’Though it be small; it be mighty’ — Reflecting on our values and the importance of the ‘little things’…

30.04.2021: Reflecting back on this week for the PIE blog as the Lead for Psychologically Informed Environments (PIE) at the national youth homeless charity: Centrepoint, I was standing in my kitchen earlier (waiting for my COVID PCR lateral flow test to develop) and my eyes caught sight of the wooden plaque on my notice board shown in the picture above. I cannot remember when I got this, or indeed who gave it to me, but this week it seemed to have a particular resonance to me as well as some of the conversations I have been having with staff across the organisation. The idea of focusing on ‘the little things’ because they may actually be the ‘bigger things’ reminded me of much of the work that it undertaken in the homeless sector. Sometimes it can feel like we are not perhaps making as much progress as we want to with the homeless young people that we are supporting or perhaps the wider organisational or system challenges we are facing can feel overwhelming. It is therefore easy to think that the work we are doing is not helpful or bringing about big enough change. It can also be easy to get frustrated or despondent about the difference we are making to #changethestory for vulnerable young people in the UK.

However, as I approach the two year mark of joining Centrepoint to lead on the development of our PIE, I have been reminded about the importance of focusing on the ‘little things’ that I (as well as the wider PIE Team) have achieved over this period as well as my many colleagues within the wider organisation. I also have to hold aside my own high expectations for myself and reflect that the past year in particular, has been challenging as we have all had to adapt to living and working within the confines and new guidance resulting of the COVID-19 global pandemic. So much work within the homeless sector naturally focuses on dealing with ‘crises’ or managing the ‘bigger picture’ and so it can be easy to forget the positive value of even the smallest steps that we can make as an organisation whether that be within our individual teams or personally.

This might be the informal contact we have on a day to day basis with a homeless young person in our ‘frontline teams’ that starts to build a support relationship with them that can allow them to feel ‘safe’ and trust us, so that we can help them to make positive changes in their lives. For example, finding suitable accommodation, beginning to engage in education, training or employment, or perhaps making changes to maladaptive behaviours such as substance use or self-harm etc. Or this might be the work within our ‘support teams’, such as in fundraising where we have sourced some additional supporters or partners to improve the physical environment for staff and young people utilising our services (e.g. https://centrepoint.org.uk/what-we-do/housing/manchester/future-foundations/) or in our finance team were we have ensured these resources are available to be spent where needed. Or this might be in our policy team where our continued efforts in lobbying government or partnership working with other organisations has finally led to social policy changes that improve the situation for homeless young people in the UK (c.f. https://centrepoint.org.uk/what-we-do/policy-and-research/). All of these ‘little’ steps forward are a critical part of the journey towards ensuring that homeless young people in the UK have a ‘home and a job’, and together add up to the ‘bigger picture’ #oneteamCentrepoint.

As a psychologist, I am perhaps more used to making small steps and the importance of valuing each and every one of these ‘little’ things towards a bigger goal. Even the process of training and qualifying in this profession takes many years, and so I learnt very quickly within my own supervision that it was important to focus on the journey and remain in the present moment even if my eye is on the future final achievement. In addition, in order to remain motivated, I have learnt (as per Behaviourist psychology approaches) that it is important to recognise these ‘little’ steps and to reward myself each time they are achieved in order to remain motivated to continue on that bigger journey. Consequently, I would suggest to readers of this blog to consider what ‘little’ steps have you made today, this week, this past month or even this past year? Have you recognised this in yourself (and others) and rewarded yourself (or them) accordingly? Even taking a moment to recognise our successes, however ‘little’ can have a positive impact on our psychological well-being!

However, as the sign on my kitchen notice board notes, it can sometimes be helpful to recognise that the ‘little’ things may also not just be steps towards a bigger end goal but also that they may be important in their own right. Too often, we perhaps have a tendency to focus on what we do not have and/or fail to be content with what we do. Psychologists call this ‘hedonic adaptation’ (Lyubomirsky, 2010), where no matter what positive experiences we have, we tend to return to a baseline ‘happiness’ level. If we get a new job, new pair of shoes, new car — our expectations and desires also increase. In other words, no matter how much success we achieve, we always return to how we felt before this and our ‘contentment’ does not increase overall. Those big (often material) ‘things’ arguably do not make us happy (Ahuvia, 2008). Actually, what psychologists are increasingly realising and applying with therapeutic techniques such as Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT; Hayes, 2012), is that the ‘little’ things, often in the present moment and aligned with our values, are those things that improve our psychological well-being.

