Can a zebra change its stripes?

Consider a person with an extroverted personality. This person loves social interaction. They are the life of the party, and feel wonderful when surrounded by lots of people. They engage strangers at the grocery store, or in line at the bakery. Now, imagine they tried to “make the decision” to live a reserved, quiet, isolated life. Never again spending time in larger groups, avoiding new interactions with people while walking through their neighborhood. You are correct in thinking that this adjustment would be a monumental sacrifice for a person who, normally, is energized by engaging with people.

Exploring my values…

Values are similar. While we can bend the values we have in order to help us be as successful as possible, we can not simply make up new values for ourselves. What we can do, however, is identify the areas where we would like to be stronger and put effort into building those things up. Here are a couple things to consider when assessing what your values are:

1. Who are the people you admire?
   • Taking a look at the people you admire, and assessing what it is that you admire about them, can help you identify what some of your values might be. This might be people in your life, or even characters in your favorite novels.
2. What moments inspire you to action?
   • It is often the case that our values manifest themselves through our actions. Consider the things that you stand for.
   • What moments in your life cause you to stop what you were doing to intervene? These moments might help you understand your values more deeply.
3. When do you feel most natural?
   • Consider the moments in your life where you feel most connected to yourself. Is that moment one where you are reading a book, exercising, or talking with friends? Maybe you just aced a difficult exam.
   • Feeling “congruent,” like the world inside you is matched up with the world outside of you, is a really good way to identify the moments you may be living out your values. Pay attention next time you are in one of those moments.

What next?

Search Google for a “List of Values” and see what types of words strike you. Consider picking out 3-5 words that really strike you. How would you define those different values? What actions do you believe reinforce that value in your life? What kinds of things could you accomplish if you really tried to live out these values every day? And is there more that you could do to incorporate these values in your daily life?

Check out some of our other posts, as well:

Man’s Search for Meaning

Personality: The heart of diversity

What is Leadership?

The post Exploring our Values appeared first on Stand 4 Kind.

            What a journey! Even writing that paragraph above is a reminder of how much amazing material Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) has to offer, and how much material we have covered over the last 5-weeks. (If you are just joining us in this series, I would encourage you to read all about psychological flexibility in our previous blog posts.) A ton of questions always come to mind when I think about values: 1) what are they; 2) how do I identify them; 3) where do they come from; 4) how do I know if mine are any good; 5) can I pick my values, or are they inside of me already and waiting for me to discover them? Well, hopefully by the end of this post the concept of values will feel a little less ambiguous, and maybe it will get you thinking about what you might say your values are in this moment. 

             Imagine that I put to boxes that were identical in every way in front of you and said “pick one.” You may have a number of questions, but given that I refuse to answer any questions or differentiate the boxes in any way from one another, you chose the second box. Why did you choose the second box? Well, the choice was completely arbitrary, and your answer might be “I don’t know, I just picked one.” It is easy to see how the consequence of this choice would have very little outcome on a person’s life, even if there were ¢5 cents inside the box they chose and $50 in the box they did not choose, there is no way to be attached to the outcome because the decision was made randomly. One key to values is that they are freely chosen and they reinforce our activities, motivating us to make some choices over others. Said another way: we cannot value everything, and we have to make choices about what things we do value because the scope of our values is limited. We cannot value everything equally, and if you have ever had several tough classes at once you may remember that you probably did not weigh each class the same, spending equal time preparing for multimedia as you did for Honors Chemistry. This helps us understand how we answer our first question above (what are values?): values are the fundamental beliefs that guide & motivate us, and that exist behind our behaviors. 

The power of values, questioned by point number 2 (how do I identify them?) is that we can look at our behavior and see if it matches what we believe our values to be. This can be very motivational in the sense that we can find incongruence between valued life directions (e.g., being a good friend) and our current behaviors (i.e., knowing that I have not made enough time for my close friendships, lately). Finding these areas where we are incongruent can help us identify our values, and move in a more valued direction. Another way to reflect on our values is simply to look at the areas of our lives where we believe ourselves to really shine! Knowing that you enjoy spirituality, physical fitness, or deep and meaningful interpersonal relationships, can help you identify some of the things you value over other areas of your life that you may value less (maybe at the moment Marriage/Intimate Relationships, for example, is not a “value” that you hold). Where these things come from—point #3—can seem like a mystery; however, we can remember that since a critical feature of values is that they are “freely chosen,” in some sense we get to decide how we prioritize our values, but we would have difficulty creating our own values from nothing. To find what is meaningful to us, we have to explore who we are as an individual. In some cases we can look back at our own behavior and excavate some of our values, we can read great books, and think about the people we admire, and through that process we can discover some of the things we value. And then we can close the amount of incongruence that lives between our actions and those things we value to push ourselves in a goal-directed way. Along that process of discovering our values, and by extension discovering who we are, we may find that we have an internal ‘nature’ that we have to contend with. That we may value some things other people do, but we are fundamentally different than other people. For example, I can tell you with certainty that I see value in the work of software engineers, and engineers of all types for that matter—my father was an engineer; however, I can tell you with certainty that my personality is one who needs to interact with people, often and deeply. Therefore, sitting in front of a computer designing a bridge, or software program, or iPhone App, is probably not a place where I will find that I am thriving as a person. But I sure am grateful that other people do find great meaning in those areas. They have the ability to make the world a better place!

