Emily Falk

One of the things that I think we really do have control over is our ability to decide whether we want to be the kind of person who responds to loving critique, constructive critique openly, or whether we want to let defensiveness get the better of us.

And obviously there are situations where people are just mean or rude or whatever, and I'm not saying we should put up with that.

but that often there is useful information in the feedback that other people are trying to give us.

And that when we can see that as evidence that they care, when we can see that as evidence that they're trying to work towards some better outcome with us,

Or even just connect with the part of ourself that wants to be continuously improving.

That can be more productive than this automatic reaction that I think probably stems from the conflation of self and value.

Yeah, so one of the things that meditation helps people do is let go of that more bounded notion of self, right?

The idea that there's a fixed sense of who I am and that that can't change or that it has a particular and rigid structure.

So when you look at the brains of people who have practiced meditation for a long time,

Their self-relevant systems behave differently than the rest of us who aren't long-term meditation practitioners.

And so that also really suggests this other possibility that just kind of letting go of that bounded notion of self can make us open to all kinds of other possibilities.

Values affirmation is a technique where we reflect on values that matter a lot to us, so things that bring us a lot of meaning or purpose in our lives, which for some of us might be things like our friends and family or our spirituality or maybe our creativity.

And the idea is that when we reflect on those core values, it can allow us to zoom out and see that...

just because we made a mistake, it doesn't have to mean we're a bad person.

Or just because somebody is asking us to change one thing doesn't mean that like everything about us has to change.

And so this is a way that we can hold on to a core sense of self while making ourselves more open to potentially changing things that aren't working or to kind of shift preconceived notions about who we are.

So yeah,

As one example, our team has done research looking at folks who are relatively sedentary, people who don't move around a lot.

And what we found is that when we randomized people to either get to do a values affirmation exercise, reflecting on these kinds of sources of meaning and purpose in their life, things that really matter to them first,

compared to a control group who reflect on values, but the ones that aren't necessarily their most important values.