#19: What are Your Values?
Instead of making New Year’s resolutions this year, think about using the momentum of the new year to make changes in your life that are aligned with your values.
Often New Year’s resolutions come from a place of shame or deficiency, a place of trying to fix what’s “wrong” with you. What if you made changes in your life based on what’s most important to you rather than “fixing” what’s wrong? This is where values come in.
The DBT skill called Accumulating Positive Emotions in the Long Term can help you experience more positive emotions more often by aligning your life with your values. In today’s episode, Marielle and Ed take a deep dive into the skill.
Show Highlights
- Access your Wise Mind when assessing your values
- What’s actually important to you vs. what you think SHOULD be important
- Your values and priorities can shift as you go through different seasons in your life
- This skill outlines a step by step process to make your values a reality in your life
- Avoid avoiding
- Pick one value to focus on at a time
- Identify a few goals related to this value
- Bite-size action steps
- Take action!
Links & Resources
DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition
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#19: What are Your Values Transcript
Marielle Berg
Hello and welcome to The Skillful Podcast, where we explore DBT and RO-DBT skills to help you reduce emotional suffering, improve your relationships, and become more present in your life. I’m your host, Marielle Berg, a psychotherapist at the Bay Area DBT and Couples Counseling Center.
Marielle Berg
Welcome to season two, episode one of The Skillful Podcast. Today, we thought we’d get the new season and the new year started by talking about a DBT skill called Accumulating Positive Emotions in the Long Term.
Marielle Berg
Ed and I talked about covering this skill for the first episode of the new year, sort of as an alternative way of thinking about New Year’s resolutions. Because for so many people, you’ll make your New Year’s resolution and by the second week of February, you’ve already broken them all. And it can lead to such a sense of disappointment and discouragement, so we wanted to offer a different perspective.
Ed Fowler
And I think that the idea of New Year’s resolutions and using the new year to create momentum and motivation to make changes, has a lot of value to it. And I think it can be exciting to think about undertaking something new in order to make changes that you’ve been wanting to change. And in true DBT fashion, at the same time, New Year’s resolutions don’t tend to pan out for most people.
Marielle Berg
Yes. And there’s probably a whole host of reasons for that, which we won’t dive into too much. But you’ll see as we go on, and we talk about the skill, it, it’s a pretty involved process, and to make any major change in our lives, it can feel overwhelming. So there’s a way that it really needs to be given some time and energy and thought and broken down into small manageable steps.
Ed Fowler
The traditional New Year’s resolution can be so ineffective because it’s based on this faulty premise that like, oh, I’m going to make this big major change. And it’s a new year, a new me, and I’m going to do it all right now. And the reality is that most effective behavior change is an accumulation of small changes, doing breaking big goals down into small, reasonable parts, and taking them one at a time.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, it’s really it’s incremental. And it takes patience.
Ed Fowler
Which is, you know, like saying, oh, it’s a new year, I’m just gonna do everything different. That sounds wonderful. But, you know, patience is actually what is more needed, both patience and perseverance.
Marielle Berg
Yes. I mean, just because it’s a new year doesn’t mean that you aren’t still you. So yeah, for better for worse, we’re still exactly who we were in the old year with the same strengths and challenges and all of that.
Ed Fowler
Right. So I think that in the Emotion Regulation skill set for DBT, there are several skills that are meant to help us decrease our emotional vulnerability, and increase our emotional resilience. And Accumulating Positive Emotions is one of those skills that can be helpful in increasing our overall emotional resilience. And when we talk about Accumulating Positive Emotions, we talk about short term and long term ways of accumulating positive emotions.
Marielle Berg
Yes. In season one, episode 17, we covered Accumulating Positive Emotions in theShort Term, which was really all about why doing daily nice things for yourself matters in terms of building emotional resiliency. And so this is sort of a second part of building or accumulating positive emotions, which is really about the long term. And the reason why we do this, is if you are not living a life according to your values, or not living your life mostly in a way that really fits with who you are, you’re going to be more prone to some of the more negative and painful emotions.
Marielle Berg
Yes. And if anyone who’s listening might be feeling overwhelmed at this point, hang on, we’re going to really break this down. Because I know even conversations around like, are you living a life according to your values can just shut people down, because it feels like way too much. And it can be like, Heck, no, I’m not. And everything is wrong. And I don’t know how to start changing things.
Ed Fowler
And I think that we want to in order to live that life worth living, that we talk about a lot in DBT, we want to be thinking about what are my long term goals? What are the things in my life that will keep me in line with what’s important to me, with what my values are? And really looking at what are the things I want, the important values to me, my long term goals for myself, and then breaking that down is a much more successfu, potentially, and reasonable way to create that life that we want for ourselves.
Ed Fowler
Or like, I don’t have long term goals, I can’t think about that, or I don’t have any values. I don’t even know what my values are. So what I appreciate about this, you know, step by step process of Accumulating Positive Emotions, for the Long Term is, you don’t have to have any of that figured out. The process itself will help us kind of identify a few things that might be helpful, and some concrete small steps, so that it’s very doable and manageable and small, instead of Oh, my God, am I living according to my values?
Marielle Berg
Right? It just feels, yeah, way, way too huge. So let’s, let’s begin to talk about some different categories of values or priorities that will help people think about what’s most important to them. And when we’re talking about values and priorities, and we’re going to list a whole bunch of them and discuss some of them, a couple of things are important to keep in mind, when you’re assessing like, is this actually important to me? Is this a value that I hold?
Marielle Berg
You want to be checking in with your Wise Mind. And you also want to be thinking about what’s actually important to me, versus what might be important to the family that I was raised in. Maybe you were raised in a family, where particular things were super important. But as you’ve grown up and left that family, you’re reassessing and thinking, you know, what, this isn’t really a value for me. You can also be thinking about values that might exist in your particular culture, or ethnic or racial group that may or may not fit for you. And the reason why we emphasize this is that we really want to help folks build lives that are aligned with what is most important to, to them, and not to others.
Ed Fowler
And I think one of the barriers to that can be the idea that I should have certain values, whether that comes from family or culture, or a peer group, or whatever itmight be. Like there’s certain values that I should have. And I think that as we look at what’s important to us, there’s just so many options, that there’s lots and lots of room to choose, what do I want to focus on, that’s important to me, regardless of what anybody else might think about it?
Marielle Berg
Yes. And that this takes courage to live like that, if it’s something that’s a bit countercultural, or people around you may not necessarily understand or approve of, you might need to use other skills to help with that. But this is really about checking in with what’s important for you. And as we begin to embark on this list of values and priorities, you may already be thinking, or at least some people might be thinking, I already know what’s important to me, you know, it’s XYZ, these things are important to me. But I think it bears revisiting from time to time because our values and priorities can shift as our life changes. So as we go through different seasons of our life, for example, what’s really important to you in your early 20s can look really different in your early 50s, and so on.
Ed Fowler
Exactly. And thinking about ways to examine what might be values that are important to us. For us, we find it really helpful to use the DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets workbook, which is what we use in our skills group, which is by Marsha Linehan. In the second edition on pages 253 to 255, is a long list of different potential values and priorities. And when we go over this skill in group, we have people go through the entire list, and check off which ones kind of stand out and then go through the process of narrowing that down to: what do I want to focus on first? What do I want to focus on now?
Ed Fowler
Because there’s usually way more possibilities than anything that we can handle in one day or month or a year. So looking at that long list, there are some categories of values that I think it’s helpful to think about, to see, is this something that’s important to me that I may want to focus on?
Ed Fowler
So the first one on the list is attending to relationships, and having a value and a priority of either working on current relationships or reaching out for newer relationships, or even ending destructive relationships. But attending to our relationships can be a really important value we might focus on.
Marielle Berg
And this one I would venture to say is important to everyone. We’re social beings,we all need relationships, some people are more extroverted versus introverted. So if this isn’t one that you resonate with, some things to think about with attending to relationships is that it’s not necessarily quantity, but it’s really about quality. And to also think more broadly, because sometimes when we talk about relationships, folks might solely focus on intimate relationships, and relationships of all kinds are really important.
