Dr. Amelia Case: The Importance Of Tapping Into Your Values To Unlock Your Authentic Self

I do really believe 100% from every part of me that everyone has the capacity to be able to do the things that they want and not to be held back by the mental baggage that's in our head that we want to push through.

Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. In each episode, we get down and personal with people who go after the things they want to make all their wildest dreams come true. Join us as we we unveil and dissect a formula for what it takes to do the thing. Here is your host, Stacy Lauren.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. This is your host, Stacy Lauren. All right, guys. Well, I have one of your experts on with me again today, Dr. Amelia Case. We are going to be talking about something else that's really important for you to understand about yourself, which is your values and how that really helps you tap in to your most authentic self so that you're able to do the thing. Not just doing it out of hustle and you wanting to move forward, but doing it out of your deepest alignment for you and knowing where that comes from. And as you're connecting to other people and getting relationships with others, really being able to identify what their values are, too, through the way that you guys are able to connect. So I'm so excited to dive into this topic. We had talked about it the other day in a coaching session, and I kind of did what I did on another interview where I was like, oh, could we please do this again? So then the listeners can also hear more about it, because I think there's something really important about understanding yourself and then what kind of drives you as you go about your life. So I am excited to welcome Dr. Case to the show. Hi, Amelia.

Hello.

Thanks for coming back again.

Oh, you're welcome. This is a really, really important topic, and it's so wonderful that you share your coaching with your audience. It's just great.

Yeah. I mean, I'm so grateful that you're willing to, because I think there's so much that's able to come out of the sessions that I have with you, and then to just be able to give that opportunity to people, to me just. It means so much.

It's great. I love it. Appreciate it.

So we were talking about values, and you specifically called it a value system, and I'd love to kind of go there with the listeners so they are understanding what that is and what that means for them.

If you sum it up in a kind of metaphoric way, value is the lens through which you look at life and say that's important. So whatever it is that captures you when you're sensing the world, when you're looking and listening and feeling whatever is important to you, you might just not even realize it. The things that are important to you are the things that you value. And for any person, that is the person's whole world. Because what's outside of the values, in other words, what's outside of what's important. Important is not important. So it's hardly worth your attention. You won't even notice it. So I love to say the example of my brother and his wife, Valerie. My brother's name is Aaron and he is very interested in machines and mechanics and cars and he's a doctor, but his love is kind of putting together cars, taking them apart, handling anything mechanical. He's the only person I know in this whole universe who's totally excited when his air conditioner breaks down because he's like, woo, I gotta fix it. He loves that. And he's not interested in lots of other things. He's interested in mountain biking because of the bike, you know, the mechanics of the bike. So he wants to make the bike better and tougher so he can mountain bike, but it's all about the bike. Versus his wife, my sister in law, Valerie. Valerie loves interior design and she loves parenting. She's homeschooled two of their kids and is homeschooling the third. And she loves cooking. So she has a completely different set of interests than he does. And that's often what people will call them, our interests. And so Valerie will pay attention to interior design showrooms or furniture stores or fabric stores or stores that sell cooking materials. And what she'll search for when she's shopping are tools to help her cook better or tools to help her educate her kids better or. Or she'll spend all of her time and effort trying to figure out how to homeschool better. If the two of them are in a car and they're driving down the street, Aaron will notice. And he could tell you where all the car places are and the best mechanics and anything that has to do with machinery. He can tell you where all that stuff is on that street or in their city where Valerie wouldn't know that at all, but she could tell you where all the best fabric stores are or where to get the best information about homeschooling. They both have completely different interests. The interests are their values. So if I said to my brother, hey, where are all of the fabric stores? He would be like, what are you Kidding. How should I know? If I said to Valerie, where are all the best places to get the mechanics for anything that breaks down in the house? She would say, I have no idea. It doesn't even register into her attention, and she has no attention span for it. So if someone talked to her about machines and she didn't pay attention, someone would say she has attention deficit disorder. Like, she can't even maintain attention on machines. But you give her interior design project, and she'll have all the attention in the world. She'll have attention surplus. And the same goes for my brother. If somebody gave him, you know, a fabric pattern or talk to him about drapes, he would have total attention deficit. And then if someone talked to him about machines, he'd have a total attention surplus. So the interests equal values, and the values drive attention. And so we only notice those things that we're interested in and we have values on. And those are the things we have tons of attention for and tons of time to burn and money to burn and attention to burn. And we'll remember every detail. And that's where we have our attention surplus. And then where we don't pay attention, it means we don't have any value on the thing, or at least it's not in our top three, let's say. And that's where we have no attention and no time, no energy for that thing. And that's where someone might accuse us of having attention deficit. And I love making those connections because a lot of people whom I've coached over the years were told they had attention deficit disorder, and yet they were super accomplished. And when it came to their companies, they had total attention surplus. When it came to the other stuff that other people thought were important and they didn't, they were labeled as being attention deficit. So it's pretty interesting how all that stuff weaves together. That's how I'd start to explain the phenomenon of having a value. It's something that you have interest in. It's something that has kept your attention, something you'd be willing to spend your time and money on. And it seems like it's the whole thing to you. That's where you want to spend yourself. And it is in complete contrast to the thing that you're not interested in at all. Like, it doesn't even enter your brain.

