Who You’ll Be This Year: Values, Goals, and a Different Kind of Resolution

[Music] Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forest Hansen. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today and if you've listened before, welcome back. Last time we talked about the rising culture of non-chalance, and that protects us from feelings of disappointment. Caring is risky, but it's also pretty mandatory if you want to get anywhere in life. And this topic is particularly relevant right now when people are thinking about how they want their life to look over the year ahead. So if we're going to care this year, if we're going to care about something, what do we want to care about? How do we want to aim that Caring? Most New Year's content does this through the lens of specific goals and resolutions. Those resolutions are typically behavioral in nature. Wake up earlier, you know, for me, eat more kale, which my parents have been trying to get me to do since I was about six years old, whatever it is for you. There's totally a place for this and we'll be talking about goals and behaviors a bit today as well. But those goals and behaviors exist in a really important, larger context, the kind of person you want to be. And this means your general sense of who you are, your stance towards your life, and importantly, your values. That's what we're going to be focusing on in this episode. Using the New Year as a chance to clarify that stance in those values, and hopefully you'll leave this episode with a clearer sense of what you care about in a few concrete ways to live that out in your life. So to help us do that, I'm joined today by clinical psychologist Rick Hansen. That, how are you doing today? I'm good. And I've been reflecting about how it's easy to treat this topic as a little bit like a cliche, hallmark, car, well, in fact, it's arguably one of the top handful of topics for anyone in a life that involves coping and flourishing. I think you're totally right. It's a really big one. And before we get into it, I do want to remind people quickly about Rick's course. It's a new course that he has online. It's called titled Rewire Your Anxious Brain. The course is 12 weeks long. It has live sessions with Rick every week, live weekly discussion groups, practices, handouts, all of that good stuff. And it's about dealing with anxiety, which is something that people really do experience around this time of year. And you can get an additional 10% off with the coupon code BWP10. And the link to that is rickansen.com/anxious. I've probably also included a link to it down in the notes for today's episode. So something that I want to start by talking about is the idea is values as like a kind of stance that we have blending together these two things a little bit. To me, a value is my current answer to what do I really want my life to be about. And there's this kind of bigger existential idea that people can endure a lot if they have a why that feels meaningful to them. But unfortunately, a lot of people live lives where they feel very disconnected from that why in different kinds of ways. And something that I think is important to have is kind of the bedrock of what we talk about today is that a values-based life is not always one that looks really picture-esque. It can be a very normal look-in and normal feeling life. But if you've connected with the things that are really important to you, if that's like raising kids or if that's acting in a moral way in the world, that's living out certain desires you have for exploration or authenticity or whatever it is, it can still feel like a deeply meaningful life. And also, the behavior that you have in the world is going to flow very naturally from those values that you have. Like if you feel connected to them, you're going to find yourself naturally acting in ways that are more aligned with those values. In other words, you're going to end up doing more of the stuff that you wanted to be doing anyway. What do you think about this dad, this kind of big framework? I was reflecting about how our stance in life, our basic values stack, is of course very contextual. And embedded in that stance and a close cousin to it is a worldview. How do you regard the world? How do you regard yourself? If you regard the world as oppressive and powerful and threatening and hostile? Well, your stance vis-à-vis that world is going to be one in which you're protected, defended, maybe aggressive. That will be your values based stance. On the other hand, if you view the world as supportive, full of opportunities, far from perfect, but still an interesting place in which there's certainly some field of action for you, well, then your values stack will be a little different there. So I'm very glad we're talking about this kind of like origin point. If you will, I'm pulling up my hands in a V shape that the center of it all is this integration of worldview and values. And then from that origin point, so many good or problematic things can flow. To piggyback on your kind of metaphor of like the heart of the thing and these things kind of spiraling off her. I think there's sort of four levels of action is maybe a way to think about this. The first level of that is values, like we're just saying, how you want to show up, a direction you can move toward again and again. Do you value being honest? Do you value being engaged? Adventurous? Living a fun life? Do you value moral action? Are there particular things out in the world that you want to create more of or see less of whatever it is for you? And then flowing from those values could be different kinds of goals. These are specific, completeable targets that ideally are largely under your control. This could be, you know, run a 5K, a lot of people around New Year's, this kind of thing. Launch a newsletter, show up in a slightly different way inside of your relationships, whatever it is. Then you've got behavior and this is what you do day after day to hopefully achieve that goal. You know, going for 20 minute run, right into paragraphs, whatever it is for you. Then there's the outcome and this is the final end of the whole thing. This is what actually happens. And much of that is not in your control. Sometimes the race just gets rained out. People tend to make the most resolutions at least in my experience about their outcomes. You know, I want to make this many dollars this year. The second most about their behavior, I want to wake up earlier. And then hardly any related to values, self-concept or direction for life. You know, I really care about this. I want to live my life in that kind of way. And this is a real bummer because our behavior tends to flow naturally from both values and self-concept. You know, if you think of yourself as an anxious person, you're not really going to be making a choice about whether or not you go to the party. You're just not going to go to the party because you're like, that's not the thing that I do. Of course I'm not going. And if a person's self-concept is accurate, the behavior might be totally rational. But a lot of the time our self-concept isn't accurate. We haven't done active thinking about what our values are in adulthood. And we're just kind of like carrying around this big bag of old stuff that just isn't as relevant for us anymore as it used to be. Or we've been kind of given these values externally from the broader culture, from other people in our life. Maybe from our experiences growing up that aren't really consistent with like who we are on the inside. And this leads to us taking on all these behaviors and making these resolutions that are about things we don't actually really care about that much because we're carrying around again. All of that kind of imported content. Well two things there for us to first shout out to the S training and his creator Werner Earhart for what I'm about to say, which potentially Werner may have gotten from some other source. But this is what I learned in 1975. And people might listen along if you don't know this little thing I'm about to do here. Apply it to yourself. Think about having, doing and