Meaningful change starts with Values
Defining and aligning to values to drive behaviour change
When I work with people, I want them to make meaningful change. This means change that aligns with values. But when I ask people what they value, it’s common for them to tell me about goals (i.e. things they want), beliefs (things they hold to be true) or rules (things they expect themselves to do). These things all have their place but values are the foundation of truly meaningful change.
Values can be defined in multiple ways, and I’ve no intention of going off down the rabbit hole of exploring those different definitions here. But, as someone interested in behaviour change, it is important for me that I give a definition of values that works for this purpose.
Values are concepts that make behaviour meaningful.
In their book The Art and Science of Valuing in Psychotherapy, Joanne Dahl and her co-authors expand on this by saying “values in this sense can never be fulfilled, satisfied or completed, rather, they serve to give us purpose or direction in each instance of behaviour” (p9).
So reflecting on values encourages us to think about life’s direction and not its destination. This is really important.
The rest of this article walks through my favourite exercise for getting to values — it’s derived from the obituary exercise, which I first encountered in a book by Kelly Wilson, one of the founders of the Acceptance and Commitment approach to psychology and coaching. Written with Troy Du Frene, it’s called Things might go terribly, horribly wrong. Incidentally, it’s a very uplifting book. As you might expect, that particular exercise asks you to write your own obituary, as if you are looking back on your own life. It’s actually quite powerful and needn’t feel remotely morbid (after all, we’re all finite).
However, people I work with often have a hard time thinking about the end of their lives and over such a (hopefully) long time frame. So instead I’ll ask them to do this exercise think about a period of about a year. I suggest they write using the following questions as stimuli:
Imagine you can hear people whose opinions you value talking about you in a year’s time, what would you like them to say about you, what you do and what you stand for?
Write from different perspectives — what would you want a friend, a family member, your boss, your colleagues or customers to say about you? It’s not a list of your achievements but about what you stand for – what will they see you doing and how do you go about doing it?
A mix of things will come up. These might be attitudes, qualities or ways of being. Essentially, you should have a list of:
1. Things or people that are important to you. Examples for me are my children (the role of parenting) and learning.
2. Qualities of behaviour that you want to display. Examples for me are curiosity, kindness and energetic.
Sometimes it will be single words like “fun” or “honesty” and other times it might be a whole sentence like “someone who always gives their best to others”. If it’s a sentence, try and think of a single word that encapsulates that sentence. So, in this example, it might be “commitment”.
Once you’ve done this, check in with the following questions:
1. Is everything in your list a ‘quality’ or ‘way of being’ that is really important to you? If you’re not sure, would you act this way if you didn’t get rewarded for doing it or punished for not doing it?
2. Can anything in your list be achieved — if the answer is yes, that’s a goal — keep a note of it but park it for the time being.
Ultimately, we end up with a list of words that can serve as directions, that you can look at and say, “these words describe the kind of person that I want to be”.
You don’t have to justify this list to anyone — if they have real meaning to you and are qualities then they are values. If you can, imagine hearing someone saying those things about you. If imagining those things makes you feel some energy, even the faintest bit of motivation, then they are the right things to be in the list.
I’ll write again about how you can use this exercise to set up meaningful change goals but, in advance of that, let me leave you with this suggestion: take one of those words in your list and ask yourself the question:
If I were to really act consistently with this value over the next 12 months:
What would I start doing or do more of?
What would I stop doing or do less of?
What gets in the way of me making those changes?
I rather suspect that with just those three questions you will generate a whole list of meaningful goals. There’s no need to rush into major changes but my last question is this:
