E188 | Thinking Films: Why The 70Up Documentary Feels Like Therapy

So the first question this documentary raises for me is, why don't we always prioritize what matters most? And we see plenty of this in the documentary.

For example, we have Andrew, the lawyer.

He was really obsessed with his work for a lot of his life.

He cared about his education and then succeeding in his career as a solicitor.

And then ultimately, towards the end of his life, now he's 70 years old, he's thinking actually family time proved more important, maybe work.

doesn't seem as important ultimately as it did for him in the past.

We also have Simon, who became a foster carer.

He lived a lot of his life always assuming there was going to be another chance for the important stuff.

He regrets, for example, not telling his mother that he loved her more before she died.

And he also wishes he had asked more about his father.

who he had never really seen since childhood.

And he describes holding back a lot of the time because he didn't want to upset anyone.

So why is it that we can put things off like this? I think it's really important to make a distinction between what we call maybe small picture thinking and big picture thinking.

So often when we're caught up in the humdrum of our lives, we're caught up in those short-term priorities, aren't we? And they often seem a lot more urgent and a lot more important than they actually are.

As a psychotherapist, when I'm working with people for psychotherapy, often a large part of my job is to try and help people move from a small picture way of thinking to a big picture thinking.

Another way of putting this is begin with the end in mind.

So in the popular self-help book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, one of the habits is beginning with the end in mind.

In other words, forcing yourself to think about not just the next week or the next month or even next year, but trying to think about your life in a big picture sense.

And the advantage of doing that is that your priorities often become much clearer than when you're caught up in the urgencies of the everyday.

So I think a lot of people tend to be caught up in small picture thinking.

Obviously, urgent demands are urgent.

You know, financial issues, paying the bills, resolving conflicts, of course, all of this stuff is important.

But again, can it detract from our bigger life values and bigger life priorities? I think absolutely.

often the stuff that's really important tends to be the most emotionally difficult.

Again, thinking about Simon asking about his father, clearly this represented a big emotional challenge for him and i think it's that emotionally difficult stuff that's the stuff that we tend to put off when i'm working with clients often that's the stuff that we're trying to target because the emotionally difficult stuff is the stuff one puts off and therefore often the stuff where there's the most value to be gained when something important produces a lot of fear or anxiety or even maybe repressed anger for a client That's how I know this is maybe something we should really be looking at because it can be an area where a lot can be gained.