An ACT approach suggests that we should identify what is truly important to us, rather than what we think (or others suggest) is important. ACT suggests we question and identify the truly important perhaps ‘little’ things in our lives (and perhaps those we work with) and spent our effort on working towards these rather than spending our valuable energy worrying or chasing the bigger things that aren’t actually important to us, or we only think they should be (Edwards, 2020). Of course, what is important to us may be different to another person. Moreover, what is important to us can change across our lifespan to some extent — what we value in our twenties may be different from what we value in our forties. For example, my career development as a psychologist and travelling were important to me when I was younger, but now as I am older my family life and having a job that aligns with my values is more important. Back to the wisdom on my kitchen sign, I also now increasingly value those ‘little things’ such as snatched conversations, impromptu activities and family in-jokes with my children, because as they grow bigger and need me less (or I am more embarrassing to my ‘tween’ eldest), the opportunity for these decreases.

One of my most used and helpful therapeutic approaches to thinking about what our values are is the ‘80th Birthday Party’ exercise (c.f. Hayes et al, 1999; taken from Sinclair & Beadman, 2016). This exercise asks you to imagine that somehow you have been able to travel forward in time to a particular event; your ‘80th Birthday Party’. Now imagine you are standing at the back of the room and you can see that everyone (as this is post COVID-19!) who is important to you has come together to celebrate this significant milestone. This includes people who are important to you now, people who have been important to you in the past and people who might be important to you in the future. Imagine that the party is coming up to the ‘speeches’ and those who are extremely important to you are getting up on stage, taking the microphone and speaking about YOU! Each speaker is talking about the kind of person you are, the way you have lived your life and even the impact that you have had on them. Importantly the things they are saying are whatever it is that you would most want to hear them say. They are not saying what you think they should, or what they might be expected to say — but simply whatever you would most like to hear.

After you have finished thinking about these speeches — the question is of course; what did they say? How would you like to be most remembered and thought about? What is important to you that these key people in your life say about you? Spending a moment to do this exercise is one way of starting to think about what is important to us and what our values are. This can give us an understanding of what we should be focusing on moving forward. What are both the little things, and maybe perhaps some of the bigger things that are meaningful to us? Focusing on these and living our lives according to the values that we hold as most important, improves not only our motivation but also more importantly, our psychological well-being. I know that whilst my work as a psychologist is important to me, and perhaps I can imagine (or hope) ex-colleagues at my fictional 80th birthday would be saying positive things about my psychology career, I can also recognise that my family and friends would be perhaps saying different things about me, that reflect different values that I hold. My children will probably not care about an academic publication that I have written for example, but they will remember the time that we had as a family on holiday or even lazing around at the weekend in the garden with the dog. This also helps give us balance, to understand that the ‘little’ things are just as important as the bigger things in managing our psychological well-being and ‘happiness’. Sometimes, as my kitchen sign demonstrates, it can remind us that what we think are the big things aren’t always whilst the ‘little’ things are in fact ‘big’ things.

Taking an ACT approach also encourages us to accept that sometimes we may become entangled in our destructive thoughts, feelings or behaviours that stop us from progressing towards those things we value particularly when those thoughts are about things in the past and/or things we cannot change. Even if we have reflected on what our values are and what is important to us, our own self-doubt, uncertainty, discomfort and painful memories can prevent us from moving forward. Psychologists recognise these feelings as a normal part of the human experience, not something to be ignored, pushed away or avoided. In fact, doing so can often cause more problems, as we do not process our experiences, which can store up risk for later mental health problems such as anxiety and depression. Therefore, recognising when our thoughts are unhelpful (perhaps because they are ‘black and white’, ‘catastrophic’ or ‘overly personalising’) can help us to have a different relationship with them. Our thoughts are just our thoughts and will only control our subsequent feelings and behaviours if we give them the space to do so. Hence, mindfulness or other activities that help root us in the present can be helpful and give us ‘cognitive defusion’ (or space / distance from our thoughts), in order to maintain our ‘perspective’ and ensure we do not make a ‘little’ thing something ‘bigger’ unnecessarily.

Finally, I think focusing on the ‘little things’ can sometimes be helpful when we feel overwhelmed or are dealing with complexity, as is often the case in the type of support work undertaken in the homeless sector. When a homeless young person presents with a great amount of risks or needs, it can often be difficult to know where to start. Consequently, focusing on the ‘little things’ that we can do, perhaps even those tangible tasks that can make some improvements to their daily experience, is really important. It can help build engagement, especially when we give space to celebrate these ‘little wins’. All of those hundreds of ‘little things’ we do add up to the bigger picture, whatever our role is within the organisation to help homeless young people in the UK. As I am often telling staff, creating a psychologically informed environment or PIE is not often one ‘big’ shift that we need to undertake. It is actually often all those little things, the tweaks to our current practice to place psychological well-being at the centre, the relatively small but impactful improvements we are making to the environments of our supported accommodation services or the changes in processes or policies that improve outcomes. Therefore, this week let us take a moment to recognise and reflect on the ‘little things’, that we as well as the homeless young people we support have achieved, for they may well actually be just as important as, or even turn out to be, the ‘bigger things’…