The Significance of Core Values in Out Lives

Early on in our lives and throughout childhood, we make various decisions about who we are. These decisions essentially shape our personalities and effect the way that we interact with other people in our world. The conscious decisions that are made during the course of a lifetime are very much influenced by the events that we experience and because of this, some individuals have positive core values whereas others have more pessimistic ones. Nonetheless, our core values shape who we are and how we live our lives. Personally, when I think of my core values one value in particular stands out in my mind. This value can be summarized by the statement “I am not good enough or I am inadequate”. In many ways this statement is very broad and can encompass many meanings, but I will try to narrow down its meaning as it pertains to me. When people say that they feel “inadequate”, the first thing that comes to mind is low self-esteem. In many ways it is true that people who feel this way do have low self-esteem, but in my case my self-esteem is not affected by this core value. In my view, I feel “inadequate” and “not good enough” in my achievement. Achievement can be defined as something accomplished, especially by superior ability, special effort, or great courage. In my personal schema of the mind, I constantly believe that I have not achieved success even though many of my actions are noteworthy. For example, I graduated high school as the salutatorian of my class with a 4.56 GPA and received the AP Scholar Award with Distinction for getting a score of 4 or higher on 5 AP tests. To most people, these actions would seem very notable and impressive, but in my view they are simply displays of effort and I believe that I can still do better. In essence, my beliefs boil down to the fact that all of my actions are “not good enough” and thus, my motivation takes over and I turn to perfectionism. These pervasive beliefs that I can always achieve more and that my actions must be perfect eat away at me and usually I feel stressed because I believe them. Tracing the origins of this belief is hard, but I think that it originated when I first came to the United States with my parents. When we first arrived to this country, life was very hard and my parents struggled greatly. Furthermore, my father suffered a pretty serious injury to his knee as a result of his effort to help the family and as time passed he developed anxiety which eventually turned into neurosis. As the years continued his neurosis improved, but he is still not the same person who came to the United States many years ago. For me, the sight of my parents struggling brought out the belief in me that “I must succeed or life is not worth living” and currently I still suffer from this belief. When I arrived to this country with my parents, I was seven years old. As stated above, life was very hard and I developed the belief that “I was inadequate” and needed to persevere to achieve success. These beliefs, in their early stages, left me very sad as a child and I had very low self-esteem. As the years continue and I entered middle school, the situation just grew worse. It was hard for me to make quality friends in school and all of the people I met seemed to take advantage of me. Furthermore, my physical maturity was below par with the rest of my friends and this made me feel even more inferior. As middle school ended and I transitioned into high school, my personal situation improved, but by junior year it once again turned unpleasant only this time my self-esteem did not diminish. It actually stabilized and I grew angry at the world when I saw that certain people did not try as hard as others and received the same results. The lack of hard work that was displayed by certain students made me enraged because I tried so hard and yet received the same praise or reward for my effort. As senior year hit, my anger climaxed due to the fact that I took five AP classes and essentially drowned myself in work. During this year my social life essentially went to “hell” because I was constantly doing homework and was unable to enjoy any time with the few friends that I had. I will not go into the details of the year, but by the end of high school I was completely disillusioned in my trust for other people and my social abilities. It was not till the beginning of summer that I realized what had happened and throughout this past summer I have very much recovered from the psychological damage that I caused myself. As the end of summer approached, I finally felt better about myself and my problems subsided. I also met a wonderful person who is currently my girlfriend, which further shifted my mind away from my anger and self-destructive core belief. In essence, the summer alleviated much of the pain that I have acquired through the subsequent years of public school. Currently, I feel much better about myself and no longer experience the anger that I did in high school, but my core belief has not vanished. Unfortunately, it still resonates within me and once in a while I will still feel anger and feel like what I am doing is not enough. I take my work at Rutgers University very seriously, and my assignments display the perfectionism and sense of inadequacy that has troubled me for so many years. In all truth, I would give up my core-belief in a heartbeat because it has caused me so much trouble in my life. I would love to let it go, but it constantly seems to return to me and plague my everyday life. Recently, I have taken up meditation and this has considerable helped with the elimination of my core belief, but not entirely. As mentioned before, the core belief that “I am not good enough or I am inadequate” is very self-destructive and as a result I have made it my goal to get rid of it. To sum up, the psychological state of a human highly affects the body and because of this fact, my core belief is extremely flawed and must be let go as soon as possible, no matter how much effort it takes. This “letting go” will finally enable me to gain inner peace and live a happy and prosperous life.