Emily Falk

That what shifts is how their brains respond to the thing that comes next.

So when we give those folks coaching about why and how they might want to get more physically active, everybody in the whole study is seeing the same coaching messages.

So things like the more you sit, the more damage it does to your body, or according to the American Heart Association, people at your level of physical inactivity are at risk for cancer and heart disease.

And

Even though everybody's seeing objectively the same messages, the people who were first given this chance to engage in values affirmation show more activation within the brain's value system, more activation within the self-relevant system, suggesting that maybe they're open to those messages in a different way than people who weren't given that opportunity to first zoom out and reflect on their core values.

Yeah, well, I mean, I think it also depends how you think about what difficult means.

Like right now we're in performance review season at Penn.

And something that we do in my lab is we do a bi-directional feedback meeting.

Like we fill out the HR forms where it's very top down.

Like as a manager, I need to give feedback to all the people who report to me.

But in that HR system, there's actually no place where they give feedback about what I'm doing well and what I'm not doing well.

And so we have these meetings that I know are on my calendar.

I know it's about to be the time when I'm going to be giving feedback to somebody else, but also they're going to be telling me what did I do as their boss over the past semester, over the past year that was helpful for them and helped them grow, but also what did I do as their boss that they wished I had done differently.

And there are a couple different things.

One is when I have the luxury of a little bit of time in my schedule, I do try to do a little bit of that kind of mini values affirmation, like reflecting on things that actually really matter a lot to me.

So I might look at photos of my kids or journal a little bit about things that I feel grateful for and things that are most important in my life.

But I also try to reconnect with why we're doing what we're doing in the first place.

And then the way that we set up these bi-directional feedback meetings is we usually start out with the things that are going well, right?

The things where they really genuinely do feel supported, the places that we're really connected, the places that we're on the same page.

And I will say that when people do this genuinely and authentically, it feels really good, like to feel seen and to feel recognized for the things that we're doing that are meaningful.