What’s My Core Message

What is the difference between beliefs and values?  Some say that beliefs are ideas taken on trust, often when we are very young.  In fact some researchers say that our basic beliefs are formed by the time we are five years old.  If this is true then much of what we believe comes from those closest to us-family and friends.  And it comes at a time when we have very little in the way of life experience with which to test these ideas. We just accept and assimilate them.

Values, on the other hand, are those ideas that are shaped by our life experience.  Sometimes our beliefs and values are in harmony, and sometimes they are so disharmonious that we have to work really hard to reconcile them or we have to change them.  I certainly do not have the same beliefs now that I did in my twenties.  Things were far more black and white for me then, because I had less life experience to create all the shades of gray.   As I have gotten older many of the absolutes I held have given way to the reality that life is not so simple and neither is the human heart.
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