Mindful Mondays #24: Your Core Values

Discovering your deepest aspirations for living, synchronicity, and ADHD

Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash

Good morning, and welcome to Mindful Mondays. Happy Easter and Passover to those who celebrate these days. We had a nice family gathering yesterday, and even saw a baby rabbit outside the condo (it’s an Easter miracle!). Wherever you are in the world, I hope you’re enjoying the beginnings of spring weather (or autumn, in the southern hemisphere).

This week, I’m gearing up for the next cohort of Write of Passage, the online course that inspired me to start this newsletter. I’m excited to level up my writing again and work on some longer form articles, which I’ll be sharing here.

Today, I’m writing a bit about one of my favorite psychology topics—values—as well as sharing an article about Carl Jung’s collaboration with a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, a podcast about ADHD, and as always, a cool quote. Enjoy!

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What are your core values? If someone walked up to you on the street and asked you, could you rattle them off? Unless you’re one of my clients, chances are you’d need some time to think about it.

Our values are our deepest aspirations for how we want to show up in our lives. They tend to be abstract nouns like compassion, creativity, adventure, or spirituality. They’re not the same as goals—goals can actually be achieved and crossed off a list. Values, on the other hand, are more like directions that we keep moving in until we die.

Once we know our values, we can use them as a compass for decision-making, and set goals that are aligned with them. In fact, if you’ve ever accomplished a goal that wasn’t really aligned with your values, you probably experienced a bit of a let-down. But taking action that’s aligned with our values makes our lives feel more meaningful.

Studies have also shown that journaling about your values can help with motivation, life satisfaction, and mental health, as well as providing a wide range of other benefits.

Curious to find out your core values? You can take an online version of an evidence-based tool called the Values Card Sort here. Then, if you feel like it, email me and let me know your top values. If you’re reading this, I’ll bet we have a few in common.

Article of Interest

The Synchronicity of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung: If you’re a fan of Carl Jung, or have spent any amount of time in New Age spiritual circles, you’ve probably heard of synchronicity. It’s Jung’s theory of “meaningful coincidence"—that is, that coincidences could mean something more than random chance. Jung theorized that synchronicities occur because of a deep connection between mind and matter—in fact, that mind and matter are, on a fundamental level, not separate. Fewer people are aware that Jung developed his theories in concert with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was Jung’s patient and later, friend. This article chronicles how these two thinkers came together and, eventually, apart.

Podcast of the Week

ADHD 2.0 with Dr. John Ratey: On this episode of the Being Well podcast, Dr. Rick and Forest Hanson are joined by Dr. John Ratey, one of the foremost experts on ADHD. Dr. Ratey talks about both the benefits and downsides of having an ADHD brain, and shares practical tools for making the best of it (including, importantly, physical exercise). This podcast should be both empowering and helpful for anyone who has ADHD or loves someone with this diagnosis, or who, as Rick says, is “at the spirited end of the spectrum.”

Quote of the Week

“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.”

—Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize-winning physicist

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That’s all for today. As always, I appreciate your feedback on Mindful Mondays. What was your favorite thing I shared today? What would you like to read more about? Let me know by replying to this email, commenting on Substack, or hitting me up on Twitter (although Elon has now decided to suppress links to Substack on the latter platform).

Thank you for reading,

Chris Cordry, LMFT

PS: Want to clarify your core values, set meaningful goals, and have support and accountability in achieving them? Reply to this email to ask me about 1:1 coaching.

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