SELF-REFLECTION

Just when we were all slowing down for summer, our August issue contained features all about reflection and introspection. Jenny Humphreys got in touch after reading Ella Dove’s piece about the benefits of uncovering your values.

‘I’ve been reading a lot recently about how understanding your values could help you make important life decisions, manage stress, and even help shape your interior design decor, but none of them had really explained how to identify your values, and I’d been struggling to do so on my own,’ she wrote.

‘Before understanding the concept of values, I have found myself in recent years profoundly moved, inspired or angered by things, and wondering what it was specifically about these events that spoke to me so deeply. Approaching these from a value exercise has been incredibly helpful. And now that your excellent feature has helped me identify my six values – all of which I will honour in myself and gravitate to when I sense them in others (or learn how to handle the absence of them in others) – I’m so much more confident in the choices I’m now making.

‘I’ve started mapping out how to establish my design career, what it will offer to my clients, and how it will contribute to a lifestyle I can feel truly comfortable in (and therefore weather the challenges and rough times when they inevitably come). It was a small step, but also a critically important one – and I’m so grateful that Ella has helped me discover them. I hope that other readers felt the same – I’m sharing the article with all my friends!’

Elsewhere, Marina Paul felt inspired by Cyan Turan’s ‘Destination: Transformation’, about finding creativity in unexpected places. She wrote: ‘I agree that rushing from place to place, boomeranging from task to task, can seem endless. My best ideas come when I am simply relaxing, reading a book with no long list to tick off. I think “relax” will be my mantra, to let the ideas flow!’