So, we arrive at point #4, how you know if your values are any good! Well behavioral psychologists have a basic theory as to how to approach this problem. We start living! More specifically, we attempt to live out our values, and we watch what happens as a result. If one of my values is interpersonal relationships, then I should try to be the best friend that I can be and ideally, I would see my existing friendships deepen and become more meaningful, and I would see new friendships begin to emerge. I would know this was a positive outcome if I begin to experience an ideal future. But what happens if in reality as I gain new friendships, my existing relationships begin to suffer in a way that was unexpected and unappreciated? Well, then I need to think about how I am living my values, because something happened that was unexpected (losing friendships), and I need to assess why. Now, consider whether we can pick our values. We touched on this briefly above when we talked about discovering our values, and it seems very unlikely that I could just decide to become a long-distance runner; however, the wonderful thing about values is, again, that we get to choose. We get start ACTING like a runner: maybe we start getting up early, walking regularly or jogging, signing up for a 5k with a friend, who knows…Maybe that’s exactly how someone becomes a runner, one step at a time J

And maybe that’s how we connect with our values. Just take things one step at a time. 

The post Values: What are the things that matter, and how do we decide what to reach for? appeared first on Stand 4 Kind.

People are used to following a whole bunch of rules while we live our lives: you stop at red lights, when there is a line, stand in it, and never propose at someone else’ wedding! But there is an even more basic rule about what has motivated us throughout our history: put simply, we should attempt to avoid ‘bad’ things, and seek out ‘good’ things. You can see how this kind of thinking served us well for a long time. We should avoid cold, and seek warmth; we should avoid danger, and seek safety; we should avoid people who want to harm us, and seek those who want to embrace us. One can see how this kind of thinking worked well for a long time; however, things got complicated when we started using language to describe not only the world around us, but the world inside of us.

            We use words to label a wide range of feelings (e.g., anxiety, sadness, fear, happiness, joy, love), and we have simultaneously transcribed those emotions on our original axiom of avoiding bad and seeking good. So, it is natural for us to believe that anxiety, stress, and fear are bad and should be avoided, and that happiness, joy, and love are good, and should be sought after. While it is easy to arrive at that conclusion, we forget that anxiety, sadness, and fear are simply emotional responses to aversive events. Not the events themselves. This idea is at the center of experiential avoidance, and it stops us from being able to make the voluntary and values-based choice to remain in contact with personal experiences in a non-judgmental way. Let’s think about an example: applying for college. This is a huge undertaking that often takes months or even years of planning, taking the SAT/ACT, writing personal statements, asking teachers and mentors to write letters of recommendation, researching schools, the expense and time involved in applications, and the risk that you might do all that work, and not get into the college you hoped for. Even though the entire process is incredibly stressful and gives us the feeling that turning back would be the best thing, we persist. Even though we might get rejected, we persist. And the reason we persist, is because we know that the upside (going to college) will be worth it, even if we have to endure a bumpy road along the way. Well, the harm of experiential avoidance comes when we let the stress involved in the application process turn us around, running the other way, before we even get the chance to fail. Moving toward something that we really want often brings out negative thoughts and feelings (e.g., What if I fail; What if it doesn’t work out;What if we break up), and moving away from those thoughts brings relief, even though we may have been moving toward something that would bring us a lifetime of fulfillment. If we act as though our goal is to avoid stressful emotions, we start to construct our lives around avoiding things that we don’t want, instead of moving toward things that we do want.

            Well, what do we do to fight against those negative feelings that come up while we work toward things that we think matter? We have to keep in mind that those feelings are simply a normal reaction to values-based action. Acceptance is a values-based choice, not failure or tolerance, not giving-up or giving in. The goal of acceptance is to acknowledge that we are demanded by life itself to feel, think, sense, and remember the things that come up in the process of living a meaningful life. It is to acknowledge the fact that while we pursue the things that are important to us, we can expect to encounter rough waters. We can expect to second guess ourselves, and to have people we care about second guessing us. But attempting to scour out the (alleged) sources of our anxiety so that we can control them will always leave us trying to dig our way out of a hole. Instead, we should opt to curiously explore the nature of our anxiety, our fears, and our stressors, so that we can change our response from running away from stress, to accepting that stress is a normal part of our lives, and does not have to inhibit our movement toward our values. There are several things that we can do to increase the likelihood that we choose acceptancev. avoidance: 1) always remember that regardless of what it may look like on social media, EVERYONE is going to experience bumps in the road, and we should be very careful when we think that it would just be easier to trade places with someone else; 2) remember that moving towards the things that we value can present with difficult times, but weathering the storm will be worth it; and 3) know that feelings of stress and fear, and anxiety, and depression can be very normal things that we all experience!^[1]

^[1]If your feelings of anxiety or depression are lasting longer than a couple of days, and reaching several weeks or months, that could indicate a clinical diagnosis that ought to be referred to medical professionals for further support; additionally, thoughts of suicide or self-harm should also be treated as an emergency and seek evaluation

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