Yeah. And I think where. Where this became really interesting to me also, in addition to everything you just said, was when people are going into relationships, there could be things that have happened in their life with different experiences where they've become doubtful of just the way that they are in relationships. And they could think that they need to heal certain parts of themselves when. And actually it's just understanding what their values are. And so there's times that, yeah, there's times to heal old wounds, but then there's also time when you're really just understanding yourself at your core and what you value. So then you know why something is really triggering that.

Yeah, this is so important because so many people will think that they have to fix themselves because somebody in an authority position or in a position of authority has made them believe that their values should be different. Remember, that should is a code word for somebody of authority is impacting your view of things. So that happens in relationships all the time. I mean, I mentioned my brother and his wife Valerie. The reason that they have a marriage is because they have a common value on how to live life. They have a real, really strong interest in being healthy, both of them, and it's a main driver in their lives. My brother had very serious asthma when he was little, so it's something super important to him. And it also had an important role to play in my sister in law's life. So that's where they first came together is they have a shared value of health and wellness and the body and eating well and living well. And that shared value is so big for both of them that it unites them in the sense that that Venn diagram has enough overlap where they have a common ground that makes them want to stay bonded together. But if you ever ask my brother, do you want to work on interior design for the house, he would be like, no. If you ever asked her, you know, you want to go out and help Erin put together a Camaro, she would be like, no, not the slightest bit interested. They have enough overlap in common where they have made this permanent relationship and gotten married and had kids, and it's enough that it's kept them together. But if she judged him and said, you're a jerk because you don't want to do homeschooling, or you're a jerk because you don't want to do interior design, you should learn it, he would go crazy because he would be like, no, I'm never going to spend my time doing that. You're the one who's into the homeschooling and that's why we're doing it. Have at it. By contrast, if he said to her, I'm disappointed in you that you won't learn how to put a Camaro together, and you can't learn how to fix the air conditioner. She would say, you're nuts. Not only am I not interested, I'm never going to be interested. And it's no insult to you. Why are you taking it so personally? That's the kind of thing that happens so often with relationships, often in couples as well. But if the person you're talking about do the thing, if the person is saying, I sincerely am drawn to do this thing, but then someone in the couple is disappointed by it, or some person of authority is disappointed, says, no, don't do your thing. Do my thing. Sometimes people are vulnerable to let go of the very thing that makes them want to live and gives them mental, emotional, spiritual, physical purpose and excitement. They'll let go of those things to try to please somebody else and to try to fulfill somebody else's values, thinking that that might make them more lovable or more worthy or attractive or something like that. That's how I often see it. I used to do this in workshops, and I saw this topic come up over and over where people would have these big ahas like, wait a second. At one workshop, the woman came up, she said, I never really wanted to be an accountant. This was a woman with her cpa. She said, I'm leaving. I'm not going to do this job anymore, and I'm going to go back to school and get my PhD in psychology. And her family flipped out because her. Her dad wanted her to get her master's, her MBA and work in business. So she was secure and get her cpa. And now she was letting it all go after all the money she spent. And her dad was flipping mad that she was going back to school and gonna get in debt and leave her cushy job, et cetera. And she did it, and her parents were very angry with her. She even ended up divorcing her husband. She said she married her husband for. To please her family and just decided that was done too. So that was one of my first live examples of somebody who had completely lived her life for somebody else's values.

