I’ve been going to Wolverine Wellness every two weeks for the past month or so just to be able to talk about my life with a neutral person. It’s not therapy, more just a check-in and way to talk through stuff. Anyways, last session, I learned something fascinating about myself.
Academics have always been a priority in my life. I have always cared greatly about my academic success, and am extremely motivated to achieve my academic dream of getting into a top program for Clinical Psychology. Probably due to this motivation more than anything else, I have, overall, done well in academics.
Last Friday, in my Wellness session, I was asked to do an activity about my values. I was allowed to pick the dozen values that are most important to me. Out of the twelve I chose, only two had to do with career success. Of those two, one of them was “work ethic”, which I value in all areas of my life, so really I chose only one value related to career success (“achievement”). Almost all the others had to do in some way with my relationships with others. When we realized this, I was shocked. Ever since I was a little kid, academics have been incredibly important to me and a huge focus in my life. And yet, my most important values did not reflect that; at all. And all of a sudden, things clicked into perspective for me and explained a lot about what I worry about and how I carry myself.
After I had chosen my top values, I was asked to select the ones I wanted to work on. This was a no-brainer for me. I struggle with being vulnerable with people. Early in high school, my best friend at the time got really mad at me because she felt hurt that I wouldn’t open up to her more. In though in retrospect I’m nots rue I completely agree with her decision to guilt me into opening up, I learned an important lesson that day that people who truly care about you want to hear what’s going on in your life. And while I have improved greatly since middle school, I am still working on how to open up with people.