Values exercise - Psicología del bienestar

Purpose workshop · Exercise 1

Mottos on a T-Shirt

Seven short steps, about twenty-five minutes. You'll start from a saying you'd be willing to wear in public and end with one small change to the week you already have.

There are no wrong answers here. Not for the mottos, not for the values. Nobody can tell you which values you should hold, and anyone who tries is selling something. This only goes wrong if you pick what sounds good instead of what's true.

Nothing you type is stored or sent anywhere. Close the page and it's gone. At the end you can copy your answers or download them as a PDF.

Step 1 of 7

Pick the ones you'd wear

Forty sayings. Between two and four of them are going on your chest. Don't pick the ones you agree with — agreeing is cheap. Picture the words printed across you as you walk into a room full of people who know you well. Would you wear it? Would you wear it with some pride?

Not a shirt person? Use whatever you would put your name on — a mug you take to work, the line under your email signature, a sign above your desk. What matters is that people who know you would see it, and know you chose it.

Two things this is not. Not a list of what you already do — nobody is taking an inventory. And not a list of what you wish you were like; that only gets you a self-improvement plan. Which of these would you stand behind, knowing you don't always live up to it?

Some of these may be new to you, and that's fine — judge the words themselves, not whether you've heard them before. And move fast: ten seconds each. Your gut gets there before your reasoning does.

Is yours missing?

Write the saying you'd actually wear and add it to the ones you've already picked. Anything goes — a proverb, a line from your grandmother, something you've said so often it became a rule. It counts towards the four.

Step 2 of 7

What's underneath

A motto is the surface. Underneath it there's usually a value — not a goal you reach, but a direction you care about moving in.

None of this is a diagnosis. These are values other people have read into the same sayings. Tick the ones that ring true and ignore the rest. If the real one isn't there, write your word in — your word beats ours. One motto can carry several values; that's normal, not confusion.

Step 3 of 7

Where does each value belong?

A value doesn't live in the abstract: it gets played out somewhere. Look at the areas of life below and, in each one, tick the values you'd want guiding it.

You don't have to fill them all in. An area can stay empty — they don't all weigh the same, and some aren't your concern right now — and another can take two or three. What you tick here decides what you'll work on in the steps that follow.

Step 4 of 7

What you do in each area

Put the values aside for a minute. In each of these areas, write down the things you do regularly — what already fills your days, not what you wish you did and not the highlights of the year.

Concrete, repeated things, about the size of “the school run”, “answering emails first thing”, “the Sunday walk”. Small and unglamorous beats big and impressive.

Only the areas you ticked a value for show up here. You can leave one empty and fill another with several: use Add another when you run out of lines.

Step 5 of 7

A value is an adverb

A goal is something you reach and cross off: run the marathon, get the degree, buy the house. A value works differently. It's a quality of action — a way of doing whatever you happen to be doing. You never finish it. You can act on it this afternoon and again tomorrow, for the rest of your life.

One way to make that concrete: turn the value into an adverb. Courage becomes courageously. Generosity becomes generously. It stops being a noun you own and becomes a way you move.

English is uneven about this, so don't force it. Curiously actually means “strangely”, and fairly means “somewhat”. When the -ly word misbehaves, use “with ___” instead: with curiosity, with fairness. Whichever sounds like something you'd say out loud is the right one.

Your values, as qualities of action

Change any wording that doesn't sound like something you'd say out loud.

Step 6 of 7

A ten per cent week

Not a new life. Not a resolution, and nothing you have to keep up. Take the week you already have — same schedule, same obligations, same people — and season one thing you already do with ten per cent more of the quality you chose. Nothing changes in what you do. One thing changes in how.

Those hours are happening either way — the only open question is how you spend them. Try one on and see how it goes.

Not every quality fits every activity. Washing the dishes “with interdependence” is nonsense — and finding that out is part of the exercise. Tap a quality under an activity to hear how the two sound together. Keep the ones that land. Tap again to drop the ones that don't.

Try several combinations up there, but take away one. One gets done; three get written down and abandoned by Tuesday. And ten per cent is deliberate: small enough that you can't fail at it, which is what makes it worth trying.

Step 7 of 7

Your week

Over the next few days, notice what happens — not whether it works, but whether it feels like you. That's the measure that matters.