Principles play an important role in personal growth. However, how you define and maintain principles is rarely discussed. To this end, I share some reflections that can help you integrate them more easily into your own life.
Principles should be liberating, not constraining.
Often when we define our principles, we focus on the things we have to do, or that we are no longer allowed to do. This makes principles, which should inspire us, seem like the rules our parents made us live by when we were small. In other words: no fun.
Take the principle “I don’t eat junk food.” At first glance, it sounds restrictive. It focuses on what’s forbidden, making it feel like a sacrifice.
But if we reframe it as “I choose to fuel my body with nutritious, energizing foods,” the same principle becomes empowering. Instead of focusing on what you can’t have, it highlights a positive choice and the benefits it brings. Suddenly, it’s not a rule to obey but an inspiring vision to live by.
Principles should carry their vision.
Again, principles should inspire us, and sometimes we need a little reminder of why we chose them in the first place. As such, it can be helpful to end your principles with a ‘vision’ that captures the overarching aspiration.
“I choose to fuel my body with nutritious, energizing foods” could become “I choose to fuel my body with nutritious, energizing foods, so that I am free of the physical limitations that junk food imposes on me.”
Principles should have a trigger.
I feel that the most difficult part about principles is to remember them. Still, I noticed that for principles with a clear trigger this was less often the case.
Building on the same principle as before, we are more likely to be reminded of actually having this principle when we are presented a choice. So, incorporating and rephrasing, we may arrive at: “When I am in the grocery store (trigger), I choose the healthy alternative (positive choice), so my body will not be impaired (vision).”
Do you have a principle that never seems to stick? See what happens when you rephrase it like this!
