A friend sent me a file with tasks that his psychologist gave him. I took a brief look, it can be divided into two sections:
- a more theoretical section: questions directed about us, who we are, where we are heading
- a practical section: asks us to set 10 goals to achieve this year
There were interesting questions so and had made me reflection of some older topics I read about some time ago.
a more theoretical section
values vs goals
First question was “What are your values?”, I was asked this question before, and gave a not at all right answer. After I dig up deeper on what are values I noticed I had mixed them with goals. Even though they’re related, they’re not the same.
Not long time ago I read a self-help book called “The Confidence Gap” by Russ Harris. I’m really not a fan of self-help books but I found this one quite helpful. Values and goals are important topics in this book. Let’s take a look on what are values and goals:
- Values ✨: they define the actions you make in your daily life, i.e. being a respectful person.
- Goals 🔭: what you want to achieve, i.e. to pass your class exams.
Okay but how are they related? Even a more basic question, why I am getting asked about my values in the first place? To answer these questions let’s first focus on goals, how would you achieve your goals? i.e. how would you pass your class exams? You probably would have to study in some schedule, read the material, test your self, go to office hours, etc. So, someone who wants to accomplish this goal would have to by a organized, constant, hard-working, problem-solver and communicative student. Would you imagine a student who is just starting to learn about the topic to pass the exam if isn’t even organized? You probably don’t right? A student like that would need to make changes in his actions that is to follow new values.
In life you’re just an adventurer with nothing but a compass and a map with red crossed points where you want to go. Compass gives you the direction to get to those points, once you reached those points, that travel ends. Like in real life, there’s a lot of ways to go to the same point. Also, there are other adventurers, they may join your travel, they may help you calibrate your compass towards your goals, or they may interfere with your goals, one way on another.
To finish the idea, to set my values I’ll first see what are my goals first.
how would you see yourself in 5 years? 🌄
On the second question you gain a superpower, where you can see your perfect future in 5 years. Perfect doesn’t mean that you are a super trillionare with 300 lamborghinis in your garage. Perfect means that you have just enough to have a fulfilling life.
Why I am getting asked this? Let’s see, I guess that a future too ambitious is hard to achieve because it requires lots of efforts, would it be worth it to spent so much time and energy to achieve that future when you can have a future where you can get almost same feelings of happiness with so much less. Also anything that isn’t not a perfect future wouldn’t fulfill your life completely.
This may look like a conformist approach for you. It doesn’t mean that’s all you gonna achieve in your life but in 5 years from now on. It’s a way of tracing the path of your journey by reflecting on your life on not a long time in the future.
Imagining how your life could be in 5 years from now is a nice experience, that motivates you to face the challenges ahead to get there.
a more practical section
This section challenges you to set ten goals to achieve this current year. They can be short-term goals, medium-term goals and long-term goals within that year. Basically the goals you need to achieve in order to have a perfect year.
I did a task like this when 2025 started, but a event surged and turned my life upside-down so I had to do them again according to my new situation. Even tho I won’t be able to reach the goals I first settled, I’ll have lots of good moments facing and reaching the new challenges given my new situation.
What about you? Do you have a goal-list or are you going to make one? How much are you willing to do to achieve your goals. I hope you have a good year and so I.