Psychology 101 for Change Agents, Session 5: Which Feelings Do You Value Most and Least?

If you want to know what truly makes you tick, it’s key to know your values at a very practical level. 

What feelings do you find most valuable in life, and which ones will you do whatever you can to avoid? 

One of the crucial insights of cognitive behavioral psychology is that even when we don’t realize it, our feelings are the products of our thoughts.   This is both an opportunity and a challenge:

• The challenge: our conscious thinking about our feelings is often not very clear—we typically don’t experience our feelings as “cognitive constructions.” We often associate them much more with external events: “This happened which made me feel sad” etc. Therefore, we often assume that the only way to experience the feelings we want and avoid the feelings we don’t want is to somehow control the external events that impact our lives.
• The opportunity: once we realize that our feelings are the product of our thoughts, we can work to become aware of these thoughts, and to change our thought patterns. This is a lever for changing how we feel that is far more subject to our control than trying to change events in the world around us.

Understanding and evolving our thought patterns to better align with our values is a core part of the journey maximize our impact as change agents and our joy and fulfillment as human beings.  

Mapping Your Values: Which Feelings Are You Seeking Out, and Which Feelings Are You Trying to Shake?

This video and  worksheet will help you take a crucial first step towards understanding and evolving your psychology:  to identify which feelings you value the most in life, and which feelings you most want to avoid.  In the process you may find that you tend to connect certain external events directly with certain feelings-–you may not be aware of any thought process in between. We’ll dig much more deeply into the wiring diagram for all the cognitive “rules” we have for constructing our feelings in upcoming sessions in this series.  For now, check out the video and download the worksheet to get the insights that come from  identifying which feelings you seek out the most and which feelings you are most trying to shake.