being. The typical stance is I want to have something. I want to have a lot of people who like me. I want to have a lot of money. I want to have a nice house with a two car garage, you know, an upony in the backyard. That's what I want to have. Okay. In order to have that, I need to do X, Y and Z. I need to engage various behaviors that will produce that result. If I want a lot of people to like me, gosh, I need to create an Instagram feed. That's really popular. If I want to get a pony in my backyard and have the money to support it, well, I need to go to college and get an MBA. I need to do those things to have what I want. And then when I finally have what I want, I will be able to be a certain way. Oh, yeah, then I'll be happy. I'll be so happy with my pony. I'll be so happy that so many people like my Instagram feed. Right. Wander pointed out that it, and you pointed it out already implicitly. Most people have that bass accords. Yeah. In other words, actually, what's much more effective is to start with being. What's the state of being that is both intrinsically valuable to you? So you've already won the game from the get go. And also what is that state of being, which is both intrinsically rewarding and meaningful for you, which also fosters appropriate action, which then gives you what you want to have. And that's the switch arena. You'd rather start from have to do to be. You start from B to do to have. That's a really useful one. And then the other thing is in terms of being as that origin point, your state of being because if you think about it in the language of results in social sciences, we talk about effects sizes. What has big effects? We've done a lot of talking about effect sizes recently. Yes. People tend to focus a lot on stuff that actually has very little impact on will get into more values later, but lifetime quality of life, service to others. People fixate on things like, I got to improve my GPA or, you know, I need to like polish my resume. me in this way, it might help a little bit, but it's not going to make a big difference for what you really care about. What tends to make the biggest possible difference is your state of being, it's your state of being along the way. So then I go back to developmental psychology, which is kind of my roots, intellectually and clinically, and there's this term I ran into when I was a young pup in graduate school. Actually I was a really old pup in graduate school. But anyway, states become goals in early child development. And as a parent and a teacher, you're trying to help certain states of being in children, such as settled, calm or generosity toward younger sibling or pleasure in learning new things. These are states of being, feeling loved, feeling safe in your bedroom down the hall so that you can go to sleep on your own without your dad or mom lying next to you for an hour or two. States of being, you want to help those states of being to become goals. And for whether it's a human young child or a young chimpanzee or a young squirrel, naturally enough, states of being become goals. Now some states of being are goals that are highly unpleasant. We don't like them like a state of being in which I'm very, very deferential. But it still becomes a goal because it keeps you safe. Right on. It works. Totally. It's really interesting. Yeah. But the larger point here is to be very aware of the natural propensity of the brain to turn certain states of being into goals, then you might ask yourself, "Whoa, what states of being were trained into me during the first 2010 to one years of my life?" And how happy am I about those states of being today? And to what extent do they serve me? And to what extent do they constrain and burden me? And then how can I help myself establish new states of being as values for me, which then from which values based action proceeds? This is great data. I love that framework on it because it makes it so real inside of people's experience, what has been my stance toward life up until this point, and which that are really understandable. It's really understandable for somebody to have a stance toward life of, "I want to experience less pain. I want to fly under the radar. I don't want the powerful people to harm me in different kinds of ways." People live real lives that put that stance kind of into them. And then there starts to become a place to ask, "Does it still need to be this way from here on out?" So I've used this phrase, "Stance toward life a couple of times now." I think it's a little bit of an ephemeral thing. You sort of just know what I'm talking about. It's hard to define. I'm wondering if you can help me define it a little bit though. Can you give an example of a kind of stance toward life here that a person could have and how different ones might be different? Yeah. I started with an example of if the world is hostile, that's a worldview. So then an appropriate stance toward it would be to be defended, cautious, maybe even fairly aggressive if necessary to get what you need. If the world on the other hand is regarded because it is, somewhat nurturing, somewhat full of opportunity, not entirely out to get you, well then that would lead to a different orientation to life, you know, as a kind of stance. Think about the fundamental neurological sequence having to do with attention. Stay with me here. So there's a natural three or four step process in which first there is alerting. We recognize what's true. Something has changed, something's different. We're in the jungle or we're in downtown traffic or we're in a business meeting or we're in a conversation with someone that we're actually really interested in. So we're alert. That's the initial first half second. We're alerted to something, something let's say in the face of the person where, "Oh, are we going to go to the next level?" Or, "Second, we orient." That's the second step of attention. We orient to what's relevant. In alerting, we just know something has happened. We don't know where it is or what it is or what it means yet. Second step, we start to orient to it. And then in the third step, we start mobilizing attention or resources around what's relevant about it and what we can do with it. And then cascading from that is sort of a flow of plans and actions and so forth. So I'm doing this as kind of a, I don't know, for me, I've never thought of it this way. Intellectually creative, maybe it sucks, I don't know. We have asking ourselves, "What are we alerting to?" Sure. Because we can have values about how we go about valuing. We can have values relating to, "What do I want to pay attention to?" And then the orienting becomes our stance. We're beginning to mobilize the stance. Okay, yeah. Yeah, I see what you're doing here, Dad. I think this kind of stance is sort of in the orientic phase a little better. That's maybe a good way to put it. So maybe let's make this kind of practical here and that'll help us sort of cut through a kind of a febrile of febrile. So for me, you have a gift for that, by the way. I feel like I usually start out. You know, in the old days, when cameras did not auto focus, you had to literally focus. I feel like my gift is to throw out certain diffuse clouds that probably has some merit somewhere. There's something here. They dial it in a little bit. Adding value along the way. I think that what you are doing the good job of highlighting is that information is not objective. Information is funneled through our lens. So there's information that's out there in the world. And then there's how we interpret that information. And two people can look at the same scene and see it. Totally different scene based on their personal life experience, their values, their history, all of that. I think that's kind of what you're highlighting here. And what that suggests is to go back to my favorite thing these days, I guess, Cisophys and the Boulder. You're essentially saying, well, you know, you're pushing the Boulder either way. How do you want to relate to pushing the Boulder? The task is the same, but the relationship with it is different. So if you have a stancer or value, feeling