What do you think helped her tap into that, to really get there where she realized and then to be able to change the way that she did.

You know, it was the workshop. I used to do these workshops kind of on a regular basis. When I was first coaching, I would do small groups, up to 40 people, and I would go through and I would have them do this values workshop. And I named it different things. One of the most successful names was, what are you living For. And people would come into the workshops and then we would tap into what their values were when they were younger and then see if that thread had continued or if something had happened whereby the person gave up whatever the thing was that he or she was interested in. And so many people had given up what they really loved to pay attention to, and they'd just given it up because somebody in a position of authority had either suggested or strongly suggested or insisted. In the case of this one woman I'm telling you about, her parents, or her dad in particular, was very influential in her life. And he, God love him, I'm not saying anything against him. I'm sure he didn't have any motives that were bad for her. He just wanted her to be safe. And his highest value was money. And he said, if my daughter goes and she gets her bachelor's in business and then she gets her MBA and she becomes a cpa, she'll be set. She'll always have a job, she'll be safe. So he coached her and pushed her, and she loves him and trusts him, and so she did that. And so she did what he said. And who knows what the circumstances were, you know, if she said to him ever. Well, she did tell me that she had said to her parents what she was interested in, and they discouraged her because it wasn't practical. How much money can someone make as a therapist for them in their perspective? I remember clearly her mom was more the passive one in the couple of her parents. But for whatever reason, her mom didn't go against her dad. And her dad thought, he's got this all figured out. So she did it. So when we went through the workshop, she got in touch with what she had really wanted to do. And I think back about this. She must have been about. She was in her early 30s, but I can't remember exactly how old. But she had enough life under her belt where she realized she hated her job and she didn't care how much money she made. And that's why she was at the workshop, right? She wasn't satisfied with her life and wanted to find out something different. So she found out what she really liked about her early dreams of her life and decided that that's what she was going to do. And in fact, it's funny that we're talking about her. I got an email from her. Not an email, a Facebook messenger message from her about maybe a month ago. She's living in upstate New York on the lake, and she got her PhD and she ended up going to live in India at Nashram for like four or six years and came back and she's working with, I think, suicide hotlines and counseling or something like that. And now she's remarried. This is really the life of her dreams because she's living her values. And I have no doubt that the guy she's with is living his, and together they're living theirs. Instead of. If I think back, if she had continued on the path that she was on and she was still married to the other guy and still working in the corporate arena, she worked for a big multinational corporation. I don't know what her life would have been like. Disease, sickness, mental illness. I don't know. Not good. Because she wouldn't have been living her own values.

How would you suggest someone tapping into that? So you mentioned discovering what you liked to do when you were younger and then kind of seeing where you are now. What would be the best way for someone listening to kind of like, yeah, great question.

