Accountability
Accuracy
Achievement
Adventurousness
Altruism
Ambition
Assertiveness
Balance
Being the best
Belonging
Boldness
Calmness
Carefulness
Challenge
Cheerfulness
Clear-mindedness
Commitment
Community
Compassion
Competitiveness
Consistency
Contentment
Continuous Improvement
Contribution
Control
Cooperation
Correctness
Courtesy
Creativity
Curiosity
Decisiveness
Democraticness
Dependability
Determination
Devoutness
Diligence
Discipline
Discretion
Diversity
Dynamism
Economy
Effectiveness
Efficiency
Elegance
Empathy
Enjoyment
Enthusiasm
Equality
Excellence
Excitement
Expertise
Exploration
Expressiveness
Fairness
Faith
Family-orientedness
Fidelity
Fitness
Fluency
Focus
Freedom
Fun
Generosity
Goodness
Grace
Growth
Happiness
Hard Work
Health
Helping Society
Holiness
Honesty
Honor
Humility
Independence
Ingenuity
Inner Harmony
Inquisitiveness
Insightfulness
Intelligence
Intellectual Status
Intuition
Joy
Justice
Leadership
Legacy
Love
Loyalty
Making a difference
Mastery
Merit
Obedience
Openness
Order
Originality
Patriotism
Perfection
Piety
Positivity
Practicality
Preparedness
Professionalism
Prudence
Quality-orientation
Reliability
Resourcefulness
Restraint
Results-oriented
Rigor
Security
Self-actualization
Self-control
Selflessness
Self-reliance
Sensitivity
Serenity
Service
Shrewdness
Simplicity
Soundness
Speed
Spontaneity
Stability
Strategic
Strength
Structure
Success
Support
Teamwork
Temperance
Thankfulness
Thoroughness
Thoughtfulness
Timeliness
Tolerance
Traditionalism
Trustworthiness
Truth-seeking
Understanding
Uniqueness
Unity
Usefulness
Vision
Vitality

And hello to you, and welcome to the Richard Nicholls Podcast, the personal development podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate, and motivate you to be the best you can be. I'm psychotherapist Richard Nicholls, and this episode is titled Values vs Goals. And if you're ready, We'll start the show.

Hello, you beauties. How are things been? Has life been treating you well? Have you been treating your life well? One of the biggest existential givens is that life is inherently meaningless, but we search for meaning anyway. And I want to remind you that I made an episode about meaning back in 2019. It's a public episode, so it's out there for everyone to listen to, and my take on finding meaning in our life has always been about living by your values rather than just goal setting.

If you listen to a lot of personal development podcasts and read a lot of self help books, you'll hear people talk about goal setting as being the most important thing for growth. I hear people say that If you don't have any goals, then you don't have any direction, that sort of thing. And that's very absolute.

And I don't like absolutes. We're humans. We're not Meccano sets that need these rigid rules to follow, otherwise things don't work right and cogs don't turn. We're all different. I'm a glaring example of that. I've got more quirks and unpredictable eccentricities than a box of frogs. I'm a therapist, and even I don't know what I'm going to do next quite often.

And it's okay if you don't either. We're not doing life wrong if we don't have a specific goal we're working towards. Instead, it can be more appropriate to live by your values rather than by your aims, if that makes sense. Often, I'll ask people about their values and they'll say things like, I wanna own my own home, I wanna lose 10 kilos, I wanna go on holiday every summer, those sorts of things.

And those aren't values, they're things to aim for, they're goals. Goals are fine, but if you're looking for meaning in your life, then you need more than goals. Otherwise, if we're prone to depression, we can easily slip downhill, you see. I meet a lot of people who feel that their life is meaningless, despite their goals.

Because they feel that their life is empty. And it's often because they're not aware of their sense of self. They don't know themselves, their likes and values, their preferences and opinions. Getting to know ourselves and our values is more important than goals, I think. Because what if we reach our goal and we're pleased with ourselves,

proud and satisfied? That feeling doesn't last. But if you think that working towards goals is the meaning of your life, then if you're not careful you'll just keep on pushing for more and never appreciate what you have in the first place. Your values can't be ticked off a to do list. You can have a goal of learn French and make a list of the ways you're going to do it and tick them off as you go, but by digging through your goals and see your value system that drives it, you might find it turns into feel connected to others or cultivate a thirst for knowledge.

If those are your values, then sure, it can drive your French lessons or History podcasts or whatever floats your boat, and give you some goals to aim for. But it also helps you to feel good about the whole process of learning French or whatever, because you can feel good even if you haven't achieved your goals, your targets.

Because the way you feel is value driven, not goal driven. Does that make sense?

Human values are quite abstract, aren't they? They're just a concept or a philosophical approach. So I think when we try to think about our values to help guide our life, we can get a bit stuck. Without the in depth thinking, my values would be, well, I just want to make people happy, or I want to be kind.

Again, they're not values. They're goals, wishes, desires. Now, that has become part of my personality, part of who I am. And whether that's nature or nurture, who really knows? A psychoanalyst could dig through people pleasing and look for insecurities in childhood, probably. But understanding that wouldn't turn me into a dick.

More understanding of why we do what we do and want what we want isn't going to stop us from wanting those things if they're harmless. We don't go back to factory settings and become self obsessed and selfish toddlers all over again. So if you do some thinking about who you are and what drives you, don't worry if you don't like the answers.

If wanting people to be happy comes from a long forgotten sense that if they're not, then it's your fault because you're defective in some way, then understanding that won't mean you no longer care whether people are happy or not. But what it would do is help you to put that feeling in perspective and save it for the right time and place.

