‘As long as you live, keep learning how to live’
Menu
This edition marks the beginning of a special 5 part Always Learning series exploring a transformative path called – Voluntary Struggle Toward an Ideal
I prefer the expanded version though – Voluntary Struggle Toward an Ideal as a framework for identity transformation and values-driven living.
This is not a motivational concept. It’s a lived framework rooted in ancient wisdom and modern performance psychology for reorienting your identity and behaviour around chosen values, rather than unconscious defaults.
Each edition will explore one of the five interwoven elements of this path:
My understanding is that we are all connected spiritually and that through that interconnected network our highest value medium of communication is through our value system. An expression of embodied values that are authentically meaningful to us, communicates on a change maker level. Like a cocktail of envy and inspiration we can affect positive change in each other just through living in alignment with our authentic values.
This is how I have learned to live my life. There is a nobleness, compassion and humble duty to it in my experience. It endeavours to make true change in the world in silence. A ripple effect of living one’s life that puts something positive into the world.
Therefore, this series’ hope is to replace drifting with direction. To move from inherited scripts to authored identity. To start living like the person you’re here to become.
Each week between the fortnightly ‘Always Learning’ Newsletters, I will share with you my experience with that particular step in the fulfilling path to be value centred and driven.
Let’s get started.
Most people aren’t led by values. They’re pulled by convenience, emotion or culture.
This is not because they don’t care, it’s because they’ve never stopped to clearly identify what matters most to them, what kind of person they want to be and what virtues mean something to them.
However, if you never define your values, then your default settings will do it for you and your default settings were written by someone else.
If you want to fundamentally reorient your life, not cosmetically but existentially, you must start with a moment of radical clarity:
Cosmetic change asks: How can I feel better fast?
Existential change asks: What do I want to become, and what must I die to in order to become it?
(See something to pose for more help on getting radical clarity)
It’s in that moment where the path begins. The threshold to a totally different kind of existence.
Grab your notebook (by now you should know I think you should have a personal notebook) and take 15 minutes for uninterrupted thought. You’re about to build the compass for the life you want to live.
Start by making two lists:
Now scan both lists and circle 3 – 5 that feel emotionally alive. Don’t just choose the ones that sound noble, choose the ones that hit something inside you. Pay attention for the surge of pride, the flicker of shame, the quiet sense of “this matters.” Those are signals.
But here’s the key insight:
Values don’t become transformative until they’re imagined under fire—in lived tension, not hypothetical preference.
It’s easy to say you value courage, integrity or presence when you’re sitting calmly staring into a notebook. A value becomes transformative when it changes how you perceive yourself and how you act, especially when you’re tested. Until a value is brought into these imagined or real moments of difficulty, it hasn’t penetrated your operating system/ trained your nervous system, emotions, or impulses to follow it when it counts.
This is why elite athletes visualize high-pressure scenarios and why within our Ironmind 4 Controllables Method practice use positional cues as mental anchors because holding integrity of position while under stress is training yourself to be an individual of integrity.
So for each of your chosen values, write this question underneath it:
“What would it look like to embody this when I’m under pressure?”
Then ask yourself:
“If I lived this value when it was hard, when it was uncomfortable, when it cost me something, what would it bring me?”
That’s how you’ll know which values are decorative, and which are defining.
This isn’t about imagining the ideal version of yourself on a mountaintop somewhere far away.
It’s about choosing your values now and taking the first step as if that person already lives inside you. Because they do. But they will only surface if called upon under tension.
Here are some deeper questions to help find that radical clarity we mentioned in ‘Something to Ponder’ –
If you sit with these, not as a mood but as a method, radical clarity starts to emerge.
And from that clarity, direction.
From direction, alignment.
From alignment, transformation.
Remember: I can study a muscle in physiology class. I can admire people who have developed that muscle. I can even picture what it would look like on my body. But unless I go to the gym and put it under load – repeatedly – it won’t develop. It won’t even appear.
You’ll never know what strength was in you unless you called it forth through stress.
Virtues behave the same way.
They live in you in potential form.
But they will only surface if called upon under tension.
‘As long as you live, keep learning how to live’
~ Seneca