Marielle Berg
So maybe broadening the lens and thinking about all the different kinds of relationships you have and attending to them, which means repairing old relationships, if they need to be repaired, reaching out and forming new relationships, if that feels important, working on current relationships, and making sure that they’re doing okay, and potentially ending relationships that feel destructive or harmful in some way.
Ed Fowler
And one of the things that in this category of attending to relationships, we can also possibly put on that list, attending to our relationship with ourselves and putting a priority on that of, you know, what is my relationship with myself? Do I, you know, attend to myself in a way that I would want a friend or a loved one to be with me? Am I maybe a little too harsh and demanding of myself? So that canalso be a relationship that we might take into consideration in terms of all of the relationships in our lives.
Marielle Berg
I’m so glad you mentioned that, I mean, really, that being our first relationship, the relationship we will have for the rest of our lives. How is that doing? Because that can really set the stage for how you relate to others, if you’re critical and demanding of yourself, that’s going to come out in your relationship with other people.
Ed Fowler
So attending to relationships can be a really important value. To take a look at another important value can be being part of a group. So not just one on one relationships, but being a part of a group with other people, finding a sense of belonging to something, receiving affection and love, from a group. Like a family, for instance, or a group of friends, spiritual community, any other type of community that we might be involved in attending to our relationships as part of the group can be an important value to take a look at.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, and I think attending to relationships and being part of a group are values that almost everyone shares, and that we all kind of need. As I said earlier, we’re social animals, we need each other, even if we are introverts, which I self identify as. A sense of belonging is so important, I think, you know, we all need to feel like we kind of have our tribe or our people or someplace where you can go where other folks get us.
Marielle Berg
And so those two, attending to relationships and being part of a group are more of the relational values. And then a third value to think about is being powerful and being able to influence others, which for some folks is really important, and for others not so much. But some things to think about if power is important to you, is being respected by others, being a leader in some kind of capacity, havin success in various ways. It also can involve making a lot of money. And so there as we’re talking about this, people might have judgments or think like I don’t want that or that’s bad. But this is, you know, a value that some folks hold and we need some folks to hold this. Otherwise, no, no one would run for president.
Ed Fowler
For some people being a leader is important, going for leadership position. Sometimes people will say like, I really want a promotion at work, I want to be a supervisor or a leader in my workplace, I want to take on leadership within a group that I’m not involved in. I do think that looking at it is power, is being able to influence others, important to me, and am I going for that when it’s feeling lik that’s something that I want?
Marielle Berg
Yeah. So another value related to being powerful and being able to influence others is achieving things in life. So this is a value that’s about being productive, about valuing hard work, working towards goals and might be about ambition. And I think, again, similar to the relational values of attending to relationships, and being part of a group, achievement in one way or another is important to most people. And it can look really different.
Marielle Berg
So what being ambitious or productive or working hard looks like for one person might be very different. For another person, for one person, it might be climbing a corporate ladder. For someone else it might be taking in rescue animals, it can look really different. But this is related also to a skill that we talk about in DBT called Build Mastery, which can really help with our sense of competence and self confidence.
Ed Fowler
Another category of value to think about is living a life of pleasure and satisfaction. Which again, what comes up for a lot of people is like, oh, no, no, I’mnot supposed to value pleasure. And the reality is like that, it can be important tohave a priority on valuing, seeking fun and our lives, having free time, enjoying aspects of our lives, including work or our hobbies. So focusing on the value of seeking pleasure can be really important, especially if we feel like we don’t do that enough.
Marielle Berg
And I know I shared when we talked about Accumulating Positive Emotions in theShort Term, how much I struggle with that. And I think even when I, when we talk about having this as a value, like an overarching value for your life, it feels a little bit edgy for me. Even though part of me knows like, Yes, folks can actually absolutely prioritize a life of pleasure and satisfaction. But I think I have some internalized kind of taboos around that.
Ed Fowler
And so if that is the case, for others, it is something to think about. And maybe it’s a value that you want to put more emphasis on to counteract the shoulds, about not seeking pleasure or having fun in life.
