Change your habits

by in Psychology 0

Change is hard work!!  It’s often much easier to maintain the status quo than to challenge ourselves to change habits.

Here are a few of my favourite posts on goal setting to help you get started on the path to achieving your goals!!

What do you want to achieve?  Why does it matter to you?  Would you try some of these tips?

Changing careers? Reflect on your values!

by in Psychology 0

In my role I provide careers counselling on an almost daily basis.  A question many people ask is “what do I want to do with my life?”  To help answer this question, many people wish to learn more about their skills and strengths to help find out which jobs are the best “fit” for them.

I like to take a step back before I take a skills approach to look at possible job options, and start by thinking about what matters to the person – in other words, what do you value?  What matters to you in the grand scheme of things?

I often find that our skills help us to get a job, but it’s our values that will often determine if we stay in that job long term.  In order to stay in a job, our values need to be the right match to that job, otherwise we often lose motivation.

So what are your work values!?  Have you asked yourself this question before?

Some examples of common work values include things like the following:

  • I value opportunities to develop or progress in my career
  • I value work where I can be creative
  • I value work that allows me to maintain work/life balance, and won’t impact on my personal time
  • I value work that pays well
  • I value job security
  • I value helping others
  • I value the challenge of making a sale
  • I value working autonomously
  • I value working in a team

Have a think about your values, and how they fit in with your current or previous roles.  If you value job security, but work in a target based role, you may find yourself feeling stressed on a day to day basis!!  If you value creativity, but work in a heavily bureaucratic role, you may feel a lack of motivation.  If you place value on working autonomously, but are in a heavily micromanaged position, you may be unhappy.

In job interviews today, it’s common for employers to ask questions such as “how do your values fit in with the values of the company?” With this in mind, it’s important to know what your values are!!

 

what to do...

So ask yourself, what do you ultimately value in your work?  Is it money?  Career progression?  Freedom to live your life on the weekend?  Such questions will help you to narrow down your list of possible careers and employers.

Change your health behaviour by reflecting on your values

by in Psychology 0

Changing behaviour is not easy.  Often we fall into bad habits such as skipping exercise and eating unhealthy food.
For people at high risk of neglecting their health, often hearing messages about healthy eating and exercise falls on deaf ears, and instead can lead to a fear or avoidance response.  It’s all too easy to think “I’ll start tomorrow,” no matter how often we hear about the benefits of healthy behaviours.

A new study by Falk et al. (2015) showed that focusing on values that are personally important to an individual can help people to then act on health advice which they previously perceived as threatening.

Participants were given typical advice about health behaviour like they would receive from a doctor, and underwent neurological scans.  Prior to receiving advice, half of the participants were lead through a self affirmation exercise where they reflected on what’s important to them, such as work or family.  Those who did the self affirmations showed more behaviour change, in a follow up one month after the initial study.

The authors of the study state:

“Neural responses associated with self-related processing and value in response to an otherwise threatening health communication intervention can be changed using self affiramaton….
These findings suggest that affirmation of core values may exert its effects by allowing at-risk individuals to see the self-reference and value in otherwise-threatening messages.”

So what does this mean for you?  Are you sitting on the fence of change?  Before you seek out information, why don’t you think about your values around the change.  For example – you know exercise is a good thing, but just can’t be bothered….why not think about what matters to you first.  Do you value looking after your family?  Think about how change may make you a better parent/sister/etc.  Would better health impact your value of looking after your family?

Think about your values – they might just help you to achieve some serious goals!!