Values & goals, as promised

As promised, here is the stuff about values and goals that I've been learning/reading about. (I'm hoping that the mods don't move this thread because I don't find the psychotherapy forum safe.)

Values are "our heart's deepest desires" and leading principles that guide and motivate us: how we want to be, what we want to stand for and how we want to relate to the world.

"He who has a why to live for, can bear almost any how" - Friedrich Nietzsche

I found this worksheet helpful to discovering my values:

http://www.thehappinesstrap.com/upim...stionnaire.pdf

Once you have your values, you can compare your current life to your values and see where you have work to do. Then you come up with goals. Goals are a desired outcome that can be achieved/completed and they should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-focused. You start by thinking of a long term goal for a few years down the line, and break this down into steps needed to take to achieve that goal, right down to something small that you can do starting this week to start the path towards achieving that goal. The book suggests focusing on one domain at a time, so rank the value domains in order of which is most important to focus on first. However working on one domain often improves the other domains.

The book also points out the importance of not making goals that dead people can do better that you! Anything that is to stop doing something or never do something is considered a dead person's goal e.g. 'never eat chocolate again' or 'never be depressed again'. They suggest turning the goal into a live person's goal e.g. instead of 'never smoke again' think about what it is you would rather do instead of smoking, such as take a 15 min walk, so instead of smoking you will go for a walk instead. And the important thing is to not beat yourself up if you don't succeed. If you are trying to eat healthier but eat an entire bar of chocolate, don't think 'I'm such a failure' and drown your sorrow with a binge of junk food. Instead think 'ok it would've been better if I hadn't eaten all of that chocolate bar, but I'm just going to try again and continue working towards eating healthier' etc.

The book is 'The Happiness Trap' by Russ Harris, who incidentally uses ACT for psychosis in Australia. I bought the book for about £7 on amazon. I've only read the values & goals bit cos I promised you guys, but the book is easy to read (important to me cos I find reading hard) and uses examples of other people, which I find helpful.

The guy also has a list of worksheets on his website to go along with the book:

http://www.thehappinesstrap.com/upim...sheets.pdf.pdf

Hope you guys find this helpful

*Willow*

This still seems more goal oriented than value oriented....maybe I'm not seeing something?

The top link is a values questionnaire which asks questions to help you figure out what your values are. You then use the values to decide on goals to help you live life according to your values. It is goal-orientated because you need to have tangible ways to live your values, but your values drive the whole thing.

Does that make more sense?? Otherwise I don't really understand your question cos values and goals sort of feed off each other.

*Willow*

Thanks that's much more clear to me...

This is interesting. The worksheet is too much reading right now. Thanks for sharing it.

The book 'The Happiness Trap' is making a lot of sense to me so far. I skipped to the chapters at the end about values so I could tell you guys, but now I've started at the beginning. It talks about the myths we all buy into that everyone is happy except us, and that we should be happy all the time to live a good life and that we should never feel negative emotions, and about all the things we do to quash negative emotions in the short term that just makes everything worse in the long term. I'm starting to see psychiatry as one of those plasters/band aids that may help short term, but make everything worse long term because we haven't dealt with the underlying cause or symptoms (e.g. if you medicate away voices, you never learn how to manage life with them). I realise that may be controversial here, and probably biased by my awful experiences with psychiatry, but it's making a lot of sense to me right now. I really recommend the book so far, and it's very easy to read.

*Willow*