What matters to you? What is important to you? What do you stand for or take a stand on and what would you fight for? Do you know that what matters to you becomes matter? That your entire reality is created by what matters to you. This is the core energy of our lives and when you understand how to define what matters to you, you have the key to manifestation, energy mastery, and creating the reality of your life on your terms.
We defend what matters because these are our life principles and standards. We define ourselves, who we are, what we believe, our ethics and morals, by what matters. But do we ever look at what matters and ask ourselves why we are supporting this belief or whether it belongs to us? Sometimes our life’s ‘matters’ are those we inherit or learn from others and we don’t question them. But it all becomes part of our matter (or reality) because what matters to you is manifesting in your life right now, whether you are aware of it or not, or want it or not.
What do you claim as matter that you inherited from someone or that is part of someone else’s belief system? Is this part of what you may be afraid to change even though you do not like it?
For example, a client had an annual family event they dreaded every year. It was tradition and had been done for decades. But they didn’t get along with the family, they were not well liked, and they never enjoyed their time at these events.
One year there was a conflict – they received an invitation to go on vacation with friends at the same time as the annual family event. This became a ‘what matters’ decision because they were faced with a choice:
Going to the family event they dreaded or going on vacation with friends they enjoyed being with.
If they chose to avoid the family event there would be a lot of angry judgments, criticism, and accusations of being disloyal to the family, of ruining the annual event, of disappointing people, and of not being part of the family.
If they chose the vacation with friends they would have a much better time but may have to deal with guilt, being shamed by the family, and not having a good time because they dreaded a potential year’s worth of being blamed for the failure of the family event that everyone (but them) looked forward to.
What is important to us defined by our priorities and our non-negotiables, principles I teach in my Energy Boundaries course. This is the foundation of our life. How we use energy is governed by our priorities and non-negotiables. But we don’t use these effectively and we often discount what is important to us to get along, go along, and make others happy.
Priorities are what is important to you, they are what you put first in your life. A priority could be self care, managing your time, safeguarding your energy, keeping yourself safe, your security, your family, or your job and career. Often our priorities involved other people and their needs, at the expense of our own.
If having approval is important to you then your priorities will reflect making others happy, getting their approval, making sure you are aligned with others’ needs, and not creating chaos or disturbances in your relationships. Your priorities could also include avoiding drama and chaos and staying away from challenging situations.
Non-negotiables are things that you will not compromise under any circumstance. In relationships that could be honesty, commitment, telling the truth, reliability, loyalty, and kindness. Some of my non-negotiables in relationships include no addictions, being honest, consideration, honesty, and commitment. I have no tolerance for those things and when they occur the relationship is over – no negotiating, no compromise.
What are some of your non-negotiables and how much do you stand for them? If you value honesty, are you willing to end a relationship if someone is dishonest? Or do you compromise your non-negotiables in the name of safety, security, avoiding being alone, or trying to make others happy
This is a tough topic but these are tough principles. Your priorities and your non-negotiables define who you are and all too often, when we are called to defend what we stand for, we give up, give in, and compromise the very things that we say we will not compromise.
So much of our energy goes towards what matters that we need to do a ‘matter review’ occasionally, to ensure that we are connected to what we want to empower and create, and that it is still relevant and important to us.
A matter review is not an opportunity to judge what we have manifested — remember, energy is neutral and non-judgmental so we can’t judge or criticize our creation as good or bad. But we can take a look at situations and events in our lives from the point of discovering what mattered so much to us that we created this situation from it and whether that is valid and something we want to do.
I think it is also important to do a priorities and a non-negotiables review, to ensure that we are aligned with what we say we stand for and that we are engaged in relationships that honor what we stand for. And that we are still aligned with our own priorities and non-negotiables.
This is not just in relationships, it is in everything that we do. A few years ago I had a job with a non-profit that was engaged in shady business dealings. I didn’t realize it at first but as I got to know more about what the business owner was doing and questioning how he was disbursing the money and products he was in charge of, I became very nervous about being part of this business and the potential for criminal liability in case the IRS ever decided to investigate this business. I quit that job because it violated my non-negotiables for honesty, transparency, and not doing illegal things.
When we review our priorities, non-negotiables, and what matters, we also need to stay in the present moment. Judging ourselves for past actions never accomplishes anything, but making sure that we are channeling our energy into creation in an intentional, thoughtful, conscious, and purpose-ful way by ensuring that what we say and believe matters is still relevant and useful and is aligned with our intention, accomplishes a lot.
As we enter into this action packed, fast moving year of transformation and energetic sovereignty, we have an even greater ability to create transformation and movement in every area of our lives. And since we’re always creating our reality in every moment, we can be more aware of what we are creating by looking at what matters to us.
The matter we are creating (which is our physical reality) unfolds from what matters, meaning things that are important, relevant, uplifting and empowering. And that includes our need for healing, validation, value, acknowledgement, and transformation.
And from ‘what matters’ we create all of our relationships and connections. They are going to respond to us in a way that mirrors our commitment and dedication to ourselves. We cannot pretend that we are aligned with our own priorities if we are not. We cannot expect others to align with priorities that we ourselves are not willing to defend. While we tend to blame people for ‘not being in integrity’ when they betray, abandon, or disrespect us, they are mirroring our own level of commitment and integrity to our own values. If we do not value our values we cannot expect others to value them.
It’s never too late to do a matter review and if you did one now, you just might discover that a few things which once mattered to you may or may not be as important now. If you release them, you can you bring some new aspects of matter into your life that will create new potentials for your reality. 
We create our intention through what matters to us, because we use what is important to us as the basis for our intention. Then we see the results in our physical reality, or matter. If we don’t like what we see, we can look at what mattered to us at that moment and change what matters , so we can change our matter (reality).
And if the people in our life are behaving badly, we need to look at how we define our priorities and non-negotiables and how willing we are to stand for our own energetic sovereignty so we can connect with people who will be mirrors of our self awareness, self love, and what matters to us.
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