inside of yourself, like feeling inside of myself, that there's some really kind, caring part of who I am. And I want that to shine through my relationships more. I want to act from that stance more in my relationships with other people. If I'm in touch with that, I don't really need to granularly figure out my behavior. I return to that feeling, that value, and I do stuff that helps me perpetuate that feeling and that value. And if that feeling or value starts to drift away from me, I kind of go, all right, I've sort of gone off track here and I need to bring myself back a little bit. And I think that a lot of that does happen in that kind of orienting phase or figuring out relevancy. There's some things where if your friend does them with you in that moment, if you're not carrying that value of, okay, I'm trying to be a warm relational person, you might just be like, well, that's not relevant to me, right? But all of a sudden you've expanded what's relevant to you because you're like, I want to be a warm and relational person and that would look like filling the blank in this moment. And so it's just another example of how behavior kind of flows from values. And I think that what people really struggle with in this process for starters is like figuring out what their values are. When I do coaching work with people, one of the most common responses is some version of like, I just can't figure out what I, what I care about or I feel like I have something but I'm not really sure. Yeah. So I do want to spend a lot of time on that in this episode. And then from there, it's the implementation stuff. It's like creating the conditions that let the best version of who you are show up more often. This is environmental design. This gets to some stuff from self-determination theory that we'll talk about. Then being a really active agent inside of that process, this is not just happening to me. I'm the one who is choosing. My hands are on the tiller a little bit here. And then of course, we got to figure out how to deal with all of the garbage that comes up in life along the way because it's one thing to be like lead of values driven life when everything is perfect. And it's quite another do this when you're dealing with with normal obstacles. Is there anything that I've said in that, Dad, that you would like to like comment on or just kind of pull out here? Yeah. I think what you're highlighting here for us kind of relates to my torture attempt at tracking the cascade of attention to make a point. My point about that is in our stance in moment to moment to moment to moment. And I'm frankly thinking about many experiences I've had in wilderness where things are really threatening and real. What's your stance moment to moment to moment? It is a product of what we're alerted to, what we notice, how we orient to, what we notice. What is it and where is it? It's identity or nature and then how relevant is it? Okay, so far. So our stance moment to moment is an understandable result of what we are noticing, what we are categorizing and what is relevant to us, all of which land on our priors, all of which land on our underlying state of being and our underlying value stack so that underlying state of being is incredibly important. To use an example, if I'm in the mountains and I want to get to the top of it, let's say, and I'm starting to notice that a storm is coming in and my partner is starting to complain. If I'm super dedicated to getting to the top of the mountain and that's my prior, I'm because that's my deep value. Well, I may keep on going. You know, and that might become my stance there. On the other hand, if, you know, I would love to get to the top, but I care about my partner, and I care about living to climb another mountain another day, then that set of priors in my stance would then lead me into a different way of being. - Yeah, and for me, I think that where this could get really complicated for people is trying to do that sorting out of what's mine, and what's somebody else's that has been given to me that has now kind of expired. We did an episode on humanistic therapy a while back, and I talked during that episode about conditions of worth, which are one of my favorite ideas from Karl Rogers, to sum that up really quickly. He basically thought that everybody had this kind of self-actualizing tendency. We have this beautiful underlying nature. Our job is to kind of clear where the cobwebs and let it shine through. And what accompanied that was a drive to become more authentic and complete. He was really into authenticity as an idea. And what gets in the way of this are what he called conditions of worth. These are stories we absorb about what we have to do in order to earn worthiness. People will value me if I will stay safe, if I'm productive, if I look a certain kind of way, if I'm helpful to other people, whatever it is. And the actualizing tendency when we absorb that starts to shift away from what we really care about and toward what are basically elaborate forms of people pleasing. The problem here is that if you think about classic resolutions, I need to hit this income, I need to hit this weight, I need to hit this follower account, I need to apply for this job. - I need to have. - I need to have. Yeah. - Outcomes you have. These are all like conditions of worth projects that are just kind of dressed up for self-improvement, right? You know, value is I really care about this thing from the inside out. And I want to live in a way that demonstrates that. And so the resolution, once we're in that stance, becomes a kind of expression of the authentic version of who you are. But that separation, like, is this me or is this condition of worth stuff? I think I get kind of muddy for people. I don't know if there's anything that you've done with people that or you've experienced inside of yourself that essentially helps you find the authenticity in this or helps you find the stuff that you really connect with and that, I don't know, more experiential way. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors. Now, back to the show. It's helpful for people to develop, as you talk about, from attachment theory, a coherent narrative of their life. And to help them, you know, track messages and shoulds that they got from key authority figures, including, this is really important. The embedded should in states that became goals when they were preverbal. The embedded should in, I should be small. Like I've known classic gender socialization, many women who are once girls, obviously, who internalized a should that they should not be loud. They should not take up space. And it's very embodied and it's preverbal. So being aware of the internalization and just understanding the shoulds you've internalized, and also reflecting on the ways in which there could well be a valid should. Like, okay, I should do a good job, but is that should reinforce, find intrinsic sense of integrity? And the values you care about, including, per, let's say, a value on duty. I gave my word, that's the basis of the should here. Not out of avoiding some sort of externalized punishment of others disapproval, or seeking some kind of externalized reward, like other people giving you big paths on the back. I think it's sensible tactically to try to avoid external punishments. And it's okay to seek paths on the back, and then internalize them, hopefully, along the way. But there's a difference between those external sources of reward and penalty and internal rewards and penalties. Much as there's a difference between externally originating shoulds that got implanted in you through natural processes when you were younger versus the should you have for yourself. So to me, that's one, and you kind of sort it out. It's a little bit like you're tracking, we just did an episode that you know, which is about the appeal of the woo factor, the woo. And you properly emphasized attention to the messengers, and whether messengers are credible, and trustworthy, or whether they're dubious flawed, and maybe exploitive of you. So similarly, this part here is tracking, who are the messengers