Practices (resources)
"If you don't change anything, nothing will change."
Teri Kansted
Reaching out and asking for help can be a difficult, daunting task.
However, once we have, what might be harder to accept is that no amount of talking, crying, or external support will actually change anything for us in the long term.
The only thing that will create lasting change in our lives is if we decide to change how we behave to create new neural pathways.
A daily practice is usually necessary to see sustainable change - exactly like wanting to grow muscles or becoming fitter: We must do it to see results.
However, we cannot change that which we're not aware of. That's where things like therapy, journaling, and other self-awareness-building practices help.
At The School of Thoughts, we call this the L.I.A.H. method: Learning, Insights, Acceptance, Habits.
In this section, you'll find free learning resources to help you gain insights and acceptance, and change your habits for true, lasting, and sustainable change.
Values
Values are the core beliefs or moral codes that drive us in life.
Have you ever found yourself raging at someone's behaviour and then felt surprised or even shocked at your own strong reaction? Or have you ever read an article by a perfect stranger, but their way of explaining themselves made you fall almost instantly in love?
Chances are the first person violated one of your core values, while the second shared a similar set of ethics.
Our values are shaped by our upbringing, the people in our lives, the social and cultural landscape (norms) we're born into or raised in, the era we live in and the political climate we inhabit. We might, through deep introspection and hard work, change our values later in life, but at best we might only be able to change our relationship with and interpretation of our values. Using the practice below, you may start to identify what your values are, why they are what they are, and whether you want to change them.
(These practices are free to download and share, but their copyright belongs to The School of Thoughts - do not share without giving due credit).
Download these two PDFs (you can download free PDF software - Adobe clone - to write directly inside this PDF here: https://getartcraft.com/apps/pdfcraft
Look at the "Values List" and tick off all values that are important to you.
Try to pick your top 10 values, then try and see if you can't lump them all into 5 and maybe even 1 or 2.
Open the second PDF and work through the questions to get a better understanding of your values.