137. Live Your Values in the New Year

"Each time a woman stands up for herself, she stands up for all women." -Maya Angelou 

As we cross the threshold from 2025 into 2026, this episode invites you to pause, reflect, and choose a different way forward—one rooted in values rather than willpower. Opening with Maya Angelou’s reminder that when one woman stands up for herself, she stands up for all women, we explore how values guide our decisions, actions, and sense of meaning across every area of life.

Instead of setting resolutions that often fade within weeks, this conversation reframes the New Year as an opportunity to reconnect with what truly matters to you. Values—freely chosen, deeply personal, and ever-evolving—become a compass for how you want to live, relate, create, and care for yourself. We unpack the critical difference between goals and values, and how values provide the fuel that goals alone often lack.

You’ll be guided through four powerful value domains to consider for the year ahead: self-talk, mental health, inner boundaries, and outer boundaries. Through personal stories, psychological research, and practical examples, this episode explores how kindness toward yourself, value-based self-talk, and clear boundaries—both internal and external—create consistency, self-trust, and sustainable change.

This episode is an invitation to reflect on who you want to be, how you want to show up, and what you want to move toward in 2026. By choosing a value—or a word—to guide your year, you begin living in alignment with what matters most, one small, meaningful action at a time.

Transcript

 Each time a woman stands up for herself, she stands up for all women. This quote from Maya Angelou starts us off today, just in time for the change from 2025 to 2026. 