I would say, number one, trust yourself. Go back to when you were even pre K and see what was it that you would just be drawn to. So in the pre K environment or the kindergarten environment, if you watch kids and watch what they do, let's say the room is designed so that there's the kinesthetic area where they're building blocks, and then there's a music area where there are musical instruments, and then there's a drawing area where there are crayons, and then there's a cleaning area where the kids can clean. Imagine how the classrooms are set up. And just think if you were to observe yourself in this classroom, might be a classroom of life. I'm just using a kindergarten room as an example. Where would you go if you were going to a station? What did you do when you were little? How did you want to spend your time? And that's the beginning of your. What I believe is your inborn strength. Your inborn strength gets expressed through your interest, and then it stimulates you to discover something that fits with it. So if you found yourself going to the drawing area and you were captured by the idea of manifesting something through using your hands to paint or draw with crayons or whatever, and then you did that also in first grade. You wanted to do that in second grade. And then your parents asked you, what do you want for Christmas? Or what do you want for your birthday? Or what do you want for a holiday? And you said, I want crayons. Think about those first things that you said you wanted for your birthday. What you wanted to do those are hints because the value system is something that is part of you. When you're, when you come into this world, there's a value system and I don't know where it comes from. And I don't know if you could say it's in the genes or something more woo woo than that. I don't know. But going back in your life, you could certainly say, yeah, I don't know how to explain it, but I've always had an interest in fill in the blank, or this came naturally to me, to fill in the blank. So wherever your attention was easily going when you were young, before you became, quote, responsible for where your life was going to go, that's important to pay attention to. So kids through elementary school usually aren't pushed to start thinking of subspecialties or money or, you know, getting their job when they're grown up. So those times are a little bit more pure to see what you are attracted to. And then after that, the next really great question to ask is, what are you really good at? That other people are always saying, hey, you're so good at this. Can you do it for me or help me do it? And that's probably something that you become adept at in terms of practical application. Even when my brother was 15 years old, he was building contraptions, making machines and repairing cars, and his buddies would always say, hey, Aaron, help me with my car. Well, he just loved that stuff. And I don't know about Valerie's early life, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if her mom was having her help make tablecloths or redesign a room, even clean the house and make things look pretty. It shows up that way when people ask you for help because you're naturally good at doing the thing. So I would go back to those two things in early life. What were you naturally paying attention to that really captured your attention? By contrast, you could say, what would I never have paid attention to? And that will show you what probably wasn't in your value systems and probably still is not. And then go to the next sort of stage of your life where there's more social interaction, which is the teens, and find out what is it that people readily recognized in you was a strength, because that would be a demonstration of your values through demonstrating your interests.

Yeah, I think that's really helpful because the more you understand this about yourself, the easier it is for you to really be able to process things better. I mean, there's so many things that through our work together that's really helped. I mean, one of them, I'm thinking, and I'm wondering if the Venn diagram that we talked about is related to this at all. Where you each have your own. Like when you're in relationship. I don't mean has to be a significant other. It could be any kind of relationship where you each have your own lives. And then where the circles combine is where it happens in again anyway. Is that something that's related to this too, do you think?

Yeah, totally. That's called the Venn diagram. It can be also called the Vesica Pisces. It's just the two circles that overlap. And obviously they're not going to totally overlap, because if two people were really the same, one of them's not necessary. Right. We're not carbon copies of each other. So there's going to be an overlap. That means that where there's overlap, there's shared values, and where there's not overlap, there are not shared values. A lot of couples and friends and parents and kids can't admit the not shared part. They have this illusion it all has to be shared. Say, for example, with the woman I was telling you about who ended up leaving corporate America and got her PhD. She became a psychologist. There was a huge break in her family when she did that because her dad flipped out and he took it so personally. So imagine that. Just imagine in the story she decides, hey, dad, you know, I found out I really hate working in corporate America and I hate being a cpa, and I feel sick all the time and I can't stand it. And I realized what will really make me happy is to do what I always thought I wanted to do when I was little, which is I want to get my PhD, and I think I want to be a psychologist. You would think when someone is listening and values you, her dad would say, oh, honey, fantastic. I'm so glad you found what you love to do. I didn't know you were suffering. No, that's not what he did. He took it so personally. Now, keep in mind, because those are his values. So when you offend someone's values, you offend that person. So when she said, she's getting out of it, he couldn't understand why he was so angry. Well, because she had offended his values. So he couldn't even stop himself from getting furious. It was a very big problem. I knew her. I ended up knowing her mom, her dad, and I knew her husband quite well. He ended up going through the workshop and they actually asked me to speak at their divorce Ceremony. But anyway, neither one of them had married each other, being themselves. So obviously that can't be much of a marriage. Right. If you're not even yourself entering the marriage.