of the internalized should you have today? That's really helpful to track. And you might even take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. One column is titled, they said, and another column something like, I say, they said, big boys don't cry. I say, it's okay for men to cry. They said, girls should not take up space. I say, women have as much right to take up space as anyone else, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's kind of a way of sorting that out. I could say another little thing, but I want to pause to hear where you think about what I've said. So it's helpful. - I think it's great. And also I would just connect it explicitly to a kind of value flowing from that eyesight, or like a stance flowing from that eyesight. - Yeah, which I think I'm just gonna, like the next little, which you're doing implicitly, but just to take it like one step further, okay, I say men can't cry. And like why wouldn't them then cry? Okay, well what does that say about what you value? And what you value is a kind of emotional expression maybe, or emotional openness or authenticity, or being real with other people, or letting them see you bleed a little bit, so we can connect it from like a common humanity stance. Or I certain values that you wanna share with the world, the belief that everyone experiences different kinds of difficulty. And the belief that it matters when somebody's emotional experiences, and that it's not just about a kind of elaborate performance art. You can really go down the rabbit hole here. And some of these can be kind of specific. Sometimes values can be like pretty specific. I find that it's generally best for people if they try to find the kind of broad value, or the broad feeling. Also there's a big somatic markers piece to this I think, where there's a feeling in the body that a person will get, if they're expressing a kind of value, or that is implicit in the kind of stance, for me that's been a really helpful thing to return to sometimes. - Yeah, I know you're going to talk more about this, which has to do with what is the deepest possible want underneath at all. - Yeah, yes. - That's a second way into the sovereignty, your own personal sovereignty and ownership, and authorship of what you most deeply care about, distinct from what they told you you ought to care about. - Now to be clear, just to repeat, sometimes what they told you you ought to care about, you really ought to care about. - Sure. - And I pay the price. - Yeah, I pay the price late in line. - You're in a reasonable amount of effort. - Yeah, for ignoring my parents advice, that you really ought to save a little money every week, Rick, starting when you're young. - You know, I do believe that. - There's good advice out there that we don't really like. - Oh, man, and then in my 50s, I realize that we were gonna crash and burn and it was like, kind of got it together in some ways. So anyway, okay, so what have you really, really cared about all along? As you get older, there's just a natural process that can arise of reflection. And one way into that is I've looked back on my life, and in terms of the relevant task of evaluating yourself in terms of how well have you lived up to your values, especially your true values. I'll call them heart values. Not their values, not outside in values, but inside out values, heart values. To what extent have you truly lived up to them? And I think a lot of people have this nagging sense that has to do with kind of full-scaled. They feel like they haven't lived up to values, which are bogus values. They're full-scaled values. They were not your deepest values. And very often when people let go of that, the striving for the brass ring, or the status symbols, proving your worth, impressing others. And on the other hand, if they look deeply, what have I truly deep down most cared about in this life? Very often people realize, you know, in the face of a lot of obstruction, a lot of challenges, a lot of difficulties, not perfectly every minute of every day, but on the whole, I've been true. I've lived true to. I've kept faith with my own truly deepest values all on the way. That's a really important thing to let in, which can then lead to a kind of absolution that's very touching and tender and profound, related to the non-achievement, to some extent, of those full-scaled values that you may have brought into in the life. And then on the other hand, if you look closely, wow, what have I truly cared about in this life? And you have to win. Well, that's a wake-up call in the remaining years and minutes of your life to today. Start living more truly, you know, to those deep values. And I'll name three that I realized for myself that I think are really quite common, so I'm willing to be kind of personal here. When I look back on my life, life, I could see that there were for sure three things that I deeply cared about. And this emerged actually in conversation with you for us. And Laurel, when we were talking about, you know, what's your why? What's your why? When you kind of run out of outside in-wise, you're left with inside out wise, your heart wise. What are your heart wise? And I look back and I thought, you know, in my life, I've always wanted to know what is true, what is really, really deeply true. It's the heart of the matter, whether it's in science or spirituality or in the mind or in the heart or intentions of another person. I've just always, you know, been on the road as Ket Stevens put it to find out. That's been true for me. Second, I've wanted to help people. I've wanted to be of service to others. You know, I'm touched by their suffering. I've wanted to be helpful. I want to help. I want to contribute. And third, I want to be happy. I want to be happy along the way. For starters, I think that kind of a life review is very helpful. It's just a useful thing to do. For almost anybody, at almost any stage of life, right? Including getting real about it. I had a moment where I really got real in my like mid-late 20s about just level of effort. And I had given a pretty good level of effort to some things and not such a good level of effort to other things. And just sort of went, okay, what would it really be like if my stance for that? I wanted to get everything that I could out of life. And part of that means sometimes having your nose on the grindstone a little bit because like that's just the price of admission. That's sort of a way to take a should, even a narrative should, a kind of should you've been given by somebody else and convert it into something that feels more meaningful to you. Because most people do not have a really tidy list of like values that are really deeply important to them. But what they do have is they've got a lot of shoots. I should do this. I should do that. Like a birlier, I should do differently, whatever it is. Vague lawningings that they have, kind of feelings of envy, feelings of desire, memories of times that they felt really like alive and connected to themself. And so what we're kind of trying to do here is we're trying to take all of that psychic material and mine it for the stuff that we really care about, right? So you can kind of use some of this stuff that isn't so great to feel or great to experience and turn it into something that's really pragmatically useful. An example of this might be looking at a particular shoot that you have. For me, I should work harder. That's a great classic example. Then you can maybe take a little while to explore what are you getting from this shoot? What is it about, you know, if I worked harder, what would I get? Is it what I get security? Would I get self-respect? Would I get more energy? Would I get more achievement? Okay. And then we can kind of turn those into different sorts of values words. For me, self-respect was a big part of it. That became increasingly a value to me. Also like mastery. I had mastery as a value. I really wanted to get good at things. I liked the process of learning. That becomes a kind of value. A piece of it for me was also a sort of, I don't know if the tone of this sounds quite right, but