It can still drive your life. Maybe you become a therapist, maybe you become a stand up comedian, or maybe you're just a good listener, an understanding friend. You can still keep your values. But with the drives in the right place, you can let go of any anxiety about what motivates you. And if you come up against any things in your life that challenge those drives, for some reason, it's not so world shattering because you still keep the meaningful part of those drives.

And what I mean by that is that if your values are like a compass that points you in the right direction, if you get knocked off course by something, even big things like losses, grief, you don't lose your meaning with your values in mind. Even if crappy things happen to you, life doesn't seem so pointless, so meaningless.

If you value connections to others, and deep relationships, then splitting up from your partner is still going to be painful and may knock you off course a bit. But when you're aware of your values, it's much easier to carry on living your life by those values of experiencing closeness to others and emotional intimacy.

You know deep down that you're going to be okay. But if you were living in a goal driven way, then that value of connections to others and deep relationships wouldn't be noticed and instead it could have been turned into I must have a thousand friends on Facebook or I must be married. You might have set the wrong goals and if you don't reach them then you can get thrown off course without a compass to guide you anywhere.

Your values don't change, you see, even if your life does and that bit of stability that can help you feel more resilient. Not only that, but when your life tallies up with your values, you'll find more pleasure in the goals that you do set. Like good old Anne Puddicombe said about constantly climbing the ladder of success.

She was a Welsh author in the 1800s. Went under the pseudonym of Allen Raine. She apparently said, You may get to the very top of the ladder and then find it has not been leaning against the right wall. Often quoted. If you understand your value system well. You can align your goals with it. So if you do climb a ladder, you've climbed the right one.

So how do you figure out your values? Well, thanks for asking. You start by simply going through your experiences, looking for the ones that made you happy. Could be work related, could be in your personal life, doesn't matter. You're just looking for those times when you were at your happiest. To figure out what it was about it that did the trick.

Who were you with? What were you doing? What was it about those experiences that you can see were the reasons it made you feel happy? And like I say, don't just go through your personal life. It's okay to look at the different jobs you might have done over the years, to see what it was that made it really click with you.

Then do the same thing, but think about the experiences that made you feel proud, not just happy. Because they're going to be different. Like for me, I feel really proud when I've been involved in a play. We all take a bow at the end and there's a real pride in performing and entertaining to me. But I'm probably no happier.

Then earlier on that day, when I was just wandering around the supermarket or something. But how about after our final performance? Because we usually do three nights, you see. And then we have a little party. Everyone brings in some food for a buffet, or we order a pizza or something. And we talk about the show.

And we talk about our ideas for the next shows. I'm happier then! But less proud, if that makes sense. So I know that I value connections and shared interests. But that I also value expressiveness and dependability. Professionalism and quality. Then do the same thing again, but this time look for the experiences you've had that made you feel satisfied or fulfilled.

See if you can see the difference between pride and fulfilment, happiness and satisfaction. You can be proud that you were acknowledged at work and got a promotion. But you might feel more fulfilled by helping a colleague who didn't understand something. You might find that those smaller wins are more fulfilling and satisfying.

So have a dig and see what needs or desires were being fulfilled and why it might have meant something to you. These are the ways in which we get to to really know ourselves. And with that bit of insight, see if you can determine your top 10 values. I'll add a link into the show notes to a list of, I think there's 150 of the common human values.

Go through them. And with this extra insight, see if you can identify just 10 values that resonate with you. 10 values that relate to why your life experiences made you feel happy, proud and fulfilled. I won't read them all out now because because there's 150 of them, but there are there's things like adventurousness, community diversity, honesty, traditionalism, things like that.

Look through the list, and when you've got ten, write them down in no particular order. They're in alphabetical order in the notes, so you aren't led into prioritising any. And this is where you really need to dig into yourself. This is where you'll go away and come back after a lot of thought, maybe. Because ten is too many.

Sure, you've got to know yourself a little bit better, maybe a lot better. But when it comes to making decisions in life, we want to really know our core values, that give us our compass. So we know which way to go when we're not sure. It's good to know your five core values. So once you've got ten values that you align with, you're starting to get to know yourself a little better, but it's a bit too many.

We want to really know what your foundations are. So,

get them down to just 5. And to trim those 10 down to 5 super values, you simply compare number 1 on your list with number 2, and ask yourself, if I could only satisfy one of these, which one would it be? And then you do the same with number 3 and number 4, then 5 and 6 and 7 and 8 9 and 10. And then look at the 5 you've discarded, and see if there's anything in there that feels too important to let go of, and decide which one from the super values list is you'd swap it with.

Now you're not actually letting go of anything, but by looking at 10 of your values and really thinking about them and trimming them until you've then got just five values that are the core of who you are. You can then look at those five and really think about them to see if these values actually fit in how you live your life now and how you hope to live in the future.

Are they values that make you feel good about yourself. It can be really useful to do this, honestly. It can help you to live authentically. By your rules. And if changes need to be made then make some gentle changes. You're probably not going to change your life overnight, it'll be too jarring. But at least you know which direction you need to nudge yourself in, so that you're following your compass.

Right then, let's go for today. Thank you all for being a part of this and helping me make this content. Like I so often say, couldn't do it without you. I've got nobody to listen to, so it's important for me that you're there. Especially if you're a patron of mine on Patreon. And if you want to support the show and get extra content, do follow the link in the description.

It'll be great to have you on board. Not only are you supporting the free content that I make, but also supporting yourself at the same time. Patrons tell me that having weekly content really does help them to keep their mental health topped up, and if you feel that you need that, then you know where I am.

So, time to go. Have a super day. I'll speak to you again very soon. Take care.