What Do You Stand For?

Peter Marshall said it best: “If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.” Do you know what you stand for in life? It can be as simple as a feeling, like freedom or compassion for a specific cause. It can be a strong orientation towards creating, building and leaving a legacy. When you know what you stand for, it will become an unshakeable part of you.

What you stand for will become an internal navigator enabling you to make sense of things you do and provide a guide for the myriad of decisions that you take each day. Standing for something means taking action and living intentionally with purpose. Perhaps most importantly, once you follow this path of heightened self-awareness, you’ll start to live your life by design and not by default.

So how can you identify what you stand for? Here are five steps you can take right now, to get closer to how you want to show up each day.

Step One: Start to identify your “why”

What is important to you? Why do you do the work you do? Is family a main driver? Are you looking to change the world through volunteerism and small acts of kindness? Whatever it is, take note and write it down. Come back to your “why” whenever you need guidance in making a decision and see if it fits.

Step Two: Identify your measure of success

What does success look like to you? Is it measured in monetary value, work autonomy or setting high standards? You get to choose how success is measured. Then, intentionally through your actions each day, make sure what you do is in line with this measurement.

Step Three: Take simple daily steps to live by design

Now that you have your “why” and know what success looks like, take at least one intentional action each day to keep you in alignment with both. We have choices to make every time with anything that we come across. We can choose to live influenced by external circumstances, or we can take deliberate action and live life on our own terms guided by our why. 

Step Four: Paint a vision and make it bold

Identify what you want your life to look like and create a vivid image of what you stand for. Some people use vision boards, create their mantras or look to a theme song as their anthem. To be able to live a life aligned with what you stand for, it helps to be bold and dream big.

Step Five: Commit to action and do one thing every day

The best way to stay consistent on your new path is to take action every single day. The concept of marginal gains illustrate that just 1% improvement can actually take your results above and beyond. Just look at the British Olympic cycling team. They created their success 1% at a time to eventually reach Olympic gold. Aggregated small gains over time really do work. With this approach, no goal is too big.

Knowing what you stand for is one of the most important things you can do for yourself. Helen Keller once said ‘True happiness is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose’. Only you get to define your life – starting now.

“Everyone has been made for some particular work and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.” – Jalaluddin Rumi