a kind of self-mastery, like I wanted to be somebody who could make myself do things. You know, I wanted to be somebody who wasn't so such a prisoner to how I felt that day or what my mood was like or whether it was raining or not raining. Whether Mercury was in the third house or whatever it is that people said, "I wanted to be the author of my existence a little bit more because I just felt not a genic and I wanted more of that." So those then became these kinds of very meaningful values for me over the next 10 years, basically, since I went through that kind of an exercise. So you can think maybe for yourself about how you would apply that as an idea. That's great. You're going. Okay, so that's one way that we can take some of this stuff and turn it into a sense of a value. Another thing that I think can be helpful for people, if they're struggling with us, is admiration. You've talked about this a lot, Dad. Looking at people out in the world who are just the way that you would like to be more. Ideally, this is not so much about, "I want to occupy their life," or "I like envy them necessarily," or "they are checking a lot of superficial boxes that I want to check." This is more about stance toward life. You genuinely admire them. What is it about them that really lands for you? Even if it's a fictional character, what is it about that character that you just really connect with and you really respect? What do they say yes to? What do they say no to? That you wish you said yes to more often or that you wish you said no to more often. Things like that. Then you can start to extract, again, values words from this. This person tells the truth even when it's kind of spooky. Great. Honesty, courage, a kind of integrity. This person really shows up for friends and family. They keep on learning and trying new things. Growth, curiosity, loyalty. We start to find some words here. This is something I've heard you talk about a lot, Dad. I'm wondering if you want to chime in with some aspect of this. There's a lot of developmental psychology around modeling. Yeah, totally. I tell you of that. Yeah, in early, early childhood. Then there's the question of how deeply are we modeling? Mimicry is a very superficial form of modeling. Yeah, good distinction. Yeah. While on the other hand, starting with what's called intersubjectivity, which is available by around nine months old, infants start to tune into and then begin to model the internalized state of caregivers through empathic attunement, which is really quite interesting. That's a way into this that I find, I think of it a little bit like channeling certain people. A simple example for me is watching rock climbers who are doing something physical that I, I, like, oh, yeah, I can see that they move their hips this way and that enables their arm to reach in that way. Oh, I want to tune more into that, into that way of being. That's really useful. The interesting thing is very often we admire people for what they have and all so for what they do, including they do something very, very skillfully. The problem is it's hard to actually emulate over here genuinely what other people have who are maybe more successful than we are or what other people do who are maybe just simply more talented at that or what they're doing is the result of 10,000 hours or more of lifetime training in that. That's hard. But what's the state of being the kind of the internal core of the people that we admire? That's within reach for us because it's the universal human endowment to be able to settle into these deep, deep ways of being. That's accessible to you. You can actually get there and often get there fairly rapidly, definitely much more rapidly than becoming as skillful as flying a plane or running a meeting as someone who's been doing it for the last 20 years. I think this is a great thing to point to your dad to put it in in my hobbyist domain, which is dancing. I cannot do dancing as good as the professional dancers who have been doing it for 20, 30 years as their full-time thing. It's just not realistic. I can try to emulate ways that they move in that kind of reflective, mirror, neuron way and that's a great way to learn. You know, that's sometimes what I do when I'm practiced. What I can probably do tomorrow, if I really wanted to, if I really cared about it enough, and for the record, I don't, which is why I'm not a professional dancer. But if I did, if I did really care about it that much, I could try to step into the like, okay, what's this person's relationship with the dance? How often are they working on their dancing? How often are they thinking about their dancing? How do they feel about this whole thing that they're engaged with? Like that's something that you actually can move into even as an amateur. If you want to deepen your relationship with something like this, and I think you're right. I think that you have access to that at least as a thought experiment pretty much immediately. That doesn't mean you could do it perfectly tomorrow, but you can have a kind of target that you're aiming for, something that you're trying to embody as now your stance toward whatever this thing is. Yeah. And what's interesting also about ways of being, that we're, let's say, emulating in other people. I think back on a shout out to Carol Hettrek, the assistant dean in my dormitory of 800 people when I, at 17 years old, a total shite dork from West Kovina, I school got elected as dorm president, and I had to suddenly learn quickly how to work with people. And so I would watch Carol and how she did things. And for a while, I think I was trying to figure out intellectually how she, with her internal computer, would realize that the best thing to say or do in that meeting was X, Y, or Z, that would take me normally 10 minutes to figure out retrospectively. But over time, I began to realize that no, all that stuff just kind of originates from a centeredness that was calm and goodwill for others and a certain knowing that she was not going to get pushed around and she could be patient and take some time to allow the group wisdom in our student council and our dormitory, all 10 floors, you know, to come to some kind of decision. In other words, that was what was really useful to emulate. So state of being. And one of the clues as to the states of being, core of beingness that we'd like to emulate or cultivate increasingly, one of the primary signals that it's the real deal is that it feels really good. Yes. Absolutely. Not a transitory, oh my God, relief that you avoided some disaster, but it intrinsically feels really good in your soul and your innermost being to be that way. That's an indicator that you're getting closer and closer to the real deal. I think you're right on, and this goes a little bit back to some of the Roger's stuff again, where he sort of thought that this self-actualizing tendency existed for us. And if we're just able to kind of tune into it, all of a sudden all of this good stuff would happen inside of a person's life. And the big marker for that is exactly what you're saying. It feels great. So another way you can kind of hunt for what you value is just going back and thinking about moments in life that felt really that way. And that doesn't necessarily mean that these were times where everything was just easy for you or there was a lot of pleasurable stuff going on for whatever reason. No, it's the moments where you felt really connected to something. I felt alive because I was teaching this workshop and I just lost track of time and I was so excited to be working with the people in it and whatever. That's very real for me. You know, times where I was engaged with the arts in a way that just felt really, really compelling. And what I eventually found from that was a kind of value on creativity and forms of artistic expression, which then kind of comes through my work. And one of the things that I look for in my work is an opportunity to exercise that muscle a little bit. And those are typically the projects or the episodes that feel particularly good to me are the ones where I feel like I've been able to