Now you're ready to learn one of the foundational skills of the Human Systems design method: Emotions to Values. Remember, this is hard. And practice makes perfect*. The more you practice the Emotions to Values method, the more deeply you will understand it.* If your house isn't on fire, do it at least twice. **Even better, make it a daily reflection!
You should set aside about an hour to do this exercise the first time. With practice, you'll be able to do it in real time as emotions come up. But it makes sense to go slow at first.
Step back into your memory. Remember a situation in which you had an uncomfortable emotion (sadness, anger, hopelessness, etc.). It doesn't have to be a "big" emotion. Great values can be harvested from even small annoyances. For your first time, avoid emotions related to more general life problems or previous trauma. Try a situation that brought up challenging emotions that are linked to the situation itself.
Ask yourself: What was it like for you to actually be in the situation? Where were you? Who were you with? What happened? What emotions came up? How did they manifest in your body? What did you see, touch, taste, smell? Picture being there as vividly as you can. Sketch the outline of the story here:
You've identified different emotions that came up. Decide on the one that was most clear and present. Think about what happened that caused that emotion.
Write down your emotion and what happened.
Example: I felt frustrated because people were late.
In any social situation, you attend to some things and not to others — your awareness is limited, so you zoom in on what seems relevant. Examine how outcomes and expectations guided your awareness in your emotion story.
<aside> 💡 This step will help you get to a 🧪 Pure Value. It's a detailed way of exploring which outcomes and expectations crowded out your personal values.
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Note: Emotion stories are very diverse. Not all of them contain every form of outcomes and expectations. If a question doesn't seem to fit, just skip that part. And don't judge the way you were thinking at the time. Just do a brain dump for now.
What way did you have to be / how did you have to treat people or approach things in order to fit in, or so that someone/people would like you, or so that you like yourself? Maybe there was an image that you felt like you had to live up to somehow?