Marielle Berg
Right, not making that a priority. And so another one, which I think also kind of can correlate to having a life of pleasure and satisfaction is having a life that is full of a lot of excitement. Having unique kind of relationships, and things happen in your life. So for some people, they really value novelty, and excitement, so trying new and different things in life, being daring and seeking out adventures is super important. And this might be someone who really likes to travel to unusual places, or try like, risky kind of, or an out of the box kind of sports and activities.
Ed Fowler
And so thinking about, is that something that’s important to me that I want more,to have these kinds of adventures in my life? On the other hand, sometimes the idea of behaving respectfully can be an important value for people. So really putting a priority on promoting a sense of humility, and modesty within ourselves kind of following traditions, following the rules, treating others well as a sense of being respectful.
Ed Fowler
And again, with all of these values, each of them has its place in our lives. Where we might want to focus on them is if we feel like it’s an underutilized value. So I’ve definitely known people who have felt like you know what, I am not conscientious about how I treat others, I am needing to put some more emphasis on that. So being respectful of others, kind of being more humble, might be a value that we would want to focus a little bit more attention on.
Marielle Berg
And then another value to think about is self direction. So for some folks, it’s super important that they kind of chart their own course in life. So they follow their own path, that they’re innovative, that they’re creative, that they feel like they have the kind of authority to choose what they want to do when they want to do it. I think about this value around self direction, to be really a value around freedom, and independence. And so for some people, this is super, super important.
Ed Fowler
And another value might be spirituality, and looking at ways that spirituality is incorporated within our lives, whether that’s practicing a specific religion, or a specific spiritual tradition, or maybe exploring spirituality a little bit more, growing in our own understanding of ourselves and our place in the world, our sense of purpose, practice of prayer, or meditation, those kinds of things. So spirituality might be an important value for some people to take a look at.
Marielle Berg
Another value is security. So this is living in, you know, a safe and secure surroundings, taking good care of your physical health, having steady income that meets all your needs. So for some folks security is a really important value.
Marielle Berg
And I think about how some of these values can really feel like they’re in contradiction with with other values. And I worked with a couple once, where oneof them, their primary value was around security. And the other one’s primary value was around having a life full of exciting events and unique kind of adventures. And so you could see where they would get stuck. But some of us have these competing values, you know, within us, we both want security and we also want the exciting life. So just things to note and be aware of as we go through this list and ask you to reflect on what’s most important to you.
Ed Fowler
And recognizing that again, all of these are have their place in our lives. Which one why we want to focus on recognizing that we can have the sense of competing values in a way.
Marielle Berg
And another value to think about is recognizing the universal good of all things. So this might come out in caring for nature being an environmental activists, understanding different people being really open minded, who might be involved in community organizing, being fair and treating people equally. So there’s lots ofways that this value can be expressed. But this is the overarching value would be around I think, recognizing the universal good of all things and the connections we have the ways we’re inter connected to all other beings.
Ed Fowler
And as we we only have a few more values to go through, a related value is contributing to a larger community. So prioritizing contribution to others, maybe helping people in need in some way contributing to our friends or family members, being committed to some sort of cause or a group with a purpose beyond ourselves. Feeling like we’re making contributions to the broader community beyond ourselves can be an important value.
Marielle Berg
I think this value, the one of contributing to the larger community can really help some people with a sense of meaning, and can also help with a sense of belonging, when we’re helping others or part of a group endeavor to make thing better in some way.
Marielle Berg
And then we just have a couple more we want to go through. So another value, might be working at self development. So maybe developing your own kind of personal philosophy of life in terms of how you want to live, and doing challenging things that help you grow and mature as a person.
Ed Fowler
And then the last value that we would want to cover is the value of integrity. So really focusing on our own sense of personal integrity, being honest and responsible. Being courageous as we pursue our life and making sure that we are, you know, paying our debts to others and contributing, especially if we’ve caused any sort of harm, we’re contributing to making that better. But really focusing on this internal sense of integrity can be an important value to focus on.
Marielle Berg
So we’ve we’ve just listed a whole bunch of different values and priorities. There may be things that we didn’t list that are actually really important to you. So this list can really be endless. These are broad, broad categories that we wanted listeners to turn their attention towards, as they begin thinking about, okay, what is most important to me? What what do I value in my life? And how can I begin incorporating more of that value into my daily life?
