Discovering What Values Drive You
The Power of Knowing What You Value
Last year I went on a holiday that turned out to be pretty terrible. I was grouchy and discontented. So we were both miserable. For the life of me, I just could not work out what was going on. Over and over, I told myself I was lucky to be there, that many people don’t get to take holidays.
That didn’t work though and only made me feel ashamed that I couldn’t enjoy it.
After the holiday, I decided to work out why I was so miserable on the trip. So I examined my values about holidays and discovered a lot about myself, my values and my expectations.
Knowing your values is essential, they shape every decision you make, including relationship decisions. If you are affected by trauma (with a little t) of living with a person who is dependent on substances or processes your values will probably have been affected too. You will have absorbed the family values.
In my book, I have a four action process that outlines how to discover and change values that don’t serve you any longer. In this post, I’ll share the first two actions to help you get started.
Change your values in four easy actions
Action One - Take a look at your own values.
What is important to you? How do you want things to work, how do you think people should be?
The best way to figure this out is to use the following process. Pick one aspect of your life that you are unhappy with. Write down four or five statements about that one thing that you want to examine. Write down the first thing that comes to mind. It honestly doesn’t matter if it’s ridiculous and unrealistic. Nobody is going to judge you. Here's an example using my sad holiday.
I know holidays should be:
Always spent together all the time doing the same thing
Not spent doing useful stuff, no exercise allowed
Doing nothing except watch tv/play on the tablet/read fiction/shop/eat out
Spent eating rubbish food and drink lots of alcohol
Going away somewhere, not staying at home
I must spend all my money and come home broke
Pretty ridiculous when you look at it like that! No wonder I was in such a bad mood.
Action Two - What is the big picture?
Now, we need to look at the way we measure those statements (thanks Mark Manson).
I asked myself what is the essence of a holiday? What is the big picture?
By the time you are an adult, you have had many interactions and picked up many values.
For example, what is the essence of a relationship? Or what do I want out of a career? What sort of parent do I want to be? What does support look like?
I decided that the essence of a holiday is to do something different from everyday life. Something fun and nurturing. A shared experience that would bring me and my partner together. Besides this, we needed to rest and prepare for the upcoming season.
With this in mind I wrote out the measures I used for each of the values I wrote.
Mark Manson once said “With great responsibility comes great power”. This may be a hard concept to get your head around, but it’s liberating to know that you have the great responsibility and power to change your own life.
You don’t need to stay captive to outdated measures any longer. Or hold on to those old constructs of yourself that don’t quite fit today’s world.
Instead, you can take your power back and change your values using the measures that work for you.
Did this resonate with you?
The last two actions are in the book as well as much more about discovering how growing up in a family with dependencies has shaped you and how you can recover from the effects of trauma.