How to Capture and Reflect On Your Anti-Values
Each of us has a unique algorithm of thoughts and emotions that get in our way.
Because these patterns tend to work in direct opposition to your values, they represent your anti-values.
If our values are the thoughts, beliefs, and motivations that determine what’s important to us, our anti-values prevent us from actualizing it.
Why Knowing Your Anti-Values Matters
Our anti-values have the most influence over us when they are unconscious.
It’s when we aren’t aware of them that they dictate our thoughts and actions most directly.
That’s why identifying and acknowledging our anti-values is the first step toward removing their power and influence over us.
How to Capture Your Anti-Values
This ongoing exercise will help you become increasingly aware of your anti-values.
You’ll do this over time by noticing them and naming them in your own words and phrases.
The words and phrases you capture should represent the inhibiting thought or belief in clear, direct terms. It’s what the anti-value “says” in your head when it appears. Your ability to do this will evolve, as will your awareness of your anti-values.
The steps for capturing and creating better responses to our anti-values include the following:
Noticing the thoughts and beliefs that prevent you from actualizing your values
Capturing this mental content in your own words and phrases
Choosing better responses for future occurrences
Reflecting on new experiences
The LearnChangeDo Anti-Value Database for Notion integrates all three steps in a single organized and interactive tool.
1. Notice
Capturing your anti-values begins with simply noticing them in the first place.
This requires the skill of meta-cognition, which is the ability to think about your thinking. There are a variety of ways to cultivate this, including:
Meditation - The very act of meditation is a process of noticing your thinking in a non-attached, non-reactive way. Meditation is like a practice session for meta-cognition. Starting or growing your meditation practice is a great way to increase your ability to notice anti-values permeating your experience. See How to Start and Grow a Mindfulness Practice for more on this topic.
Journaling - Journaling is a deliberate practice for capturing your thinking and reflecting on the mental content that permeates your experience. Journaling can be a great way to define your anti-values and explore them from different perspectives.
Working with a mental health professional - Working with a licensed mental health professional can be a great way to open up about anti-values and other disruptive mental content that permeates your experience. For some, having an objective third party to share your thinking with is a constructive and insightful way to learn about yourself and become more aware of your thought processes.
Noticing your anti-values is a skill that can be cultivated through any of the skills above, or better yet, through some combination of all three. The sooner you develop this skill, the sooner you can create some “space” or “separation” between yourself and the mental content that arises.
2. Capturing
As soon as you start to “pay attention” to the thoughts, beliefs, and mental habits that permeate your experience, you’ll immediately be able to begin capturing anti-habits.
Capturing is writing down the anti-habit in your own words and phrases. Simply naming the thought and recognizing the flaws in its logic or rationale is a powerful way to remove its power over you. Capturing creates a strong sense of separation between you and your thinking. It helps you remember that your thinking is merely a process in your brain instead of fundamental truths about reality.
When you engage in this process, you’ll immediately start to notice that your anti-values typically form beliefs about the way things are or should be. For example:
“I’ll never succeed.”
“I’m not good enough.”
“I’m going to be stuck here forever.”
You can use the LearnChangeDo Anti-Values Database for Notion to capture your anti-values in whatever words or phrases make the most sense to you. This is a highly personal process; no one will read them, so be open, honest, and direct with yourself. The clearer and more accurately you can capture your anti-values, the more effectively you’ll be able to respond to them in the future.
3. Choosing Better Responses
For most, the onset of an anti-value usually triggers some reaction. These reactions typically come in three forms:
Fight
Flight
Freeze
It’s important to remember that most of our anti-values and reactions to them began in childhood. When we were young, there may have been some experience or situation that prompted fear or suffering in us. We likely reacted by fighting, fleeing, or freezing as a coping mechanism. These natural reactions become embedded into our patterns of thinking and behavior. Those reactions helped us maintain a sense of security and safety, and because of this reinforcing effect, we continued to resort to those same responses throughout our lives.
But as we age, those reactions become outdated and no longer serve us as they once did. In most cases, those reactions get in our way and prevent us from pursuing our values and what’s most important to us (hence the name, anti-values).
For most anti-values, the mere act of noticing them is enough. Meditation teaches that non-attachment to thoughts is often enough to pass through them unhindered. But in cases when anti-values have historically prompted anti-habits, additional efforts can be made to change these behaviors.
The value in noticing our anti-values emerges when we can change how we respond to them.
4. Reflect
Reflection is thinking about your experiences and drawing insights and lessons from them.
As you go after your goals and pursue your values, your anti-values will undoubtedly “get in the way” in different ways. When these periods of stress, anxiety, self-doubt, or uneasiness set in, these are valuable opportunities for reflection.
One benefit of capturing and organizing your anti-values using a tool like the LearnChangeDo Anti-Values Database is that you can return to each one and add journal entries whenever you want. Over time, you’ll be able to see how your relationship with this anti-value has developed and how your thinking around it has evolved.
Reflecting on our experiences and drawing insights from them is also a powerful way to develop your values. As counterintuitive as it may seem, challenges and obstacles in our lives are precious opportunities to put our values into practice and convert them from ideas into actions. Continual reflection on your experiences and your thoughts about those experiences can help you uncover additional ways to create a value-driven life.