Values vs Goals
ACT for BeginnersWhat we're focusing on this week is values and committed action. Values are at the heart of the ACT model. They guide us as we go through life. They inspire us. They motivate us. And there are many different definitions of values. There's not one agreed definition. The values are the qualities I wanna bring to my actions right here, right now, in this moment, and on an ongoing basis.
With clients, I often describe them as your heart's deepest desires for how you want to behave as a human being. How you really wanna treat yourself and others and the world around you. Goals are what I want to complete, achieve, have, or owe. Whereas values are how I wanna behave. So a goal is in the future, it's something I'm aiming for, trying to get, wanting to achieve.
Whereas a value is how I wanna behave right now, how I wanna behave every step of the way towards achieving my goal, how How I want to behave if I do achieve my goal, and how I want to behave if I don't achieve my goal. Values are a fundamental importance in at least three different ways. Firstly, they inspire us. When we get in touch with our values, we have all sorts of ideas about what we wanna do with our time in this planet, and how we wanna treat ourselves and others. And they motivate us. They motivate us to step out of our comfort zones and do the hard yakka.
It's an Australian term for hard work, but I prefer hard yakka. You know, do the hard yakka necessary to build the sort of life we want, to face up to our fears, to keep going even when our mind's trying to talk us out of it and all sorts of uncomfortable emotions are arising. And last but not least, they bring a sense of fulfillment to our life. They enrich our experience with a sense of meaning and purpose.
They make our lives meaningful. You can usually say your values in one word or two words, you know, loving or being loving, kindness or being kind, fairness or being fair, honesty or being honest. If it requires more than two words, if it requires a whole sentence, it's probably not a value. It's probably a belief or an idea or an attitude or assumption or or a rule of how to live your life. For example, Thou shall not kill. It's not a value. It's a commandment. It tells you what you can and can't do. You can't say it in one or two words.
The values that are underneath that commandment or rule are something like loving or caring. So a lot of this week is gonna be about values and how we get people in touch with them and It's not just enough knowing what your values are. We wanna translate them into goals and translate them into action plans, committed action.