One of my favourite parts of therapy is doing work around values. Clarifying what they are can entail questions like: “What do you want to stand for in life? At your 80th birthday, what do you want someone you love to say about you in a speech? If you won the lottery, or inherited a fortune, so money was never an issue, what would you spend your time doing?
Or (the most difficult one in my opinion): If you had everyone’s total approval, what would you do with your life? (I’m a pathological people’s pleaser, which is why it feels almost impossible to fathom a world where this tendency didn’t guide my every move).
Anyways, when you’ve clarified your values, you have an inner compass of sorts, and can start acting in line with those values. And more and more research is pointing towards mental wellbeing not being contingent on happiness, but whether a person is living a “full” aka meaningful aka “values-congruent” life. One where we make space for discomfort so that we can make that difficult move towards the type of person we want to be.
This week I’ve been fleshing out the values of It’s Complicated. It turns out having done therapy for more than nine years made clarifying the company’s values a really enjoyable process. The question I asked myself was:
What will stick us to our mission of helping therapists thrive, so they can transform the world one session at a time?
This note would become far too long if I pasted in everything I wrote about the six company values that came from this exercise, but I can say that they all align with my own personal values, and that they are very therapy-centric. Care and conscientiousness, an ethos of thoughtfulness, social awareness, and community spirit are just some of the values that will act as a lighthouse when we’re steering the ship and a storm hits. And isn’t that a comforting kind of orientation?
PS. If you’re interested in doing your own values clarification work, let me know, and I can send you a list of inspiring questions.
