Walking Towards Your Values

I’m now over halfway through the third month of participating in The Mighty’s Monthly challenges for 2017.

Me and my oldest.  About to go for one of our walks.

The Mighty declared March to host the Self Confidence challenge, and the first task in week one was to identify your character strengths by taking the VIA (Values in Action) Survey of Character Strengths. The second part of this challenged was to write examples of those traits, which I did in this post. This week is the third part of the Self Confidence challenge and that is to write a list of activities to do that support these character strengths. For me, this has been a lot harder than the first two parts of the exercise.

First, putting expectations on myself is something I’ve overdone in the past and has led to tremendous anxiety. So, for me, I need to set realistic expectations, or this whole exercise won’t be an act of self-care but an act of self-destruction. Second, when I looked at my list of character strengths, I felt like I needed to figure out which of my personal values these strengths were connected to….and that the activity I chose for each strength needed to be in line with one of those values.

Why are values so important? For me, self-confidence and mental health have always been connected to the idea of walking through my life in the direction of my personal values; if I have the focus in mind that whatever I’m doing, I’m doing because it matters to me, deep in my heart, then there is peace and contentment in what I’m doing.

Long ago, when I began to really work on dealing with my Generalized Anxiety Disorder, I used a workbook called Get out of Your Mind and into Your Life. The basic premise of the book was that if you figured out what you cared about in your life, what you valued and how you wanted your life to be, then your anxiety would eventually decrease because you would be doing behaviors that supported those values. Most of us who have suffered from anxiety and depression develop avoidance behaviors to help us cope with the overwhelming physical sensations that come with our illnesses, so we tend to miss out on a lot of things we value. That’s where the concept of walking towards your values comes into play.

This premise of walking towards your values really connected with me during my recovery because it helped me tolerate my anxiety symptoms. I understood, for example, that, though I felt very anxious driving my car while having a racing heart or depersonalization or scary thoughts, the value I had for getting to the place I needed to be helped me to tolerate the discomfort. At one point in my recovery, driving to therapy was anxiety-producing, but the value I had for both the therapy itself and my therapist’s time, made me continue on, even while my anxiety increased. It helped me with avoidance behaviors, like social isolation, because, for example, I disliked crowded rooms, but I valued my children, so I had to show up to their dance recital or student of the month assembly and tolerate the crowd. The bonus was that once I arrived at therapy or was engrossed in my children’s performances, I became lost in those moments and my anxiety went away.

Date night with my hubby.

           Getting our steps in. Me and my youngest. 

     

With the idea in mind of knowing my values from all the work I’ve done in recovery, knowing my strengths because of the recent survey, and knowing my ability to over-do in my expectations, I came up with the following list of activities that are designed to boost my confidence through boosting my values:

According to the VIA (Values in Action) Survey of Character Strengths, these are my strengths: “zest, enthusiasm, energy; curiosity and interest in the world; self-control and self-regulation; industry, diligence, and perseverance. See my chart below for how I put various values and activities that go with those strengths:

Strength	Value	Activity
Zest, enthusiasm, energy	Writing and community	Support another writer through social media shares every day.
Curiosity and interest in the world/ Social intelligence	Being social/having fun	Go out with another couple for a double-date night.
Self-control and self-regulation	exercise	Hit 10,000 steps a day and exercise daily.
Industry, diligence, and perseverance	writing	Write a blog post about my experience with this exercise

So far, I’ve been pretty successful in these endeavors, and I know it’s because I set realistic standards for myself AND because I’m playing on my strengths. Together, that has boosted my confidence.