After reading that title, what are your initial thoughts? Are you confused? Are you pondering on your own values?
Values
a person's principles or standards of behavior; one's judgment of what is important in life.
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As a clinician, my sessions lately have consisted around boundary setting and identifying where my clients want to set firm boundaries in their lives. When identifying boundaries, you must start with your values. If you do not have any values or are unable to identify any, you wont be able to set clear consistent boundaries that you are willing to follow through on. When identifying values, you may be asking yourself; "what are my core beliefs?"
Well lets start with this, I explain core beliefs to my clients as sunglasses. When you put on sunglasses, you usually notice a few different things such as:
Polarization
Polarization in sunglasses increases your ability to see and provides you with clarity for the things around you. For example, in sport fishing they often wear polarized sunglasses to assist with reducing the glare from the sun when it hits the water, which in result, increases visibility of fish underneath the waters surface.
Filtering Light/Protection from the sun
When wearing sunglasses, you reduce eye strain and increase visibility. You are able to filter harmful rays from the sun and enjoy the beauty around you. You are not only able to see more clearly but you are able to protect yourself from harmful, unwanted rays that may cause more harm in the long run!
Now, with all of this information you may be running to Sunglasses Hut to buy new shades for the summer months but may have lost track of why this correlates with core beliefs/values.
When exploring values and your core beliefs, you often see things differently than those around you. When an individual has core beliefs, they identify and value certain things that influences how they see the rest of the world around them, hence the sunglasses analogy! Our core beliefs and values act as sunglasses. When we are comfortable with our purpose and having a deeper understanding of what we stand for, we often have clarity for hard situations and can protect ourselves from unnecessary harm.
If you are wanting to explore more value and boundary work, try this simple exercise below:
My hands reach for…
My feet run toward…
My eyes search for…
My soul wonders if…
If you open the trapdoor of my heart, you’ll find…

Now ask yourself, what do you stand for?
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