📕 Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before

In “Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?”, Julie Smith distills the essence of psychological wisdom into practical, accessible guidance, transforming complex concepts into actionable steps for improving mental well-being. Whether stumbled upon through a friend’s recommendation or sought out in a quest for self-improvement, this book emerges as a modular, insightful guide, rooted in the real-world application of psychological principles.

Through concise chapters, Smith empowers readers with strategies to navigate the ebbs and flows of emotions, the intricacies of human thought, and the challenges of personal growth. Highlighting the reciprocal relationship between thoughts and feelings, she demystifies mental health, advocating for a balanced approach that integrates mindful awareness, self-compassion, and the cultivation of resilience.

With anecdotes and metaphors, Smith invites readers into a journey of self-discovery and healing, underscoring the importance of small, consistent actions in fostering slow, sustainable change. From debunking myths around motivation to offering solace in the face of grief, the book serves as a compassionate companion, encouraging readers to apply its lessons with patience and persistence.

As a practical guide, “Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?” stands as a testament to the power of understanding and improving one’s mental well-being, making it a must-read for anyone looking to navigate the complexities of the mind with grace and intention.

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About the book

Author	Julie Smith
Year of release	2022
Genre	Nonfiction, Self-Help, Psychology, Health, MentalHealth , Persona Development , Science
Pages	368
Average WPM	362
Date Started/Finished	20 to 25-September-2022
Time took	3.18 Hours

Impressions

It was insightful I loved how modular the book chapters were. Practical guide to improving and maintaining mental well-being.

How I Discovered It

Jowaria recommended me to read it

Top Quotes

Metacognition is the process of examining our own thoughts. By doing this, we can gain distance from our thoughts and see them for what they really are, which gives us more control over our feelings and behaviors. We can choose how to respond to our thoughts instead of feeling controlled by them.

The brain has limited information to go on, it’s job is to save as much time and energy as possible. So it takes short-cuts and makes guesses and predictions all the time.

Keep it small. Keep it consistent. Slow change is sustainable change.

Focus on small, specific goal and accomplishment of it means you are heading in the direction of your ultimate goal (Huberman, 2021).

No amount of therapy or psychological skills is going to overturn the destructive impact of poor sleep or diet and lack of physical activity.

Showing up and caring can be more powerful than trying to solve a problem. Most people don’t want advice, they just want someone to be there and show they care.

Confidence is like a home you build for yourself. When you go somewhere new, you must build a new one. But we’re not starting from scratch.

Confidence doesn’t mean being fearless. Building confidence means being willing to do what matters to us, even when we feel afraid.

Calm anxiety: Try to make the outbreath longer and more vigorous than the inbreath.

Mindfulness is not ultimate, unbroken concentration. Its the process of noticing when your mind shifts its focus and intentionally choosing to redirect that focus back to the present moment.

Emotions are a reflection of what is going on around us. All things are constantly changing so a normal state is one that constantly changes too.

Values are different from goals. Goals are specific actions that can be completed, while values are guiding principles about how we want to live our lives. Values shape our behaviours and overall direction, while goals are temporary and specific.

Overly focusing on outcome can lead us to quit more easily when we don’t see results quickly enough or when we meet resistance and hurdles along the way.

Summary + Notes

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Introduction

Tools might look great in the box. But they only help when you get them out and start practising how to use them. Each tool takes regular practice. If you miss the nail with the hammer this time, come back later and try again.

1: Understanding low mood

• Lots of self-help books tell us to get our mindset right. They tell us, ‘What you think will change how you feel.’ But they often miss something crucial. It doesn’t end there. The relationship works both ways. The way you feel also influences the types of thoughts that can pop into your head, making you more vulnerable to experiencing thoughts that are negative and self-critical.

• Reflecting on moments after they happen will help to gradually build up the skill of noticing the links between those aspects of your experience as they happen.

• Mood fluctuation is normal. Nobody is happy all the time. But we don’t have to be at the mercy of it either. There are things we can do that help. Feeling down is more likely to reflect unmet needs than a brain malfunction.

• We cannot directly choose our emotions and switch them on but we can use the things we can control to change how we feel.

2: Mood pitfalls to watch out for

• We live in groups and depend on each other, so we all spend much of our lives making guesses about what other people are thinking and feeling. But when we’re feeling down, we are more likely to assume that those guesses are true.