Yeah, it's really hard to. It's really hard to keep that up.

Yeah. So she and her dad, they didn't have an overlap because the overlap was he wanted his circle, so to speak, to just envelop hers and take over hers for whatever reasons he thought he was right. But those were his values that he wanted to impose on her. And because he was such an authority, she went along with it because he was her dad and she trusted him and he was the authority. So that's where the word should came in. I should go to school. I should get my mba. I should get in with, you know, one of the top firms in the. In the world. Multinational firms.

Yeah. And then one of my favorite things about this work is really when you understand the benefit and the drawback to the value. So for yourself and then also for.

Others, for right now, the benefits and the drawbacks. Totally. I mean, if we go back to that woman I was talking about, a benefit of being a psychologist and getting her PhD was that she would get to study the mind and human behavior. And she was very interested in why young people had suicidal tendencies. So she got to come up with solutions for something that had meaning for her, and that was a benefit for her. Use her mind and solve something different than equations or spreadsheets. The drawback was she gave up a big, giant paycheck. And so there was the drawback that was financial. There was another drawback, which was there was a schism in the family that she let her dad down. So there was another drawback to going after her values. There's a balance of drawbacks and benefits, no matter what side she was on. So when she was working as a CPA and growing in that multinational corporation, the benefit was she had power and money and prestige and reputation in that job. And which she could appreciate. Right. But the drawback was it was an empty life for her spiritually. And because spiritual was her highest value, spiritual and mental were her highest values personally, she always felt she was coming up short. If her highest values were financial and vocational success and achievement, she would still be in that job today because she would have been getting so satisfied. And then there would have been other drawbacks. You see what I mean? There's always a benefit and a drawback.

I think that's really important to understand because then maybe you won't be as hard on yourself when you see something coming up or someone you're in relationship with.

Yeah. I mean, you. If you respect them in yourself, I think, and I've heard this from students and clients for a long time, when you know your own values and you really know them and feel them, then when you see somebody else with strong values, you recognize that. And the only thing you can say is, well, that's that person's values, even if they're totally contradictory to yours. It's a sort of a sense of respect. Like, yeah, I totally disagree with that person and I'm totally not interested in that stuff. But, man, I gotta say, he or she has got some really clear values. I mean, it's very evident when people have them. It's very evident. I think it's a tough. It's a very tough life for anybody who is not very clear on what the values are that are worth living for. That's where I think anxiety and depression, frustration, whatever, they're actually great feedbacks. The woman that I was telling you about, she thought she was depressed. I would never say that she was depressed from like an DSM 5 type of diagnosis, a diagnostic manual type of diagnosis, but maybe a psychologist would have said she was depressed. I would have said she's not depressed. She's getting feedback that she's totally living somebody else's life. And I would call that feedback pretty handy.

Let's talk about it in terms of understanding yourself better. How do you think if someone understands their value and how they approach life and what's the most important to them, how will that benefit them?