kind of scratch that edge. Right. In much the same way, what are the times of life that just felt kind of awful because you were not connected to any of this? What did they have in common? What did the good times have in common? Is there anything that you can kind of extract from that? Back to the show after a quick break. Now back to the show. When you feel into root values for you related that have to do a lot with state of being or mode of being, you know, where you're coming from. You know, in a fundamental way, that's kind of like what's your stance? Well, it's where you're talking from in life. And we definitely want to know the stance of other people around us. You know, where are they coming from? Yeah. Okay. There could be a lot of values that are kind of close to the very center of the bull's eye, very close to the origin point. And yet, even deeper, there are certain, I think, central root values that subsume many of the rest. So if you look inside yourself, kind of a question for you for us, you know, and you consider your own deep rooted values, are there two or three that are major origin points that encompass so much of the rest so that if you're really dialed into them, kind of like true north, as long as you're really given over to those fundamental purposes or fundamental values, all kinds of other good things, well, but if you're not really given over to that one or those three, yeah, you're not really in the groove. Think one of them is relational. And it's, again, more of a stance than something that I can easily put a word on. It's a kind of warm connection toward other people. And this feeling of being sort of rested in like a friendliness, it's funny to have like friendliness, be one of your core values, but I think it is actually kind of true for me. I like being congenial. I don't like it when stuff gets really full of friction inside of my relationships. Life is hard and complicated for people. Life is a kind of a way that I like to lean toward. I like to think the best about people's motivations. A lot of this is about inserting motivations into the mind of other people. I don't really like doing that. And if I do, I try to make it positive. You know, like interpreting people's behavior in kind of a generous light. And I've found myself exploited by others almost never as a result of this. And that's often people's kind of explanation like, oh, you'll get sort of taken advantage of by other people. Like, maybe that just has not been my experience. Could be a lot of privilege in that, a lot of stuff to unpack there, but that's just the case for me. So things have just gone so much better for me when I've operated relationally with other people from that stance of like friendliness and warmth and like process reality. Maybe that's the way to put it. We had just really an emphasis on being pro-social as a value. That's really beautiful. That's really true. I have a similar one when I, to use the word that you haven't yet used, which I think is implicit, you know what you've said, is love. Sure. Probably. Yeah. Or benevolence, I would say. Even if I don't love them, I know that as long as I come from a basic goodwill, basic benevolence. And an aspect of that, for me at least, is around non-harming, paying attention to a stance that really values not harming other people if at all possible. I think there are certain situations where you have to balance duty to self. That's a value. And duty to others. And your duty to yourself includes doing things that other people will find unpleasant or consequential for them, such as you're trying to hire the best possible person for a job, hundred people apply. Ninety-nine of them are not going to be happy because you're only going to pick one. Well, you have the right to do that. So there's a place for that. But in general, really I think for me what follows from real benevolence is a moral dimension. I'm not prescribing my personal values. I got that. I think it's helpful for people to ask, you know, what, what at the deepest root of all, you know, like one ring, one ring to rule them all, right? When Lord of the Rings, you know, at the deepest root, what encompasses so many other things that as long as you're staying true to this one, then much of the rest will follow. Yeah. And if you're struggling with this as we talk about it, if we're talking about this and you're just not really getting a great feel for something, I think there's still a couple of things that can be helpful for a person. One thing that I've played around with a little bit that I haven't totally done from a personal practice standpoint, in part because I feel in kind of good shape about some of this, is the idea of writing a letter from your future self. That's something also that I've heard you talk about a little bit, Dad. People talk often about writing letters to their future self. I kind of like the idea of one that's coming from that forward-facing perspective. So this doesn't need to be from the far future. You know, you can do the sitting on the porch when you're, you know, 93 version of this and that can get more into like life-perfaces land maybe, but just kind of keeping focused more narrowly on this year. If you're imagining that it's early 2027 and you're looking back on this year. And regardless of what did or didn't happen for you, in terms of the ultimate outcomes of this stuff, what would you like to be able to say about the way that you lived? And to put this in that perspective of that future version of you. So you're writing a letter that includes something like, you know, I'm really excited for you because this year, you fill in the blank. You know, you moved in this kind of a direction. You represented this part of yourself really well. You know, another version of this that sometimes people will talk about is like if somebody that you really liked gave like a short toast about you at a, you know, at a wedding or something like that, I guess that's what people make toast mostly. What would you want them to say? Like what would you want them to represent of you? And that can be a good indicator for people, a guy of the stuff that they really value. This is really good for us, Tom. I can get a little sappy sometimes, but I do think it's a good exercise. Yeah, I think it's good for people to stretch, right? Yeah. Sure. And the people could have, you talk about this a lot, you know, and with a tip of the hat to Steve Hayson act is psychological flexibility. Sure. And for me, it's been a value to be able in terms of self expression. Yeah. Can you play all 88 keys on the piano of self expression? Now it may be that you're centered on, you play the piano. So you would know whatever the name would be like the middle C or I don't know what that is. You got it. Right there. There you are. Nailed it. But at least you can hit the really super high note in the deep bass. Okay. And I think that's true. And if we can't really go into those spaces, that's problematic. So I have a value on that. To kind of really underline something you've stressed here. If you think about landing the values plane, you know, or kind of settling in here, this could well be a two-parter. Again and again, is it your value or their value, right? And I've got a couple, maybe closing reflections. One is to keep feeling the difference between striving toward a value outside yourself compared to what it feels like to be lived by a purpose, moving through you and manifesting through you, expressing itself through you into the world. There's a real difference between the feeling of those two ways of being. And we typically operate in that former, more dualistic way in which we're scratching and clawing our way to the summit of some mountain rather than feeling like we're being carried along as we move downstream in some kind of river of purpose. So just feeling the difference between those. I think that's really helpful. I recall when I was training to climb Mount Whitney by the face with a friend of mine a long time ago, I was running laps inside her knee. indoor gym four miles less a lot of laps. And I started noticing the