• You might notice that you feel the need for more reassurance from others when your mood is low. If you don’t get that extra reassurance you might automatically assume that they are thinking negatively about you. But that is a bias, and it is quite possible that you are your worst critic.

• Emotional reasoning is a thought bias that leads us to use what we feel as evidence for something to be true, even when there might be plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise.

The thing about the human brain is that, when you believe something, the brain will scan the environment for any signs that the belief is true. Information that challenges our beliefs about ourselves and the world is psychologically threatening.

• As we are building awareness of our thoughts, we need to work hard to see that pattern of thought as just one possible interpretation of the world and allow ourselves to consider alternatives. Spotting these common thought biases and labelling them helps us to do that.

• It’s OK not to have a clear opinion on something while you take time to think about different sides of the story. So give yourself permission to sit on the fence for as long as you need to. Build up that ability to tolerate not knowing. When we do that, we are choosing to stop living life by the first thoughts that pop into our head. Our choices become more consciously thought-out.

• Chapter summary

  • We naturally look for evidence that confirms our beliefs. We then experience what we believe, even when there is evidence to suggest otherwise.
  • Whatever has caused our low mood, it tends to come along with a focus on threat and loss (Gilbert, 1997).
  • Get some distance from those thoughts by becoming familiar with the common biases, noticing when they appear and labelling them as biases, not facts.

3: Things that help

• Metacognition is the process of examining our own thoughts. By doing this, we can gain distance from our thoughts and see them for what they really are, which gives us more control over our feelings and behaviors. We can choose how to respond to our thoughts instead of feeling controlled by them.

• The power of any thought is in how much we buy into it. How much we believe it to be true and meaningful. When we observe our own thought processes in this way, we start to see thoughts for what they are, and what they are not. Thoughts are not facts. They are a mix of opinions, judgements, stories, memories, theories, interpretations, and predictions about the future.

• The brain has limited information to go on. The brain’s job is also to save you as much time and energy as possible. This means it takes short-cuts and makes guesses and predictions all the time.

• During difficult times, we may not be able to function at our best, but we can still set goals for the direction we want to move in. For example, if we’ve been ruminating on a painful experience, we can ask ourselves what we would do if we were feeling better and try to take small steps towards that goal.

• Meditation is like a gym workout for the mind. It provides a space to practise the skills being used.

• Chapter summary

  • We cannot control the thoughts that pop into our minds, but we do have control of our spotlight of attention.
  • Trying not to think about something tends to make us think about it more.
  • Allowing all thoughts to be present, but choosing which ones we give our time and attention to, can have a powerful impact on our emotional experience.
  • While there is a time for focusing on a problem, we also need to focus on the direction we want to move in, and how we want to feel or behave.
  • Thoughts are not facts. They are suggestions offered up to us by the brain to help us make sense of the world.
  • The power of any thought is in how much we believe it to be the only truth.
  • Taking power out of those thoughts starts with stepping back, getting some distance (metacognition) and seeing them for what they are.

4: How to turn bad days into better days

Keep it small. Keep it consistent. Slow change is sustainable change.

• How do you want to feel instead?
  • When we are trying to tackle low mood, the tendency is to focus on everything we don’t want to think and feel. There is value in doing that. But if we want to move away from what we don’t want, it helps to know where we do want to go instead.
• Chapter summary
  • Focus on making good decisions, not perfect ones. ‘Good enough’ steers you towards real change. Perfectionism causes decision-making paralysis, whereas improving your mood demands that you make decisions and take action.
  • Keep changes small and sustainable.
  • When someone is down, we show them kindness because we know it is what they need. So, if you are committed to managing your mood and overall mental health, commit to practising self-compassion.
  • Once you understand the problem, use it to help you work out where you want to go and focus on the horizon ahead of you.

5: How to get the basics right

• There is no perfect routine. Establishing a balance of predictability and adventure that works for you within your unique circumstances is key. Noticing when that goes off track and pulling it back is a big step in the right direction.

• Chapter summary

  • Our mental health defence players provide the foundations of good health. When we nurture them daily they pay us back with interest.
  • If you do one thing today, make it exercise. Choose something you enjoy and you increase your chances of keeping it going.
  • The relationship between sleep and mental health works both ways. Prioritizing sleep will help your mental health, and making changes to your day will affect your sleep.

6: Understanding motivation

• Anhedonia is something different. This is when we stop taking pleasure in the things that we used to enjoy.

• Anhedonia is associated with a number of mental health problems, including depression. When we feel that way, we start to question whether anything is worth the effort. Things that once brought joy start to feel meaningless. So we stop doing the things that have the potential to lift our mood because we have no desire for them any more.

• Chapter summary
  • Motivation is not something you are born with. The feeling that you are energized and want to do something cannot be relied upon to always be there.
  • Procrastination is often avoidance of stress or discomfort. Anhedonia is when we no longer get a sense of pleasure from the activities that we used to enjoy. This is often associated with low mood and depression. If something matters to you and could benefit your health, don’t wait until you feel like it – do it anyway.

8: How do you make yourself do something when you don’t feel like it?

• How to persist for the long-haul
  • Over the years, psychology research has challenged the idea that success is all down to innate talents and has shown that grit (Duckworth et al., 2007) and, in particular, perseverance play a vital role in our ability to succeed (Crede et al., 2017).

• Something that many people learn the hard way is that it doesn’t mean just continuing to drive forward until you burn out. When we are working on long-term goals and making changes that we want to maintain, we have to learn to counter-balance the stress of effort with the replenishment of rest. We don’t need to always be working or always feel energized and refreshed. We need to be able to listen to the body and step back from effort so that we are ready to drive forward once again.

• if we use those in-between moments to clear emails, scroll through social media or get a few things done, the body and brain will not be returning to a rest state to recharge. So the next time you reach for your phone to fill the 15 minutes between meetings, why not step outside for some fresh air or find a space to close your eyes for a moment instead?

• You focus on a small, specific goal and the accomplishment of it means you are heading in the direction of your ultimate goal (Huberman, 2021).

• Chapter summary
  • We cannot rely on motivation to be there all the time.
  • We can practise acting in opposition to urges so that we can act in line with our values - rather than how we feel right now.
  • Repeat a new behaviour enough times and it will become habit.
  • For any big goal, rest and replenishment along the way is vital – just ask any elite - athlete.
  • Make use of small rewards along the way.

9: Big life changes. Where do I start?

Albert Einstein reportedly once said, ‘If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.’

This quote often comes to mind when I hear the common misconception that therapy consists of sitting in a room and dwelling on your problems. It does involve thinking about your problems, but there is method in that. The most effective way to resolve a problem is to understand the problem inside out.

• Chapter summary
  • It’s not always clear what we need to change and how to do it.
  • You cannot change what you cannot make sense of.
  • Get to know your problem inside out to make it easier to identify which way to go next.
  • Start by reflecting on situations after they have happened.
  • Be ready to get honest with yourself about ways you may contribute to the problem or keep yourself stuck.
  • Therapy supports you through this process. But if you don’t have access to therapy, journaling can be a good place to start.

10: Make it all go away!

• Emotions are real and valid, but they are not facts. They are a guess. A perspective that we try on for size. An emotion is the brain’s attempt to make sense of the world so that you can meet your needs and survive. Given that what you feel is not a factual statement, neither are thoughts.

• When we treat our current thoughts and emotions as facts, we allow them to determine our thoughts and actions of the future. Then life becomes a series of emotional reactions rather than informed choices.

• So how do we stop buying into thoughts as if they are facts?
  • We ask questions.
• Chapter summary
  • Emotions are neither your enemy not your friend.
  • We have more influence over our emotional state than we were ever taught to believe.
  • Pushing emotion away can cause more problems than allowing it to wash over us and take its natural course.
  • Emotions are not facts but are one possible perspective.
  • If there is painful emotion, get curious, ask questions. What can they tell you?

11: What to do with emotions

No amount of therapy or psychological skills is going to overturn the destructive impact of poor sleep or diet and lack of physical activity.

• Increasing your emotional vocabulary so that you can distinguish finely between different emotions helps you to regulate those emotions and choose the most helpful responses in social situations (Kashdan et al., 2015).

• Chapter summary

  • You are not your feelings and your feelings are not who you are.
  • The sensation of emotion is an experience that moves through you.Each emotion can offer you information but not necessarily the whole story.
  • If there is something emotions are useful for, it’s telling us what we need.
  • When you feel something, give it a name. Try to label emotions with more detail than just happy or sad.
  • Allow emotions to be present and soothe your way through, rather than blocking them out.

12: How to harness the power of your words

• Use the Feeling Wheel (Wilcox, 1982) to help you find the words to describe how you feel.

• Chapter summary

  • The language we use has a powerful effect on our experience of the world.
  • The more words you have to describe how you feel, the better.
  • If you don’t have the words you can use something like the Feeling Wheel to give you prompts.
  • Notice the words others use, read books and explore the ways you can keep building your emotional vocabulary.

13: How to support someone

When we focus on trying to fix the problem, it is easy to underestimate the power of simply being there. Most people don’t want to be told what to do. But they do want someone to keep showing up to check in and show they care.

• You cannot support them at your best if your mental health starts to deteriorate. So it is absolutely imperative that you prioritize your own health too – even in small ways. Keep a close eye on the basics. Keep track of your sleep, routine, nutritional intake, exercise and social contact.

• Chapter summary

  • It is normal to feel overwhelmed or inadequate when supporting someone with mental health problems. You want to fix it but you don’t know how.
  • Leaning in to support someone who is suffering can be stressful as you don’t want to say the wrong thing. But don’t avoid them.
  • You don’t have to fix everything to be a great support.
  • Look after yourself to prevent burnout. Get your own support and set clear boundaries.
  • Never underestimate the power of listening.

14: Understanding grief

• Grief is a normal and natural part of being human.
• Trying to completely block out grief can lead to problems further down the line.

15: The stages of grief

• We know from the research that ruminating alone on angry feelings can make the anger and aggression more intense rather than less (Bushman, 2002).

• Chapter summary

  • Denial can help us survive the overwhelming pain of grief. As denial fades, this allows new waves of emotion to surface.
  • When we experience anger about something we can’t control, using physical movement helps us to use the physiological arousal and bring the body back down to calm for a while.
  • Ruminating over the What ifs can easily lead down a path of self-blame.
  • Depression is a normal reaction after a bereavement.
  • Acceptance is not the same as liking or agreeing with the situation.

18: Dealing with criticism and disapproval

• Now, this chapter is not about to tell you to just stop caring what anyone else thinks of you. In fact, we are built to care about how we are being perceived by those around us. Criticism can be a sign that we haven’t lived up to expectation in some way and sometimes (but not always) can signal a risk of rejection or abandonment.

• We develop our sense of self and identity, not only from our own experience and how we interact with others, but also through what we imagine those other people really think of us, the ideas and perceptions they might have of us. This is called the ‘looking glass self’ (Cooley, 1902).

• People-pleasing is a pattern of behaviour in which you consistently put all others before yourself even to the detriment of your own health and wellbeing. It can leave us feeling unable to express our needs, likes and dislikes, and unable to hold boundaries or even keep ourselves safe. We say yes, when actually we want and need to say no. We feel resentful of being taken advantage of, but unable to change it by asking for anything different.

• And the fear of disapproval never disappears because there is always the possibility of putting a foot wrong, making a wrong choice and displeasing someone – even if that person is someone we don’t like or spend time with.

• If we grow up in an environment in which it is not safe to disagree or express difference, if disapproval is expressed with rage or contempt, then as children we learn how to survive that environment. Keeping other people happy becomes a survival skill that we hone and perfect throughout childhood.

• It is only later, as adults, that those behaviour patterns become detrimental to our relationships. We second-guess every move we make, always tentatively trying to work out what others are expecting of us.

The spotlight effect is a term originally coined by Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky (2000) to describe the tendency of humans to overestimate how much others are focused on us. We are each at the centre of our own spotlight of attention and we tend to imagine that others are focused on us too, when in reality, everyone’s spotlights are usually on themselves.

19: The key to building confidence

• Confidence is like a home that you build for yourself. When you go somewhere new, you must build a new one. But when we do, we’re not starting from scratch. Every time we step into the unknown and try something new, experience that vulnerability, make mistakes, get through them and build some confidence, we move on to the next chapter with evidence that we can get through tough challenges.

• Confident is not the same as comfortable. One of the biggest misconceptions about becoming self-confident is that it means living fearlessly. The key to building confidence is quite the opposite. It means we are willing to let fear be present as we do the things that matter to us.

• Self-esteem generally means being able to evaluate yourself positively and believe in those appraisals (Harris, 2010).

• ..some studies have shown that for people with low self-esteem, repeating affirmations and statements that they don’t believe, for example, ‘I am strong, I am lovable,’ or being asked to focus on all the reasons that statement is true, tended to make them feel worse (Wood et al., 2009).

• Chapter summary

  • Confidence cannot grow if we are never willing to be without it.
  • To build confidence, go where you have none. Repeat every day and watch your confidence develop.
  • Confidence is situation-specific, but what you keep as you move around is the belief that you can tolerate the fear as confidence grows.
  • You do not need to overwhelm yourself with your worst-case scenario. Start with small changes.
  • Along the way, be your own coach, not your worst critic.
  • Courage comes before confidence.

20: You are not your mistakes

Most self-doubt is linked to the relationship we have with failure. How other people respond to your failure does not say anything about your own personality or worthiness.

21: Being enough

• The brick wall that most people hit on their way to self-acceptance is the misconception that it will cause laziness and complacency.

• Self-acceptance is not the same as passively accepting defeat. Self-compassion often involves taking the more difficult road that is in your best interests.

22: Make anxiety disappear!

Escape and avoidance only provides short-term relief but feeds anxiety in the long term.

23: Things we do that make anxiety worse

Your brain learns like a scientist. Each time it has an experience, positive or negative, it clocks that as evidence for its beliefs. If you avoid the thing you fear, you never give yourself the chance to build up evidence in your mind that you can get through it and survive. Just telling your brain that something is safe is not enough. You must experience it.

• Safety behaviours – We can also come to rely on things that we associate with safety if we don’t trust ourselves to be able to cope when anxiety hits. We may feel unable to go anywhere without ‘just in case’ medications, or we take a mobile phone everywhere because looking down at it enables us to avoid conversation at social events.

• Your brain will take some convincing, so you need to repeat that behaviour over and over. The things you do most often become your comfort zone.

24: How to calm anxiety right now

• Breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, out for 4 seconds and hold for 4 seconds. Focusing on something square can act as a guide and help you to keep your attention on the breathing, minimizing the chances of being distracted too soon.

• Chapter summary

  • When anxious our breathing becomes faster and each breath is more shallow.
  • To calm the body take slower, deeper breaths.
  • Try to make the outbreath longer and more vigorous than the inbreath.

25: What to do with anxious thoughts

• When a worrying thought pops into your head, it’s like driving past a car accident: you can’t not look at it. Thoughts of danger demand your attention for a reason. Your brain is offering up a story for what might be happening and if there is a chance of the worst-case scenario happening, then you had better be prepared.

Spot biased thoughts that make you feel worse

• Catastrophizing is when your mind jumps to the worst possible scenario and offers it to you as a prediction of what might happen now. It plays that out for you like your own personal horror movie on repeat in your mind. It is one possible prediction, but not the only one.

• Personalizing is when we have some limited or ambiguous information about the world and make it about us.
  • For example, I’m walking down the street and see a friend on the other side of the road. I call her name and wave, but she doesn’t wave back. Immediately, my personalizing thoughts tell me that she must hate me. I must have said something to offend her. Maybe all our friends have been talking about me and I thought I had friends but now I have none.
• The mental filter is that tendency for us to hold on to all the information that makes us feel worse, and neglect all the information that could help us feel differently.
  • Let’s say you post something on social media and you get 50 comments. 49 of those comments are positive and encouraging. 1 is negative and points out something that you already felt insecure about. The mental filter is when we focus our attention on that one negative comment and neglect to consider the other forty-nine.

Overgeneralizing is when we take one experience and apply it to all experiences. If you interview for a job and get turned down, overgeneralizing thoughts would sound like, ‘I’m never going to get a job, so what’s the point of applying for anything else?’ or after a breakup, ‘I screw up every relationship so I’m not going to date ever again.’

• It leads to a more intense spike of emotion because it turns one problem into a bigger, life problem. Secondly, it often leads us to avoid the situation in the future, which feeds anxiety and makes it much harder to face.

• Each emotion, behaviour and period in our lives is temporary and not necessarily a reflection of who we are permanently.

Our brains take in and process a lot of information every second of every day. But the world around us offers infinite amounts of information. If your brain was to try and process everything, you would not be able to function.

