Stop Setting Goals, Live from Values
Fulfill your goals in the pursuit of Value-based living
Starting from a deficit is always frustrating because, after all the work done and resources used to get oneself to the surface, you often find yourself exhausted by the journey. Further, deficit thinking has us defining ourselves from the perspective of where we're going, not where we've come from, and it can feel that no movement has occurred at all! Unfortunately, this mentality is exactly what we often bring to 'goal setting,'’ and it's precisely why the spiral of shame and self-doubt is so often the end result. Thankfully, we can give up this way of framing the pursuit of goals by instead looking at the incremental achievement of value-based living.
Values are not Behavior
Values are not synonymous with, or at least not fully understood or fulfilled by, particular behaviors. This may at first sound obvious, but it's not typically how we assess and judge ourselves and one another. When did you last chastise yourself for not attending the gym and binging a TV show instead? When did you last judge another dishonest based on a particular behavior? For that matter, when was the last time you felt yourself unfairly judged when you went with being supportive rather than honest? Or, how easy is it to think of a time when you gave up on supporting one Value, like Honesty, for the purpose of saving someone's life, job or prevent being hurt?
All of these scenarios bring us to three conclusions:
Values never go away
Sometimes, supporting one Value in a particular way may mean not supporting another in a way we'd otherwise do
Context often drives what Value(s) we're focused on
Consider the difficulty of judgment, both of others and ourselves. Often, one family member or loved one will declare you don't love them because you don't treat them the same way as another. The accusation is often met with stunned frustration because of course you love them, it's simply that you interact differently due to the nature of the particular connection, the context in which a behavior occurred and what the other person's interests may be. A more obvious example would be if one of your kids declared you didn't love them because you don't treat them the exact same way as your spouse. Clearly, the claim is absurd, as the very nature of the connection leads to different behaviors. Notably, the Value itself never went away.
Life is a constant juggling act of supporting what we care about, utilizing the behavior we've learned to associate with particular Values, and doing so within contexts over which we often have no control over the particulars. Consider self-esteem or integrity, where 'standing up for yourself' is a piece of common advice given. Yet, when faced with a hostile work environment or unhealthy personal relationship, we won't follow the advice; instead, we opt for another behavior. Where we often then shame ourselves, the reality is we did act to support a Value, but instead of Integrity, we acted on Financial Security, Safety, Peace, etc. We're concerned with not a judgment about long-term consequences but a proper evaluation of why we do what we do at any given moment.
Those moments are context-driven. We will not likely be able to focus on Health when we're perpetually surrounded by junk food and find it difficult to access healthier alternatives. It's little wonder that Pleasure takes center stage in that context. We're not likely to work on Self-Esteem/Image when coming out of an emotionally abusive family, surrounded by an unsupportive community, and/or lacking in skills that our specific society finds useful. I say "likely" here because there are always personal stories of people seeing their way through adversity; this is about the general experience. In fact, behind every story of success despite adversity, you'll find that the person did the one thing we're about to bring attention to: expanding perspective.
Daily Living
Rather than goals, let's consider what we're already doing in our lives that is helpful and expand on that. Rather than getting caught up in a hyper-focus on one behavior, let's consider how we always seek to support what we care about.
Steps of Valued Living: ("Identifying Values" worksheet on Resources page)
Identify an area of your life in which you'd typically set a goal based on lack or self-denial
What Value is associated with that area?
Select 2-5 other Values that come to mind or are associated with that initial Value.
What are healthy behaviors to support that Value?
Consider how others support those same Values and how you may bring such behavior, completely or in part, to your own life.
Each step is about starting from your humanity, living from what you value, and building upon what already exists. From that foundation, you can increase your confidence in what is behaviorally possible by enlarging your competence in supporting what matters to you. Noticing what you're already doing is exactly the opposite of getting lost in contemplating what you're not. The latter is an ever-expanding sinkhole, and we know where it sends us: nowhere.
Being aware of the daily ways we live from our Values reminds us that we are constantly in service to them. By expanding what is possible through noticing how others support our shared Values, we build a greater repertoire of behavioral tools to work through the struggles that inevitably come up. Isn't that what we're all ultimately interested in anyway?