difference between feeling like I was being pushed toward or I was pushing toward that goal at the end of the four miles or rather the sense that there was some kind of an invisible cord of golden light that I could feel that was pulling me toward my destination. You know, it's a different kind of sense of things. That would be part one. Part two is to be willing to really face the the mortal questions here. And it's okay to do thought experiments like if you're writing a letter to yourself like you said from a year in the future, what would you really want this past year, which is starting from a year in the future to have turned out to be? The way of looking at it is if you got a terminal diagnosis and you had 10 years to live or five or one, how would you want to use that time? And what can that really tell you? Another version of this facing mortality is to write your own obituary and even have somebody read it to you. Now be careful about this if you tend to get all more bitten so forth. But what would you what do you really care about when the stakes are high? In other words, the stakes are both really high and they don't matter at all. Can you hold both truths? Your life matters profoundly and in the larger scheme of things, you know, we're one of many billions of people who've already walked this earth. And can you hold both truths, including the truth, like your life matters a lot. How do you want it to be? It's the unique construction in the history of the universe that is you. No one else ever has been nor ever will be you. What do you want to make of it? And to really let that land, which then goes to the observation that I think a number of people are really kind of squeamish about doing this and squirrely because they're afraid of falling short from their true purposes. Okay, you've offered a lot of good advice already for us about how to manage that and sort out the difference between their sheds and your sheds. And I've made the comment that when people really look about their deepest purposes, very often they realize, wow, to their great credit, they've stayed true to those purposes much at the time. So they're it's important to have a willingness to recognize the big stakes and to own them and to not freak out, you know, I watch football, I think about people that commentary sometimes, people who are not afraid of the big show. Your life is the big show. As far as your concern, it's the Super Bowl every day because you may not get it tomorrow, right? What do you want to leave out? You don't want to leave anything on the field, you know, you want to leave you want to lay it all out on the field, right? So related to that, I think a lot of people deep down if they're a little quiet and they reflect on what has really mattered to me in this life, well, what I most want to know is I'm lying there on my deathbed that I really lived on the basis of in this life. You know, the answer is very often actually there. And then the question is, do people really want to hear it? And I think a lot of people get kind of squirmish and squirrely about this because they're they kind of don't want to hear it because they're afraid that they'll fall short. And I would just say that's very understandable, that's really normal. You can bring compassion yourself about it. It's profoundly important to hear it, even if you have fallen short to some extent because today and tomorrow, you can pick yourself up and start living more in alignment with your deepest purposes and values. And usually though, you will discover that you've done an amazing job already in this life of being true to what most matters to you. For starters, I think that's totally great, Dad. Really appreciate you offering it to people. And I think to some extent, you're right, that there's often a lot of it's not so much that a person doesn't know what they care about or what their values are. It's that down there, they're in there somewhere and what's getting in the way is a lot of other stuff, a lot of fear, a lot of conditioning, a lot of psychological content, a lot of anxiety about what would it mean for me if I connected with this thing that was there. And those are sometimes the things that can be just as important for us to work through and just as important for us to figure out. So hopefully, based on all of the stuff that we've talked about here today, you have landed with two to three values. It doesn't have to be a long list. In fact, it's probably better if it's just two to three, particularly when we're thinking in terms of like stance toward the year ahead, right? This is really what I want to be living from for the year ahead. Now, you might have that piece of paper and you're going, okay, now what? Well, the now what is what we're going to do the next time that we record be a while. So that's going to be our next episode. We're going to talk about moving from those values to creating different structures inside of your life that will help you realize them more. We're going to talk about setting goals related to that. Really, I like to think more in terms of structures than goals, but okay, we'll talk about that next time. We'll also talk about dealing with impediments. So all of the stuff that comes along the way that can derail us, creating good enough conditions to help you realize those goals in different important ways. Like how can we set up our life in a way? How can we find environments or situations that help us meet our goals? And then hey, maybe as part of this whole process, we'll also talk a bit about identity. So whenever we do a thing, we're reinforcing a kind of identity. When we act from a value, we're reinforcing that identity inside of us. And we'll talk about how we can kind of take advantage of that process and do it a bit more effectively. So until next time, Dad, thanks so much for doing this with me. This was great. I really appreciate it. Really enjoyed today's episode. I talked with Rick about figuring out what our values are for the year ahead, and particularly in happening a kind of stance that we identify inside of us. And values are directions. They're a kind of path that we have for life moving forward. And for me, I like to think about values as my current answer to the question, what do I want my life to be about? Life is pretty hard regardless of whether or not you're able to connect to your values, but it's a general finding that people can endure an awful lot if they have a why that feels meaningful to them. And this is part of the reason that our New Year's resolutions often fall so flat for us. We're approaching all of this stuff that we don't actually deeply care about. They're just kind of conditions of worth that we've dressed up in different clothing. We feel like we have to perform a certain kind of way in order for people to like us. We've got to check a certain box to be successful in the eyes of some external person floating around in the ether or maybe buried inside of our memory. And it becomes increasingly detached from what we really care about and what we really value. And that was our goal with today's episode to help you figure out what that stuff is that you really care about. We started by talking about four levels of action that a person can work at. They can work at the level of their values, their goals, their behavior, or their outcomes. People tend to make the most resolutions related to outcomes. I want to make this much money by the end of the year. I want to lose this much weight, whatever it is for you. The second most about their behavior, I want to wake up earlier and then hardly any at all about their values. But this is a big problem because our behavior tends to flow very naturally from the combination of our values and our sense of who we are as a person. If we're an anxious person to use an example that I use during the show, it's going to be very natural for our behavior to be a certain kind of way. If I think of myself as an effective, capable person who has values that are our pro-social in nature, certain behaviors are going to flow from that sense of who I am. If I think of myself as somebody who