What are you already good at?

Is there a value you’d like to enact to a greater extent in a particular domain of your life?

For example,

let’s say an important valued life direction for you is

“being respectful of my own time and other people’s time”

and you want to enact that value more in the domain of WORK.

Sometimes a good place to start is identifying the ways in which you’re already doing a good job in enacting that specific value.

This process can be a nice shot of confidence, and its a good perspective taking exercise rather than only focusing on the negative.

TRY being REALLY SPECIFIC

and write down your info (its too much to expect of your brain to expect it to be able to structure this info mentally)

For example (these are a few of my personal examples. I’ve explained the examples a bit, which obviously you wouldn’t need to do if you were just writing it for yourself)

– I’m really good at googling info as I need it for learning computer skills (e.g. how to do something in excel that I need to know how to do at that particular moment). This works far better for me than taking classes. I learn the info in the context I need to use it in and don’t learn info in advance of needing it/things I don’t need to know.

– During a few minutes of my drive to work I do a “paying attention to the present moment” mindfulness exercise (i.e. I pay full attention to the process of driving). This works for me for transitioning from whatever I have been thinking about to being “in session” with clients when all my reactions are orientated towards what will be the most helpful reactions for the client.

– I’m good at not attempting to multi task in the few minutes I have between client appointments. I’m good at respecting how valuable those few minutes are for resetting my cognitive and emotional energy (respectful of myself and the next client).

– I use gmail’s canned responses feature for when people request generic info that I need to give out repeatedly (e.g. directions to my office).

—

If something is an important valued life direction for you – no doubt you are already moving in that direction in some important ways.

If this blog post appealed to you, don’t cheat yourself out of the experience of doing this by only allowing yourself the experience of reading about it. <<33 Once you are done with your list of what you're good at already, pick ONE VERY SPECIFIC thing you're willing to do differently to enact your value to a great extent. An advantage of the valued life directions concept is that you can use your knowledge of your valued life directions to guide your behaviour in a very broad sense - you can easily judge for yourself, in the moment, whether a particular behavioural choice is consistent with your valued life directions or not. But, since focus is limited it can also be useful to pick one behaviour change to focus on until you have established a new habit.