What is Important?

I have been talking about values recently, but what exactly is a value and how does it differ from a goal?

Russ Harris sums this up nicely by saying ‘ Values are words that describe how we want to behave in this moment and on an ongoing basis.  In other words, values are your hearts deepest desires for how you want to behave - how you want to treat yourself, others, and the world around you.

Sometimes people I work with will say to me I value my family, or I value my friendships, or I value my health.  And if we think back to our definition of values they don't seem to fit well with qualities of behaviour.   I cant be family, and I cant be health.  What we CAN call family, friends and health are domains.  And then within those domains we have our values.  There are various ways of looking at domains and I am going to make an entire separate video about them as I have some tools we can use and they will be too long to discuss in this video, so please subscribe to be notified when that video comes out.

So why are values useful in therapy?

They can create meaning.  Quite often I find that most of the people I work with are disconnected from their sense of purpose which then has an impact on their mental health and well being.  Through values we can work out what we want our lives to stand for and bring meaning to it.  I also find that when I am talking to people I am working with they report that their symptoms or the things they do to reduce unpleasant feelings such as anxiety can move them away from what is important in their lives and helping them understand that can show that in the long term behaviours such as avoidance dont work for them.

Values are really handy as an outcome measure! In other words they tell us what works for you.  If you are in therapy, or if you are trying out new behaviours and those behaviours or that therapy is moving you towards your values then it is working.  If its moving you away from your values then it isn’t working.  It may seem sometimes that what you are doing is making you feel worse but is moving you in a direction consistent with values. 

This opens up a big debate within the therapy world.  And the debate is this - in services how do we measure if what we are doing is working?  The most common currently is symptom reduction.  We give you questionnaires that ask about symptoms that relate to low mood, or symptoms that relate to anxiety and we ask you to score them, and if your scores down it indicates your mood or anxiety is improving.  So does that mean you are getting better?    What would happen if you came to me struggling with social anxiety, and we found away where you could do what ever work you do online, and you would never have to leave the house and socialise with any one again.  Would your anxiety score go up or down?  It may go down because you no longer have that threat of socialising any more, but I would argue that by not going out your house would not be an improvement in your life?   How about if we did some work together and we get you to a place where you attend your best friends party that you really wanted to go to, but in order to attend that party your anxiety is higher than usual?  Your questionnaire score is now higher than it was, indication worsening symptoms, but you have managed to engage in a really meaningful and valued activity.  In fact there is research that suggests that the correlation between anxiety symptoms and functional impairment is really weak - what that means is it isn’t the case that as anxiety goes down, quality of life goes up.  We can see anxiety increase and quality of life also increase.

So what I'm saying is looking only at symptom reduction as a measure of progress - without looking at what you want from life and what your values is maybe not the best way to measure progress.

So how does that differ from goals?

Goals are things that you are aiming for in the future, these could be things you want to get, have or achieve.  Whereas Values are how you want to be or behave right now in this moment, and on an ongoing basis for the rest of your life, and how you want to behave as you move towards those goals - whether you achieve the goal or not.

Or put another way : Values describe how you want to behave, while goals describe what you want to get.

A good example from Steve Hayes is the different between ‘getting married’ and ‘being loving’.  If you want to be loving and caring then thats a value as it you cant complete being loving and caring - its ongoing.  Getting married is a goal, it is something that can be completed.  And even if you did get married it is possible to not be loving and caring within that marriage (although the marriage probably won’t last very long).

Another way to look at it is values are a direction we continuously try and move in, not the destination.  So if the value was to head West we can never complete that, whereas a goal would be crossing a specific river whilst heading west.

Some examples of goals:

Get a job

Buy a house

Find a partner

Get married

Have kids

Win the next football match

Some examples of values:

Be loving

Be honest

Be caring

Be compassionate

Be courageous

Be fun

Be independent

I am going to leave a link to a list of values in the description below so check that out for some more example.

I hope you have found this video helpful and got you thinking about values a bit more.  Have a good day and take care.