And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the Personal Development

Podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivated to be the best you can be.

I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols and this episode is titled Values versus Goals.

And if you're ready, we'll start the show.

Hello, you beauties. How are things been? Has life been treating you well? Have you been treating your life well?

One of the biggest existential givens is that life is inherently meaningless, but we search for meaning anyway.

And I'm going to remind you that I made an episode about meaning back in 2019. It's a public

episode, so it's out there for everyone to listen to. And

my take on finding meaning in our life has always been about living by your values rather than

just goal setting. If you listen to a lot of personal development podcasts and read a lot of

self-help books, you'll hear people talk

about goal setting as being the most important thing for growth. I hear people say that if you

don't have any goals, then you don't have any direction, that sort of thing. And that's very

absolute. And I don't like absolutes. We're humans. We're not Macarno sets that need these

rigid rules to follow, otherwise things don't work, right, and cogs don't turn. We're all

different. I'm a glaring example of that. I've got more quirks and unpredictable eccentricities than a

box of frogs. I'm a therapist, and even I don't know what I'm going to do

next quite often. And it's okay if you don't either. We're not doing life wrong if we don't have

a specific goal we're working towards. Instead, it can be more appropriate to live by your values rather than by your aims, if that makes sense.

Often, I'll ask people about their values and they'll say things like,

I want to own my own home, I want to lose 10 kilos, I want to go on holiday every summer, those sorts of things.

And those aren't values, They're things to aim for.

...