Ed Fowler
And hopefully, going through this, this list sparked some ideas for you of things that are important to you. Maybe it’s not one of the ones on this list. But one of these brought something out for you of like, oh, yeah, this is something that is really important. And I don’t know that I have that as prominent in my life as I would want.
Marielle Berg
Yes. And I mean, with all the skills, but particularly with this one, it’s not a one and done. Like this is sort of regular lifelong work, revisiting rechecking in with your values, making sure that they’re showing up in your life in one way or another. So this isn’t kind of a quicker skill. It’s not the TIPP skill, where we have people dunk their heads in ice water, and they feel better. This is much more, as we said, in the beginning of this episode, kind of plodding, incremental skill that takes a lot of patience.
Ed Fowler
So in order to Accumulate Positive Emotions in the Long Term, we want to be conscientious of our values. And there is kind of a step by step process to break this down to make it actionable.
Marielle Berg
Yeah. So once you’ve identified what your important values are, the first step is to avoid avoiding. So if you’ve already listened to us, at this point in the podcast, you’re hanging in there, you’re thinking about what might what your values mightbe, but I imagined as we were talking about it, that some people might turn off listening, or might turn off the episode because it could be like, totally overwhelming. Like, Oh, my God, my life has to align with my values. And it totally doesn’t. I don’t know what to do. And it’s just, I could see some people just shutting down.
Ed Fowler
Or even like, oh, you know, let’s get back to the really specific actionable things that will make my life better now, I don’t want to think about this longer term stuff. So if that is how you’ve been approaching this, that happens. And I do thinkand you know, thinking about our values and our life’s goals in a way, really focusing on that at times putting a priority on pursuing important values to avoidavoiding the bigger picture. So taking some time to really look at this is the first step in Accumulating Positive Emotions over the Long Term.
Marielle Berg
Yes. And once you’ve done that, the next step is identifying the values that are important to you. We just listed a whole bunch and other ones might come up foryou. So getting kind of clear on what are your values, not the values, again, that you’ve necessarily been told you should have, or not the values you had when at a different stage in your life. But what are your values now? And then identifying one value to work on now, like what’s most important? Because you may have gone through that list or listened along and thought, okay, like 20 things they said are important to me. But really thinking about like, where do I have some charge, or where’s there a spark in me around a particular value around a particular area of my life that I really feel like need some attention now.
Ed Fowler
And then once you’ve identified one value to focus on, the next step is to identify a few goals related to this value, the specific goals that you would need to work on in order to make this value part of your life. So for example, if you go through all that long list of potential values that are important, identify a handful that you would want to focus on and choose one. If the one that you choose, for instance, is to be productive, that you want to put more emphasis on being productive in your life, then goals that you might set for yourself to bring this value more into your life would be getting a job, a new job that you feel useful in, or being more active and keeping up with important tasks at home, or finding a volunteer position where I can use skills and build skills. So that would be an example if your value is being productive, some goals might be specific things that you would need to do to have productivity be more a part of your life.
Marielle Berg
And this is another place, and in addition to the avoiding that we talked about the beginning, where I think people can get really stuck. And the reason why values work is so hard. Because we often don’t go from values to goals, we just think, okay, I value creativity in my life. But I am a lawyer and there’s no creativity whatsoever. But I secretly want to be a painter, and I can’t do that I will have to upend my whole life, it can’t happen, you throw your hands up, and you say it’s too bad, I’ve made my bed, I have to lie in it.
Marielle Berg
And so we want to gently counter that with the skill and have you as you just did a moment ago in terms of productivity and have you really think about a few manageable goals that are related to that value. So you gave an example about productivity, I want to give an example about bringing creativity in. So maybe a goal would be finding a painting class to go to, or setting up an area in your house where all your painting supplies are. So when you’re ready to spend some time making art, everything is set up for you. Or maybe you don’t even have supplies and the goal is to like buy some materials.