We are talking about values. They guide you. They help you take action and make decisions on every aspect, on every front of your life. You can use values to guide you. Let's get into this. Let's get this started. How are you preparing for your new year? I think we struggle at this point by imagining the gap between where we are and where we want to be, and instead, if we reflect on where we were and where we are now, we're more likely to cultivate gratitude and appreciation And understand where we took action on what was important to us. Some people like to set a New Year's resolution. And research shows it lasts about 18 days. That's a very short period of time that we can push using willpower to try and do something. And if we haven't generated the internal value of what we're trying to accomplish, willpower runs out. After about three weeks, I've been doing a word of the year for, I don't know, maybe the last 20 years, and using that to guide me has always been helpful. It's something that I learned from the Whittemore girls, and if you're a knitter, I highly recommend their podcast. The idea of choosing a value to guide you for the year is much more likely to give you the pleasure that you're looking for, the feeling of satisfaction that you crave. So I want to talk about values today. I talk about them a lot here because once we're in contact with our values, the decisions and our actions, what we want to do and what we want to no longer do become much more clear. Values are freely chosen by you. They're your personal beliefs and standards about what matters to you. It doesn't matter what someone else is doing and you can still act on your values. Even if someone is behaving in a way that you don't like. Now, we often inherit our values from our families or society, and it really does take time and intention to explore our personal values and let go of any of these lingering social values that no longer serve us. Now, you may find that a lot of your values do align with what your family taught you. There's things like, when I grew up, we had the tiniest television, and the only things we watched were really The Muppet Show and some PBS specials. If we were lucky, we could get a few cartoons in on Saturday morning, but it really was not the central focus. Many of my friends would come over and say, where's your TV? And, you know, it's this little thing in the corner. Um, I have gone a long time without TV. My. Many of my family members don't have TV, and it's something that always stuck with me as a value. And without TV, I can do other things that are interesting to me. Now I do have a TV and I went to bed early and read last night. I didn't watch the TV. It gives me options. I don't have to completely reject something or completely embrace something. I can experiment with what feels right. And the TV is kind of this superficial example, but you can plug in any example about what you grew up with as important that you learned from the people who looked after you, your neighbors, etc. this is the really important part. You are the only person who can create your unique set of values, and that means that if you're just adopting the values of others, then you're creating those. And I want to invite you to consider with great intention your values. Now values are completely separate from goals. Remember I said people abandon their goals after 18 days because they lack any connection to why it's important to them. Values. Inform your goals by letting you know what's important. There are people who want to get healthy because they think they should, and there are people who want to be able to play with their grandkids one day. And so they're committed to health. The value of I want to have a long life and be around for my family is really different than I think I should. That value will give the fuel for someone to make healthy choices, schedule the doctor's appointment, or go for a walk. If you value creativity, you might set a specific goal of making art for 20 minutes a day, and it's a way to help you carve out time to act on that value. Your values also act as a compass. You can think of it kind of like a moral compass, but it it works in a lot of situations. Your inner compass are leading you towards your standards and your priorities, and that comes down to every little thing that you do, how you spend your time, what you think, the news you consume, the people you spend your time with, how you behave. All of these things either move you closer to what's important to you, or further away from what's important to you. So when you're aligned with your values, your actions reflect that and you can observe yourself behaving in a certain way. Oh, I'm moving towards my values by being patient with my kid, or I'm moving towards my value by picking up something for my neighbor. Inaction in a value domain is often because we think we should be doing something. You maybe think you should value something, but it's what other people want you to value, and it's hard to get motivated or excited about what everybody else wants us to do. Values also evolve and their importance changes as you grow and as you age. What you value in relationships or work or in yourself. Think about what you valued when you were 15 or 20 5 or 35, or the age you are now. Ongoing evaluation of your values and prioritizing what's important gives you that feeling of consistency, of living in alignment with what's important to you. We have to adjust and accommodate over time. And finally, values are what you care about and how you want to be as a person in any given moment or any situation. It's nice to be kind and patient when the other person is kind and patient. It's easy when you're dealing with someone who is being unkind or impatient. Can you still be a patient, kind person? This requires a little reflection on how you want to show up. I am determined to be nice when I go to the grocery store. Right? I'm just gonna chat with the clerk who's helping me with my groceries. I might talk with someone in the aisle. I'm certainly going to get out of the way if someone's coming through. I'm not going to park my cart in the middle, or I'm not going to step in front of someone while they're looking at the shelves. There's things that I will and will not do that keep me, you know, a kind neighbor. When I'm at the grocery store, your values let you demonstrate yourself to yourself and to the world of what's important to you. So when you focus on your value for the new year, what it is that you want to move towards. Think about your personal principles or standards of your behavior, and you are already living by a lot of values. Sometimes it's just a matter of having a look and exploring. What did I do today that was in line with my values with. Being a decent human being on the planet when we do this value work. Research shows it improves all aspects of our lives, and that means our feelings, our sense of meaning and purpose, our relationships, our work, our health. All of these things that are part of who we are are improved by making action towards our values. And I would say from my own personal experience, from my work with clients and in the psychological research, prioritizing your inner value work is the best investment in your time. So you can imagine a value domain is the overarching category in which you would like to express your values. So you might have values in education or parenting or romance in your career, your self-talk, your mental health, in social justice, environmental issues, your spirituality, creativity, your intellect. All of these things are the overarching domains. And then you choose one that feels important to you. There's four that I think you might want to consider for the new year. And there are categories that you can have a look at your self-talk. How do you want to treat yourself? How do you want to speak to yourself, and how do you want to demonstrate to yourself that you are kind and worthy? The second one is around mental health, and those are your thoughts, your feelings, your behaviors, your reactions to these inner and outer experiences that we're having all day long. And mental health can be seen. A therapist. It could be going for a walk every day, journaling, meditating, doing things you love. The third one I think is really worth paying attention to are your inner boundaries, and these are the limits that you set with yourself. Keeping a commitment to