Principle Based Methods
The most important step to attaining a stress free life is creating emotional balance, you have to learn to prioritise between what is important and what is not so important using a principle based method, we will get into that later but first you must establish your moral principles. Your principles are your moral beliefs, a person with strong moral beliefs is often described as mature. It is a good idea to write your moral principles down in an easily accessible place like a journal or a planner and review them often, modifying them where necessary as we learn and continue to grow more mature.
Example list of moral principles:
- Remember the people involved.
- Defend those who are absent.
- Maintain a positive attitude.
- Keep a sense of humour.
- Listen twice as much as you speak.
- Be orderly in person and in work.
- Be sincere yet decisive.
- Do not fear mistakes - fear only the absence of creative, constructive, and corrective responses to those mistakes.
- Be loyal to those who are loyal to you.
- Never compromise with honesty.
A good way to establish your moral principles is to consider how you would like others to think of you, imagine somebody who you deeply respect giving a speech about you at your wedding, graduation party, or (unfavourably) at your funeral, what would you like them to say? Would you like them to say you had a lot of money and a lot of friends? Hopefully not. What you would most likely want them to say is that you're kind, loving, brave, mature etc. Write down what you would like to hear them say, think of different peoples opinions of you, only the opinions of people who respect you are important, for example your family members, your colleagues, friends etc.
Now that you have a list of attributes that you would like to be known for, it's time to start implementing them and creating goals to working towards them, all your moves should be designed so that they follow your moral principles or your "moral compass." Your moral compass will not steer you wrong if your principles are correct, decision making will become easier with practise. As a result you will not feel stressed when faced with adversity, you will check your moral compass and deal with the situation appropriately.
