Use The Seven Virtues To Attain Your Goals

Simply put, to use the Seven Virtues to help you attain your goals is to ensure that you’ve got the right mindset established before you begin your journey.  Here’s how I’m applying the “virtues” to one particular goal of mine.

Use the Seven Virtues to capture your goals

DECIDING THAT you want to bring something new into your life does not conform to the calendar.  And yet as I write this a new year swiftly approaches, the moment in time that we tend to focus on goal setting, or “resolutions” for the New Year.

What’s been your experience with these resolutions?

For most of us, they stand large and resolute at the start, but then day by day what we’ve resolved to do fades as the year moves on, and the ingrained habits that make up our lifestyle keeps us entrenched right where we’ve been all along.

How about taking a different approach?

The approach I’m referring to is to apply the Seven Virtues to your quest to accomplish your goals.  Of course, it’s a good idea that before you even do this, you’ve translated your “Resolutions” into “Goals”, because they’re not the same thing.

You might resolve to do something, like lose weight, but a true lose weight goal needs to have certain attributes in order to have any decent probability have attainment.  As I wrote in Manifest Your Goals Like The Pros Do, to properly work toward a goal, you must put in place the right processes, management techniques and necessary mental/emotional alignment to succeed.

And even before that — before you pull out the notebook and start writing down the goal(s) and what you’re going to do each day to step toward its attainment — it’s a really good idea to cultivate the right mindset.

Read my article on Mindset and Goal Making

Basically, what this means is that before you embark on your planned journey to attain your goal — loosing 15 pounds in three months, for instance — your mindset must be free of self-sabotaging thoughts like, “My genetics make me fat”, or “I’m too stressed/old/fatigued to lose weight.”

Once you’re clear that you have supportive mindset and a plan to achieve your goals, then consider how you might apply the Seven Virtues to provide some help along the way.

 

Apply The Seven Virtues to Your Goals

I literally bumped into a recitation of the Seven Virtues while searching for something else on the Interwebs. As I familiarized myself with them, it occurred to me that I might apply them in some fashion to my how I go about successfully obtaining my goals.

You’ll remember some of these seven virtues: Faith, Hope, Fortitude, Charity, Justice, Prudence and Temperance.

Let’s see where they fit, or how I might use them to help me finally achieve my long-time objective of getting rid of the mercury-filled amalgams in my teeth that are contributing to a host of health issues. Having said that, my aim with sharing this is to get you to contemplate how you could use the Seven Virtues to make your own goals come true.

These are four of biomarkers that I believe are affected by the mercury in my dental amalgams:

Biomarker Blood Test Result Desired Result
Fasting blood sugar 100 mg/dL 80 mg/dL
Inflammation (C-reactive protein) 3.74 mg/L 1 mg/L
Thyroid (TSH) 1.25 uIU/mL 1.00 uIU/mL
Testosterone 506 ng/dL 800 ng/dl

None of these blood test results are bad, per se, particularly for my age (I was 58 at the time), but if you’ve spent any time on this site, you know that I’m hellbent to optimize my health (and yours) — and these numbers are less than optimal.

So, let’s step through each of the Seven Virtues and get a sense how I could use them to help me attain my goal of ridding my body of its mercury burden, and by extension, how you might apply them to your own goals.

(1) Faith

Faith is the complete belief, trust or confidence in someone or something, often without evidence.

Religious tenets come to mind.  Or in my case, holding the faith that if I steadfastly continue to connect the dots between various seemingly unrelated biomarkers — such as higher than ideal fasting blood sugar and inflammation, a poor performing thyroid (hypothyroidism) and low testosterone — I’ll be able to identify the smoking gun is the mercury oozing from a mouthful of amalgams.

Watch my Skype interview with mercury test expert, Chris Turf.

(2) Hope

Hope is a positive feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.  It plays nicely with Faith. It’s kinda like you “hope” your “faith” will be true.

I hope that my faith in my own research and experimentation will not only show that I nailed it that mercury is the underlying issue for those aforementioned less than salubrious biomarkers, but that I’ll find a solution for getting rid of the amalgams in my mouth that I can afford.

(3) Fortitude

Fortitude is simply never giving up, and to do that you must exhibit courage when faced with pain or adversity.

I could simply shrug and say,

“Hey, people my age tend to have high blood sugar and systemic inflammation, and certainly men face declining testosterone as they age.”

Though this is true, it’s not immutable; meaning, it’s not some law of nature that you must experience these markers of aging.  So, keeping in mind that I can get what I want by first having the right mindset tuned by Faith and Hope, and than fueling my actions with Fortitude — I can move me closer to my objective.

(4) Charity

Charity is the is concern for, and active voluntary giving of help to others, typically in the form of money or in-kind services.

I can’t know what changes you want to bring about in your life, but if they require a steady, focused effort, you must make room.  Perhaps something else has to give way.  If your desire is for better health, for instance, and you’re of an age where you have both children in the house to deal with and aging parents that need your help, the first place to apply Charity may be to yourself.

If, however, being overwhelmed helping others is not your situation, Charity may come into play through the tenet that “helping others helps yourself”, a corollary to “give to get”.

(5) Justice

Justice is being fair and equitable with others. I think it goes well with Charity.  In both instances, you have to give a sh*t about others, and perhaps for that to happen you have to first give a sh*t about yourself.

In the context of my objective of ridding myself of my mercury burden, I need to realize that my efforts aren’t some unreasonable foray into self-obsession, but something that’s just and valid.

(6) Prudence

Prudence is to be careful, cautious and moderate, often in relation to money. To be prudent you need to be reflective and have a plan or some general idea of certain constraints to guide you.  Think of it as would a marathon runner who needs to be moderate with his pace in order to last the whole 26.2 miles.

The way I apply Prudence to the aim of getting rid of my mercury dental amalgams is simple — I seek to do with less material goods so I may save more money for dental work, and for the detoxification supplements I deem necessary to excrete as much mercury and other heavy metals as I can.

(7) Temperance

Temperance is the exercise of the voluntary self-restraint required to be moderate with needed things and abstain from things which are not needed.

Similarly to how Charity and Justice, or Hope and Faith may align with each other, Temperance and Prudence fit hand-in-glove.  Both require forethought and self-restraint.

Of the two immediate ways that occur to me that I’m applying Temperance to my mercury eradication goal, saving money was already mentioned (see Prudence), but Temperance also factors in to the self-restraint I’ve exercised with my intermittent fasting regiment in order to ignite cellular autophagy, a useful way to help with cellular detoxification.

 

Your Takeaway

I admit that seeking to improve your chances of succeeding with manifesting your goals through the prism of the Seven Virtues is a bit unorthodox.  But think of it this way — the whole point of the Seven Virtues is to guide you to a more virtuous life, which means living a life with this stuff baked in:

  • Righteousness
  • Goodness
  • Purity
  • Moral
  • Ethical
  • High-minded
  • Principled
  • Exemplary

And unless your goal is simply to upgrade your car, practicing these virtues can’t but help you achieve any goal that makes a better you.

 

P.S.  Hey, if you eat a lot of fish or have amalgams in your teeth, check out my articles about mercury/heavy metal toxicity/detoxification and watch my interview with mercy expert, Chris Turf.

Last Updated on March 13, 2018 by Joe Garma

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Joe Garma
 

I help people live with more vitality and strength. I'm a big believer in sustainability, and am a bit nutty about optimizing my diet, supplements, hormones and exercise. To get exclusive Updates, tips and be on your way to a stronger, more youthful body, join my weekly Newsletter. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.

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