Ed Fowler
Right or even for instance, if creativity is the value, and you painting is what you would like to do, you may include a goal of listening to more music to get inspiration, or go on some trips to look at some scenery to get inspiration for painting more. So there’s your specific goals that would get you towards this greater value of creativity.
Marielle Berg
Right, so so it’s really it could be really broad, going to museums, reading books, or watching documentaries about famous painters, whatever it might be, that’s going to spark creativity that’s important to you. And then the next step, once you get to several goals related to the value is to choose one, to just pick one of those goals to work on.
Ed Fowler
So for instance, if if your your value is creativity, you’ve got a list of goals, the onegoal might be to create a space for painting in your home. And so that’s, you know, out of the laundry list of goals that would be related to that value, pick on that’s actionable. So and then the next step after that is identify action steps towards that singular goal.
Marielle Berg
So as we’re going through this work, like it’s getting smaller and smaller, and this is where, again, those kind of New Year’s resolutions often fail, because they’re sobroad. Like, I’m going to be a better person. It’s like, okay, and how are you going to do that?
Ed Fowler
Right, right.
Marielle Berg
So we’re getting, we’re making it really bite size. So identifying a small action step towards your goal. If the goal is setting up, you know, that area in your house where you can do your art, maybe the small action step is to talk to the folks you work with about clearing out a corner or clearing out a room. Maybe a small action step is searching for a desk if that’s needed, or some materials that you need.
Ed Fowler
Gathering art materials into one place, so getting them from all the different parts that you have them stored, and maybe buying some new ones would be another goal. So you’re gathering your materials, there’s many action steps towards that one goal. So we’ve gone from a long list of possible values to focusing on one value, creating a bunch of goals, to focusing on one goal, creating a bunch of small action steps towards that goal. And then the final step is to take one action step now.
Marielle Berg
Yeah, and then repeat this sort of over and over in terms of taking more action steps for finding your goals, revisiting them. So it’s, it’s a process, but it’s so, once you can break it down this way, these big values that might feel distant or unmanageable or just completely out of reach begin to feel more like they can bea reality. Oh, yes, I can’t have creativity in my life, I have this one action step, when I carve out this corner of my home, as my place where all my you know, art supplies are.
Ed Fowler
And again, I think that the process of, and I think it is helpful to write it down, to write down your goals, write down your action steps, and then you systematicallygo through those action steps. And once you have those accomplished, then you go back to your goals and choose a new goal, and create action steps for that goal and go through those one at a time.
Ed Fowler
And this is where New Year’s resolutions tend to break down is, oh, I’m going to exercise. But there’s no sense of action steps and doing them one at a time. And so that it’s like, oh, I’m going to exercise more, which is so broad and vague and unclear to like, Okay, I’m going to make a list of steps that I need to take. And then I’m going to take them one at a time. And slowly but surely, it’s not as big and flashy. But slowly but surely we do achieve those goals and build those values in our lives.
Marielle Berg
Yes, and the exercise is a great example, when we were talking earlier about doing things that are actually important to you. So maybe exercise is more, you know, you know, it’s important, or you feel like it should be important, but maybe it isn’t really important to you, maybe you hate exercising, and you’ve told yourself, you know what, I need to be a runner. And so really beginning to think about okay, if I don’t like exercising, like it but being physically well or contributing to my physical health is a is a value for me, what can I do that actually will work for me? Maybe that’s taking a walk, maybe that’s spending time in nature, maybe that’s dance. So getting really clear on what is actually important to you, not what other people are telling you should do.
Ed Fowler
And I think in all of these things, having goals and action steps that are reasonable. So if the if you’re not going to do it, it’s probably not a good goal to focus on. And being able to use your Wise Mind to be realistic of like, this isn’t really motivating me right now. What I appreciate about this, this skill of Accumulating Positive Emotions Long Term is there’s so many options of values we might pursue, and goals around these values. Do the ones that you actually will follow through on, and break it down into small actionable steps and just do those.
Marielle Berg
Okay, that’s a great note to end on. Thank you.
Marielle Berg
Thanks for listening to today’s episode. To learn more, or if you’re in the Bay Area and want to get started with therapy, you can find us online at bayareadbtcc.com. That’s bayareadbtcc.com.