yourself, knowing what you want. Engaging in honest reflection about who you are and what you desire. And the fourth is outer boundaries. And these are really about how you apply your inner boundaries to the outside. It's like a limit that you might set with other people, and that it's the outward manifestation of those inner boundaries. I want to talk today specifically about self-talk, because this is something that you can use while you're cultivating your New Year's value resolution. Self-talk is how you counsel and advise yourself, and this includes the language you use in your head, as well as the things you say out loud about yourself, either to yourself or to other people. It's how you describe or judge yourself. Then it's how you coach yourself through challenges. It's been a lot of really interesting research about people who speak out loud to themselves. And using your name when you're doing soft talk is a really powerful and kind of fun trick to get you to pay attention to your language. So I've always said to myself, like this, this is an inner thing. I say kind of all the time. Come on, Amy, you can do it. And it's an invitation. And it takes on a different tone depending on the task. If I'm running up a hill or if I'm procrastinating sitting down to write. But come on, Amy, you can do this. Feel free to borrow that one. It really allows me to move and take the action that I want to take. The value in my self-talk is about being kind and loving and compassionate. I also want to be at ease and confident, and I want to be my own inner cheerleader. So the actions that I think you could take in this direction that would help you the most are art, an art journal, writing meditation using affirmations. Being around positive people and managing your stress and your health in a way that helps you feel better. So let me know how you want to speak to yourself. I would love to hear your personal conversation. The language that you use in moving through value based positive self-talk, shifting to mental health. And these are really the thoughts, the feelings, the behaviors, those reactions that you have. It includes what you're telling yourself about what's happening. If you have an inner dialogue that says a lot of, oh no, this is terrible, this is horrible. That does not help your mental health. Your mental health is also constructed through the story you tell about yourself and what you make. Challenges or worries or anxieties or specific mental health symptoms mean. What do they mean to you? How positive mental health requires time and attention. It's just not by accident and it involves thoughts and using your strengths. You may be facing significant challenges around improving your mental health, or you may be facing smaller challenges to improve your mental health. Either way, there is a certain amount of time and attention that's required. If you find yourself saying, oh well, doesn't matter. Nothing's going to help me anyway. It's just like this. I'm just like this. Those are thoughts of poor mental hygiene. You really want to cultivate a stance of every little thing helps. I'm going to do just right now. Just for today. In this moment, the value of focusing on our mental health is really getting in the present moment. It's having the future focused optimism. So being optimistic that the future will get better. It's using loving kindness towards yourself, towards others, and being non-judgmental. When you're here, your thoughts going through your head. So the actions that can come out of these values are more positive relationships. Education can really help us with our mental health, and knowing something about what we're going through is a huge benefit. So talking with a therapist can have a big value. Going on a retreat. Taking a holiday and doing a writing retreat where I just tuck myself into a hotel. I'm doing that in January. I'm hosting with my friend Aurora Duvall a retreat for women in Paris. These are the kind of things that are larger, take an action of commitment, of travel, and they involve a sort of like a big change. Smaller changes are a daily commitment to making art, journaling, exercise. Now on to inner boundaries. Now these are the limits we set with ourselves. And they relate to self-respect, keeping a commitment, having inner discipline not in a bad way, but the kind of discipline that gives us structures to be the person we want to be. It's knowing what we love, what we crave, and what is not for us, what we're not willing to put up with. It's about what we're accepting from ourselves. Are we going to accept terrible, judgmental thoughts, or will we, when that happens, shift to something more positive? An inner boundary is also taking personal responsibility and acknowledging that you are responsible for taking care of yourself. The values in this area might be focused on honesty with yourself, clear communication with yourself. Self-respect, dignity. Consistency. Self trust. Again, making art can really help with inner boundaries. It helps you know what you like. Another way to cultivate and understand your inner boundaries is time alone. Meditation. Retreat. Travel. Finding role models in your life or on television or in a book. That kind of self-reflection where you allow yourself to admire another woman and not to be jealous, but to be all curious. Oh, I see that in her. I could have that too. And finally, outer boundaries. And that's what those inner boundaries look like on the outside. Essentially, it's this outer manifestation, and it's the limits you set with others around your time. You might say, oh, I can't meet you at three, but I could meet you at four. Simple, clear, logical, and then you can start to build up more outer boundaries with, oh, I don't want to talk about that or let's, let's shift. I don't like how you're talking to me, or I'm unavailable to make another batch of cookies or volunteer another day this week. It's delegating to others. I need help with the dishes or the laundry. It's asserting yourself and speaking out loud what you desire, which is why they come after you. Realize what it is that you want. So the values in this area might be clear and assertive. Communication following through on limits. If you ask someone to do something and they don't, you gotta have a response. We can go back and say, I ask you to do this. You didn't do it. Um. The consequences. I can't join you later today. I have to go do it. It's keeping your word to yourself and to others. And it's a lot of self-respect. And sometimes speaking up when it feels really uncomfortable. So those actions that allow us to cultivate outer boundaries are practice. Takes a lot of practice. You can do assertiveness training, certainly journaling, looking to role models and how they set limits again. Being around positive, like minded women can really help you with this. Working in therapy to cultivate specific boundaries and how to set them for your unique situation. And then there's this quality of willingness, sort of having a willingness that you want to change something, do something different. And that urge can really fuel you to set those outer boundaries in respectful ways. So I would invite you to think about three things that about you that you find personally meaningful and important. When I think about this, for me, I think about creativity and I think about justice and equality, and then I think about contribution taking action towards what feels important that I can contribute. Think about your three things that feel really important, and you can start your journey of writing about and making art about what's most important to you. And there is no right or wrong answer, and you might get caught up in what I want to work on. All of it, what you can, but not all at once. So it's just picking one and focusing on it. And that singular focus will actually help all the other areas of your life. So I always love to hear from you. If you drop me a line either on Instagram or in the show notes, there's a button, you can send me a message. I would love to hear from you. Let me know what your value and your word will be for 2026. I want to wish you a very healthy, happy, and prosperous 2026. Now that you know all of this about values, and you've got a whole host of tools from which you can pull to build up your values and take action on your values, what will you create? I'm looking forward to speaking with you again in the next episode.