05.03.2020 Exercise: 🌳 Emotions to Values Practice

To begin with harvesting your own emotions, step back into your memory. Pick a situation you experienced in the past weeks that felt challenging and that stuck with you. This worksheet is most interesting to go through for a situation that brought up challenging emotions that are linked to the situation itself more than to previous trauma. Here are some questions to help you flesh out your memory.

• Where were you? With whom? What happened? What emotions came up? How did they manifest in your body?

As you have identified different emotions that came up, decide on the one that was most clear and present. Think about the immediate cause of the emotion.

Write down your emotion and its immediate cause.

I felt ___________________ because____________________________________________________________.

ie. Aisha felt frustrated because people were late.

Find the emotion that came up on the list below and ask yourself some of the prompting questions. Challenging emotions point us towards values that were blocked, that we could not attend to, that were suppressed and so on.

If the emotion you wrote down does not match the emotions listed beneath, go for the one that is closest. For each emotion, you'll find several questions—pick the one that seems most helpful, and take notes.

Using the guiding questions, try to articulate your value as a sentence.

Ex: Aisha felt frustrated because people were late. That blocked her ability to treat her time as sacred.

→ Aisha's articulated value might be: "treating time as sacred"

When you articulate your value try to use one of these pre-fixes in your formulation.

approaching things ___, treating people ___, acting ___, keeping things ___, living life ____

Note down your articulated value:

Let's clarify your value to make sure that it isn't polluted with norms, goals, fears, etc. Note that your value might already be on spot, in which case you don't need to answer the questions below.

• Would it still be worth doing independent of the outcome? If so, continue to the next bullet point. If not, it's a goal or fear! Take notes below.

"How would I want to approach things/treat people/etc. if I couldn't affect the outcome?"

• Would still be worth doing if no one knew you did it? If so, continue to the next question. If not, it's a social norm. Take notes below.

"How would I want to approach things/treat people/etc. if no one noticed?"

• Do you believe you could still be a good person even if you failed to be this way? If so, continue to the next question. If not, it's an internalized social norm. Take notes below.

"How would I want to approach things/treat people/etc. if there were no rules?"

• Would it still be worth being this way if no one else ever joined in? If so, (after all the questions above) it's probably a value! If not, it’s an ideological commitment. Take notes below.

"How would I want to approach things/treat people/etc. if I couldn't influence anyone?

Write your clarified 🌳 Personal Value in the box below using one of the following pre-fixes.

approaching things ___, treating people ___, acting ___, keeping things ___, living life ____

Imagine that you had to give an actor instructions on how to be the way you are being when you are living by your personal value. Write out your thoughts in a paragraph (stream of consciousness is fine) on how they should do that.

Now boil those thoughts down into one sentence that the actor should hold in their mind.

Write your specified 🌳 Personal Value in the box below using one of the following pre-fixes.

approaching things ___, treating people ___, acting ___, keeping things ___, living life ____