Well, number one, the person has energy and interest to do whatever that thing is, you know, you're talking about do the thing. And you talk about wanting people to be really in alignment, authentically in alignment with whatever it is that they want to do. It's impossible to have alignment when you're not aligned or you're just serving somebody else's values. It's like feeding the beast for somebody else's desires. It's unsustainable. So if you want to be in alignment with doing the thing, you have to know what your values are and be able to recognize them first. Be able to say it to yourself and then be able to recognize the things around you. Is that worth my time and effort? Is that person? Is that event? Is that whatever project what's worth it? Because when you're aligned with your values, you have lots of energy and enthusiasm, also ideas, and you're willing to put in the effort. And it seems like, even if it's tiring, there's this inexhaustible flame of enthusiasm that's just keeps getting fed because the thing that you value is the food. So you do it, and then it. It's generous in the sense that it keeps reinforcing that and feeding you energy. And then I think in those cases, it's much easier to get resources. It's easier to ask people for things, whether it's money or assistance. It's easier to ask people for help. When you're really committed to a thing, to doing something, it just seems like it just is natural to ask for help. It's also more natural to offer help in that way as well. I would say it just invites a quality of ease. Ease. Being feeling on purpose and feeling like you're aligned with your values just seems to make quality of ease. I'm not saying that life becomes easy. There will always be challenges, and. And that's a wonderful thing. But it's easier to face challenges when you're being true to yourself and authentic. Does that make sense?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally does. Okay, so, Amelia, the time is here. I would love to hear. Let's say someone did not listen to any of this and they're just listening to this part here. What would be the number one piece of advice you would have for people regarding values?

Find out what your values are and be really clear about the areas that they kind of fall in so that you still feel like you have wiggle room. A value doesn't lock you in. It gives you space, but within a sort of area of your life. And if you want to know your values, then ask yourself five simple questions. What is it that I naturally spend time on and get excited about? What is it that I listen to, the words I'm using? What is it that I spend money on? And I don't have any regret about spending the money on it. What is it that I talk about? I spend time talking about it inside my own head and outside of my own head. I can't seem to shut up about it. What is it that I learn about? Where do I try to go and study? What are the kind of YouTube videos I watch or podcasts I listen to? Where am I putting my attention? How am I spending my attention? And then what is it that it's easy to set a goal about? You just feel, I want to set a goal on this, and then it's easy to go after the goal. So if you say, oh, I want to set a goal on this, and then you can actually do it. That means it's aligned with your value systems. So you can use those five questions. Just that easy. Handful of questions have to do with what are you willing to spend your time on, your money, on your time talking about, thinking about, making goals about? It gives you an idea of what it is that you're willing to put into an area of your life. A lot of people talk about different areas of life, too. And I like the model that is the seven areas. Spiritual, mental, financial, vocational, social, familial, physical. And so you could write out those seven areas of life and just ask yourself, what is it that you like to be in each one of those areas? What do I like to be spiritually? What do I like to be mentally? What do I like to be vocationally? Just say, what do I like to be in any of those seven areas or all of them? What do I like to do in these areas? What do I like to do spiritually, mentally, financially, vocationally, familially, physically, socially, what do I like to do? And then you could say, what do I like to have in each one of those areas of life? And wherever you can just write and write and write and say a lot. Say a lot. That'll be in the areas of life where you already have a lot of experience and you have a lot of dreams and interests. And that can also set you straight. Because then you can ask yourself afterwards, am I doing that? Am I being that? Am I having that? And then you hit that cold, hard truth. Ooh, I'm kind of outside my values. Or the same wonderful truth I am. Oh, I seem to be really adhering to my own independent, unique values.

Yeah, that's really good. I love those questions. I think they're so powerful, too. And then what do you think? You've said a lot, but I want to just make sure that the people listening really hear this. What's the number one benefit for them doing this work?

Being in love with yourself. I think that's it, really. Loving and appreciate yourself. And when you love and appreciate yourself, it's much easier for somebody else to love and appreciate you. When you love and appreciate yourself is when you feel healthy. Your mind and your body gets lit up, literally lit up. Your immune system's happy, your hormonal system's happy. Your system is elevated. When you're doing the thing that you love to do. Just think about it. If you're doing something that you can't stand doing, it feels like there's a weight on you inside and out. Right. Emotionally heavy, intellectually heavy. It's a pain in the butt. So, yeah, the benefit is you love and appreciate yourself. You love and appreciate your life. I think you can love and appreciate other people more easily because you can see they're all trying to live their values. And when you find somebody who's really living in his or her values, I think there's just a level of, I don't know, identifying that brings respect into a relationship. It's like a beautiful sort of respect. Less questioning about who that person is, because that person demonstrates a life lived according to true and authentic values. That's kind of how I think about it.

