value determination process that I've developed back in 78 that has been used again by millions of people. It's free on my website if anybody wants to go there, drdmartin.com, and go on there and use it. A lot of companies, a lot of individuals, organizations, even governments use it. But it's a tool to help you discern what's really priority. Because many people, when they meet people and they meet somebody that they look up to, without realizing if they inject the values of those individuals into their life, and they try to envy them and try to imitate them and try to be second to being somebody else instead of first at being themselves, and they lose their authenticity and they create an incongruency. Floyd called it the superego, which is an internalization of some outer authority's value. And this distracts you and it moralizes you and makes you judge yourself with pride or shame, which are inauthentic expressions of your real self. So I a firm believer that if we identify what's really valuable to us, and I put down 13 questions that I've discerned over the years to help people narrow that down. Once we do, it's kind of like an aha moment. You kind of realize, well, no wonder my life's excelling there and not doing well there. And then you end up starting to set goals congruently. Because when you fill your day with high priority actions that are congruent with your highest values, your day doesn't fill up with low priority distractions, it don't. You create neg entropy, which is life physics, instead of entropy, which is death physics. And you tend to have uh more fulfillment in life when you're living by priority, and you don't have all those distractions.

Speaker 2 · 6:45So if you're not dedicated to what's really important and delegating what's not, you're gonna be trapped and you're gonna be basically distracted and require external motivation and you're gonna self-depreciate and many people trapped there. So that's why knowing what your true values are, what's really important to you, instead of the ideals that society expects, the normative ethics that you're subordinated to, the moral hypocrisies that you're sometimes taught, it gives you what David Hume called the is versus the ought. What are you really instead of what you would think you ought to be? That authenticity liberates people from a lot of bondage, baggage, and emotional distress.