The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 94 - Doctor Julie: The ONE Simplifying Thing That Will Transform Your Life

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. What do you want in life and how do you make the changes to get it? In this moment Dr Julie Smith helps you to tell the difference between a goal and a value, and what the difference between the two can mean for your life. While goal’s end as soon as you achieve them, a value is something you follow all your life. Even though life may pull you away from the path set by your values, you can always return to it. Dr Smith discusses the need for value check ins to remember what is important in your life and to reflect on the gradual changes you are making that lead to big meaningful differences in your life. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/Sew3KrnPIqb Dr Julie - https://www.instagram.com/drjulie/?hl=en https://www.tiktok.com/@drjuliesmith?lang=en Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. So values and goals. What is the the difference what is the value sure so um the way I would talk about sort of values and goals in therapy is really around um a goal is something that you once you achieve it once you get there um it's done so you know your goal might be to get through your exams okay exams are over you passed done a value doesn't finish or end. It's

a pathway. If you imagine your life as a journey, for example, it's a path that extends the whole of your life. And it's something that you choose to always stay close to when you can. And I think, you know, life will always take you in different directions. So sometimes life will pull you away from a particular value. But it's really about always evaluating and knowing where that path is so that you can pull back in that direction. So for example, when your, you know, your career starts to take over because it's so busy, and then you think, Oh, I haven't spoken to my girlfriend all week. That's you going, that path's too far away now, I'm pulling back, I need to head back in this direction, because this is important to me. And so it's a kind of, you know, winding path where you're,

sometimes you're pulling away from it and sometimes you're going back towards it. And something that I included in the book was these sort of little values check-ins that I would do and we do in therapy where we look at, okay, just look at the different areas of your life. It doesn't have to be rocket science. It doesn't have to be really kind of airy-fairy. It's looking at, okay, what's important to your life? You might have family, intimate relationships, health, creativity, you know, lifelong learning, career, contribution, those kinds of things. And then you could literally kind of split it up into boxes and put in each box words, not about, what's really crucial is it's not what happens to you it's not what you want to happen to you it's how you want to respond to things how you

want to be in that area of your life what kind of person you want to be so let's say you were looking at your you know romantic relationships what kind of boyfriend do I actually want to be you know what what kind of partner do I want to be? What do I want to represent to that person? And how do I want to come at difficulties? How do I want to sort of respond to problems that we face? And, you know, that kind of thing. So it's all looking at the attitude that you bring to that situation in your life or that area of your life. And you might come up with words that then kind of resonate or, you know, maybe, I don't know, maybe in your work life, maybe enthusiasm is a word that you just hold close to you and that becomes one of your values. And so you can then, and sort of exercise that's in

the book is you can almost rate, okay, how important is it to me to be enthusiastic in my work? Maybe it's 10 out of 10. That's really, really important to me. And on that same scale, then how much do I feel like I'm living in line with that this week or today? Two out of 10. I'm pretty tired. Can't even bother today. This job's really boring today or whatever. And so when you, what you've done there is you've looked, you've opened up a discrepancy between, okay, this is really important important to you but you're not living in line with it why what's going on not not in a way that you can then be really self-critical but as a tool to say um yeah my girlfriend's really important to me but I haven't seen her for four weeks why what's stopping me from jumping on a plane right now okay let's do

that and then you know when you start to do those things and, and you're coming back towards your value, the sort of rating for how much you're living in line with it would go up. And so doing that kind of exercise is really just a long, long winded way of saying, you can look at what's important to you. You can just do a really quick measure up of how much am I living in line with it? And what areas of my life do I need to pay attention to because I'm not living in line with it. So it can be kind of quite simple and a fairly quick exercise really I am I was actually watching a video last night and uh there was a guy on YouTube I don't know how I managed to stumble across it the video had like 2,000 views this is not anybody anybody would know but I he was sat in his car and I found it really fascinating because I don't know whether I should

say this or not but um I found it fascinating because he exhibited certain like narcissistic delusions of grandeur in talking about what he wanted to become and what he wanted from his life and um it got me thinking that it's quite difficult to understand whether something you say or write down or aiming for is a value or if it's just based on like an inherent deep childhood born insecurity. Because if you'd asked me at 18 what my values were, I would have said a million pounds, a Lamborghini. Like I would have defaulted to these things because those were the things that would have like,

I don't know, scratched my like insecurities, right? But as I've, as I attained those things and had more chance to reflect on what actually makes me feel good and fulfilled and complete, I would have said family, connection know health two very different things right one's cause-based one is just an insecurity so how do we know the difference and and you don't right because you know you and it's always a horrible answer isn't it but you you know maybe you had that aspiration when you were younger and and you went with it because it's all you knew at the time. And then you learned some, you became more wise

and your values shifted slightly. And that's the thing. That's why I talk about doing sort of quite regular values check-ins because depending on your life stage and what you're doing, your circumstances, your values will change. My values transformed when I had

children and, you know, probably sort of flipped them upside down really. And that's okay. I could never have known that that would be, I couldn't have prioritized my children before they were there anyway, you know. And for example, you might not have been able to know that you would feel differently now back then at that age. You didn't have the capacity to do that. You hadn't had the life experience. So it's okay. You know, there isn't this sense of, there is this right path. And if you get on it at 17, you'll be all right. You know, the whole process is a learning process. So it's okay to change direction. It's okay to discover, this is not where I want to be, but I've learned something. Here we go. Let's change direction. Let's go in this direction. And now I've got

the knowledge of where I don't want to be. Speaking of changing direction, then a lot of what's written about how we change direction is you've got to make this like big grand decision in your life. And then today you've got to go in that direction as if it was like a 90 degree turn. And this can be quite terrifying for a lot of people because it's not easy to do. You talk about this in the book, you talk about habits and things like that and how we make change in our life. What have you learned in your, you know, your experience as a clinical psychologist about how people do actually make meaningful change in direction in their life? I think something I've learned is that big meaningful change is not made drastically and quickly. You know, sustainable change is made carefully. And there's this

process of, it's not just action, there is a lot of kind of reflection. And then there's a bit of action, then there's a bit more reflection of like, we tried that, how was it? You know, do we need to change direction? You know, we keep moving. So it's a kind of bit by bit by bit, but we greatly underestimate how powerful and sustainable that can be when we do it bit by bit. And, you know, develop habits, for example,

and constantly reevaluate and check in on which direction we want to go in. So I think something that I've learned, and certainly actually in my NHS work, for example, the type of work that I was doing, it took time. You know, if someone's really poorly and there's a lot to work through, that takes a long time and that's okay.'s kind of how we work it takes time to heal and things like that so um i think i learned to sort of acknowledge that not everything has to be done yesterday