Time Required
15 minutes. You can try this practice whenever you feel defensive or threatened.
How to Do It
1. The following is a list of different values, characteristics, and qualities, some of which may be important to you and some of which may not. Start by ranking them in order of their importance to you, from 1 to 11:
- artistic skills/aesthetic appreciation
- sense of humor
- relations with friends/family
- spontaneity/living life in the moment
- social skills
- athletics
- musical ability/appreciation
- physical attractiveness
- creativity
- business/managerial skills
- romantic values
2. Then, write a brief account (one to three paragraphs) of why your #1 value or quality is important to you, including a time when it played an important role in your life.
Why You Should Try It
In our daily lives, we sometimes encounter threats to the self—from receiving negative feedback at work to being excluded in social situations. In these moments, it’s difficult to stay clear-headed, open-minded, and in control. We may get defensive or act out, depriving ourselves of constructive lessons and harming our relationships with others.
Researchers have found that writing about our most important values can help us experience less stress, be less defensive and more open to information, and make healthier choices in these situations.
Why It Works
When our ego takes a hit, reflecting on what matters most may help us move beyond narrow self-image concerns. It can remind us of the other resources we have in our lives: how strong and capable we are, or how much support we receive from others. We start to realize that there's something we care about—whether it’s cultivating relationships or creativity—that matters more to us than whatever difficulty we’re experiencing in the moment.
Once we gain this broader perspective, we become more open to hearing negative feedback or potentially scary but useful information. We can take a wiser and more long-term perspective, instead of getting bogged down in momentary negative feelings.
Evidence That It Works
Tang, D., & Schmeichel, B. J. (2015). Self-affirmation facilitates cardiovascular recovery following interpersonal evaluation. Biological Psychology, 104, 108-15.
When participants received negative feedback on an essay they wrote—a form of self-threatening information—their blood pressure increased. But it recovered more quickly after they wrote about why their top value was important to them, compared to writing about why other people might hold a particular value.
Sherman, D. K. (2013). Self-affirmation: Understanding the effects. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(11), 834-45.
Sherman reviews the benefits of self-affirmation on defensiveness, stress, and performance and proposes a model to explain how it works: by increasing our psychological resources, broadening our perspective, and keeping threats separate from our sense of self.
Sources
Brandon Schmeichel, Ph.D., Texas A&M University
Comments
and Reviews
Tara Tiger Brown
I completed this practice immediately after I listened to the podcast. I had just finished dropping my son at his bus stop where I felt socially excluded because the parents speak French and I don't. To compound matters, I live in Japan where people speak Japanese and I am socially excluded from most conversations as I'm a beginner speaker. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty bad and the podcast made me feel a bit better and motivated me to participate in this practice. This exercise reminded me of what's important to me and in the bigger picture, how I focus on those values. The guinea pig in the podcast mentioned sharing through speaking or writing and as my ability to speak to others is limited to brief get-togethers with other English speakers, it makes sense to focus on my writing. Now to wait to see how long this more hopeful feeling lasts...
Kira Newman
Hi mun, the study called "Two types of value affirmation" (under Evidence That It Works) used a different list of values: empathy/compassion, being responsive and supportive to the needs of others as well as one’s own needs, creating or contributing to something larger than oneself, trust/openness, personal growth, and being in mutually supportive and caring relationships. If you're doing the Affirming Important Values practice, you might consider selecting from these if the ones listed don't speak to you. We choose the current list because it's more widely used in other research. Also, I think you could interpret these categories in a meaningful way. For example, business might include career and creating products that provide value to others; politics might include campaigning for justice and human rights. The other four categories seem quite meaningful in and of themselves.
mun
None of the items in the below list is an important value. Has there been a mistake? business art/music/theater social life/relationships science/pursuit of knowledge religion/morality government/politics