It’s not unusual for clients to have dreams and hopes, and to have questions about whether they would truly be better off if they made a big change. There’s three exercises I encourage my clients to go through to assess their fantasies and evaluate whether they should make a big change. One of the messages I hope you can get from these strategies is that taking
First exercise: Flesh out your fantasy. It’s important to let your imagination run and fully detail what you hope your life would be like after you make a particular change. Once you’ve written down the specifics of how your life would be different… assess whether you can bring these changes into your life right now, without a giant disruption. This exercise can be useful in helping point out that you can do more to make you more joyful fairly easily.
Second exercise: Time chart. Sit down and map out how you would ideally spend a week’s worth of time. How much would you devote to family, how much to friends, how much to sleep, work, hobbies, etc.? Then track your time for a week. How are you actually spending your time? Can you make any adjustments to bring you closer in line to your ideal? This simple exercise can help you identify the differences between your values and your lived life.
Third exercise: Decisional Balance. The decisional balance worksheet is a slightly more sophisticated version of a pro/con list. It helps clarify ambivalence, and it can be useful to do several of these over time to see if you are trending any particular direction with a decision you find difficult to make. First you write down the pros and cons of making a change on the left hand side of a piece of paper. Then you write down the pros and cons of not making a change on the right hand side of a piece of paper (link to a model in the bold, underline title). Then you weigh each item you wrote down (you pick your scale, 1-5, 1-10, 1-100) to understand the value of each benefit or loss to you. Then you can add up your points and see how much you are trending towards or away from the change. Doing this exercise several times will help you identify trends of changes in how you value different pieces of the puzzle. (The decisional balance approach is associated with Motivational Interviewing techniques that first arose around treating substance use, but it’s useful for lots of different types of decisions.)
I hope you find these ideas helpful. Please feel free to comment, as I look forward to your feedback.