Our attention is like a spotlight. We have control of that spotlight, but we cannot control the actors who come on stage. We cannot control how long they spend there, what they say, or when they leave. What we get to do is focus that spotlight on one or two of them at a time. If we settle our focus on the anxious thoughts that tell stories of worst-case scenarios and images of you not coping, they get the chance to feed back to the brain that all is not well.

26: Fear of the inevitable

• Irvin Yalom, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University, describes it perfectly in his book, Staring at the Sun.

  ‘It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it.’

• He also suggests that ‘though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us’. In this sense, our very human anxiety around death is not just a discomfort to be eliminated. Confronting our awareness of death can also become a profound tool for finding new meaning and purpose in how we live.(Neimeyer, 2005)?

• Three of these, listed below, were originally proposed by Gesser, Wong and Reker (1988).
  1. Approach acceptance – Holding beliefs about an afterlife or the possibility of going to some form of heaven enables the individual to cultivate acceptance of their own mortality.
  2. Escape acceptance – For those who experience great suffering in their life, death may be accepted or even embraced as it is perceived as possible relief or escape from that suffering.
  3. Neutral acceptance – This is when death is perceived as neither desirable nor a means of escape from suffering, but as a natural part of life that we have no control over.
• Chapter summary
  • Our collective fear of death is a fear of both the known and the unknown.
  • For some people, coming close to death brings about growth and positive life transformation.
  • Acceptance of death is not the same as giving up on life. Quite the opposite.
  • Acceptance of death allows us to bring meaning to life.

28: Why reducing stress is not the only answer

Stress is not always the enemy. It is also our most valuable tool. Learning to replenish after a period of stress is more realistic than trying to eliminate it. Stress helps you to perform and do what matters but we were not built to be in a constant state of stress. We need stress for a fun and challenging life, but too much and the benefits are lost.

29: When good stress goes bad

• Burnout happens when that short-term stress response that we have is repeatedly triggered over a prolonged period, without enough chance to rest and restore in between. There is often a chronic mismatch between the individual and one of the following:
  1. Control – Living in a situation in which you do not have the resources needed to meet the demands you are faced with.
  2. Reward – This might be financial in an employment scenario. But equally, it can be a sense of social recognition or acknowledgement of value, either in a work environment or any other.
  3. Community – A lack of positive human interaction and the sense that one has social support or a sense of belonging.
  4. Fairness – When there is perceived inequality in any of the other factors in this list.
  5. Values – When the demands you face are in direct conflict with your personal values.
• Chapter summary
  • The stress response works at its best when it is short term.
  • Chronic stress is like trying to drive your car on the motorway in second gear. There is only so long before damage is done.
  • Burnout is not just a workplace issue.
  • There is no silver bullet that works for everything. The right balance for one person will be unrealistic for another.
  • If you are showing signs of burnout, listen to them and respond now by starting to meet your needs.

30: Making stress work for you

• When we focus on how our actions, big or small, can help others, we show less stress response in difficult and demanding situations (Abelson et al., 2014).

• Mindfulness is not ultimate, unbroken concentration. It is the process of noticing when your mind shifts its focus and intentionally choosing to redirect that focus back to the present moment.

• Goals founded in contribution rather than competition helps us to stay motivated and persevere under stress.

31: Coping when it counts

In fact, research shows that simply reminding someone that their performance improves under pressure improves their actual performance by 33% (Jamieson et al., 2018).

32: The problem with ‘I just want to be happy’

• humans are not built to be in a constant happy state. We are built to respond to the challenges of survival. Emotions are a reflection of our physical state, our actions, beliefs and what is going on around us. All of those things are constantly changing. Therefore, a normal state is one that constantly changes too.

• It’s not so much that they are struggling to achieve their goals. They are not sure which goals to set in the first place, and whether any of them feel worth it.

• Values are not the same as goals. A goal is a concrete, finite thing that you can work towards. Once you achieve it, that is the end point. Then you have to look for the next goal. A goal might be passing an exam, ticking everything off your to do list, or running a personal best. Values are not a set of actions that can be completed. Values are a set of ideas about how you want to live your life, the kind of person you want to be and the principles you want to stand for.

  • Shorten version: Values are different from goals. Goals are specific actions that can be completed, while values are guiding principles about how we want to live our lives. Values shape our behaviors and overall direction, while goals are temporary and specific.

34: How to create a life with meaning

Overly focusing on outcome can lead us to quit more easily when we don’t see results quickly enough or when we meet resistance and hurdles along the way.