can't ever really learn things that well and sort of struggles to accomplish different goals in life and people can't really be trusted, well different behaviors are going to flow from that too. Thinking about the values that you really carry deep inside of yourself and how those values inform a kind of stance toward life is a huge lever for us because all of a sudden, all of this other stuff just starts flowing naturally from it. This was when Rick mentioned that bit about how states can become goals in childhood, how if we have a state where we get used to really flying underneath the radar, staying quiet in order to not bother anyone or to avoid punishment, that becomes a kind of goal for us in adulthood even if it doesn't feel great. Maybe we learn something like sure this doesn't feel the way that I want it to feel, but it's how I stay safe, so I gotta keep doing it. And look, sometimes that's true, sometimes we are in environments where we just need to protect ourselves, but a lot of the time we're carrying around stories that we've outgrown and there's a lot more opportunity for our lives than we realize. So what we're trying to do here is to have a sense of the best within us. That's our values. Then we want to try to create the conditions that let that version of who we are come out. We want to become more of an active agent in that process and we want to learn to deal with the obstacles that come up along the way. During this episode, we mostly focused on that first one, figuring out what those values are. We then spent a good amount of time talking about the difference between a should and a value. Is the value coming from you or is the should coming from somewhere else? But we can still take those shoulds and figure out the stuff that's meaningful to us. I had a should that I should work more. And there are aspects of that should that frankly were true. I probably should work more, but if I think about it that way, I should work more. That is a certain tone that is associated with it. It's quite self-punishing and you see that in a lot of resolutions. They're basically punishments that are kind of dress-top and fancy clothing. It's hard to punish yourself up the mountain. Yeah, punishments work for a little while, but typically our motivation is going to run out. And we're going to feel sh*t along the way. So of course we want to avoid it if we can. But we might be able to find something inside of that sh*t that is really meaningful to us. So for me, if I explored that sh*t, I should work more. I started finding all of this other stuff. I really valued self-respect. I wanted to fall asleep at night, have my head hit the pillow, and feel good about myself. I wanted a sense of integrity inside of my work life. Like I was doing things that mattered. Like I was self-actualizing in some kind of a way. I wanted to get the experience that I can make myself do things. And that I didn't have to just hit myself with a club over and over again to do them. I could positively motivate myself towards the things that I cared about. That was really important to me too. All of a sudden, those words that I'm using, you know, as integrity, self-respect, that has like a different tone associated with it. That all forest you should really work more. And often based on that tone is a kind of feeling in the body, a somatic experience. For example, I talked about being pro-social during the podcast. And that pro-socialness has a kind of feeling associated with it for me. A feeling of openness, a feeling of connection. And I can tell when I get further away from that inside of my interactions with other people, I start getting tired and contracted and kind of short. And when I'm doing that, when I'm in that behavior loop, if I'm able to pause for a moment, take a little step back and go, OK, I've lost the feeling. I've lost the feeling of pro-sociality. Other stuff is coming in. These are like my, you know, if you want to talk about it a certain kind of way. These are my survival strategies, that sort of stuff. OK, sure. Fine. Can I reconnect with that feeling? How can I find that in this interaction? To be clear, that doesn't mean that you're a doormat. That doesn't mean that I let people walk all over me. But I have a basic stance inside of myself of being warm toward others for as long as reasonably possible. We then discussed a bunch of other ways to try to identify your values. We talked about finding people that you feel really warmly toward, people you admire, people you respect. What are, what's their stance toward life? What are some of their core qualities? Is there anything inside of that that you can identify as like, OK, that's pretty meaningful to me. We also talked about remembering moments in life when we felt really connected in the way that Rick was exploring that kind of you dimonic happiness. There's this sense of purpose and meaning. And like you're part of something that matters. I mentioned writing a letter from your future self as a practice that somebody can do if they want to explore this. You know, maybe something like, hey, it's 2027 and I'm really excited for you because this year you became more this kind of a person or this year you moved in the direction of doing that kind of a thing. And this is not normally, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, this is not normally my lane for this kind of thing. It can be a little sappy and I tend to be pretty pragmatic. But man, there are aspects of that exercise that I've gotten a lot of value out of personally. And to some extent, the basis of all of this, all of the ideas that we talked about today is the is the meta idea that the way that we interact with our circumstances really matters and our orientation toward them can really change them materially, not in like a metaphysical way, but in just a literal lived experience way. You know, it's Cicifis in the Boulder as Rick was talking about the mechanisms of attention, you know, alerting, orienting the feeling of something being relevant to you. How do you receive information and what kind of stance do you receive it through? Do you receive it through a stance that feels really consistent with the best within you with the things that you really care about or something else, something you've learned as an adaptation over time. And how do we increasingly clear away some of those adaptations? So those really wonderful aspects of our nature can come through more consistently. So now that you've landed on having hopefully a couple of values, a couple of things inside of you that you really want to express out over the next year. And hey, if you're feeling kind of brave, you can write a comment down below. If you're watching on YouTube, like what are what are you trying to connect with more this year? You can write a review on iTunes or Spotify that includes that information. It would be kind of fun to look through some of those and to see what's coming up for people here. Now that you've got that, we got to do some stuff with it. We got to figure out how we want to structure the year ahead. How do we want to relate to different kinds of goals? How do we want to balance different values that could be in soft conflict with each other? How do we want to deal with the obstacles that can naturally come up as we try to do this? You know, I have this kind of value, but man, I'm really scared about doing this thing. Let's relate it to it. How do I manage that? We're going to talk about all of that next week. As we get to the end here, another quick reminder about Rick's new course, rewire your anxious brain. It's 12 weeks long. It's all online and you can learn more at rickhansen.com/enxious and use the code BWP10. That's BWP and then the numbers one and zero for 10% off. If you've been enjoying the show for a while and you would like to find a different way to support us, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com/beingwhilepodcast and for the cost of just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show and get some bonuses in return. Until next time, thanks again for listening and I'll talk to you soon.