Yeah. And you're making me think of just one more thing. And I hear this a lot in that singles community because they're divorced, widowed, and coming back out of that. Right. And fighting back for their own life as a single person.

Yeah.

And it's really easy to fall into that trap of what's wrong with me or what's wrong with this other person. But I think this values work is tied directly to that. And I was just wondering if you could speak to that too.

Yeah. That's a great opportunity to say what is right with me instead of what's wrong with me. Sometimes I think that being freed up from a relationship is a time to really look at yourself in the mirror in a different way. Even if the breakup or the change was difficult or that transition was painful, I think it's a great opportunity, a great time to look in the mirror and say, let me just see. Do I see any evidence of the fact that I was trying to live by the other person's values? Did I lose myself in there and start trying to live by somebody else's values? Or did that other person let me down by not living according to my values and unrealistic expectations? I think it's a beautiful time to start over in the sense of start fresh with yourself and say, oh, my gosh, I learned a lot about my own values. And instead of that, any breakup or split or any loss makes you feel like less capable. I think you turn that right around and say, oh, my God, I'm more ready for a relationship now because I suddenly have this realization that my values are important to me. And when I am clear with my values, I have a lot to offer the world and another person. And so I feel confident in that. Does that make sense to you?

It does. Yeah. And then there was one more side I wanted to make sure we got, which was the part where I love the reframe of the. Instead of what's wrong with me, what's right with me. But it's also that idea of, of sometimes when you're seeing something in someone else and you're unhappy, and it could just be a values mismatch.

Well, if I. If I said what a lot of people have told me in the past is, and it comes in the guise of I just wanted that person to be happy, or I just wanted that person to make me happy with this one little thing, something like that. And so that person didn't, or I wasn't able, and so therefore I hurt that person or I was hurt by that person. And this idea that something has to be fixed or something has to be healed, I think is a little bit overworked in the sense that if, if you ever tried to make yourself into somebody else's values or live by somebody else's values, then you're not hurting the relationship so much as you're actually hurting yourself. And you're not even actually in the relationship because you're trying to pretend to be something else other than what you are. And the same goes for if you expected somebody, unrealistically expected somebody to fill your values and become your values, then you would be asking that person to be somebody different. And that's not a case of wanting to. No one has to fix himself or herself, and nobody has to heal. If that person knows I'm just being me as I am with my values, I don't fit with this person. There's not an overlap, so there's nothing to fix. It's just a matter of just being frank with the fact that sometimes there's no place for a person who doesn't share something with you. We all come together because we have these overlapping values, interests, shared interests, commonalities with each other. And if you don't have it, it doesn't mean you have to change or you have to become someone else, or that you're unwhole or that you need to heal yourself or someone else needs to heal. It just means that it's so much more simple than that. It just means that there really are these things called values, and they really are an expression of our lives, our very selves. If it's not there, it's not there. You can develop, you can become more adept at using vocabulary in different areas of life. You could say you want to be, quote, well rounded in different areas of life. But that's totally different than having some expectations on yourself or someone else to show up and have a value that just doesn't exist for that person, it will never work. And by contrast, where you do have overlapping values, really honor that and step into that beautiful joy of that shared space. And where there is no shared space, be confident that that's okay. Because when you have a shared space with someone and you really authentically share that space, your relationship there is totally rich and wonderful. Because you don't fill every gap of every overlap that a person has doesn't mean that you're coming up short, that there's anything wrong with you or there isn't anything wrong with the other person. It's just not. It's impossible for two people to have complete overlap.

Yeah. Okay. I really like that, and I'd love you to share where people can learn more about you.

Yeah. DoneWithAnxiety.com is an easy start.

Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on with me again, and I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom on this really, really important topic.

Oh, you're welcome.

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