Category: Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT)

The Benefits of Everyday Mindfulness

Posted on by Rachel Collis
Everyday mindfulness is about maintaining an ‘open, accepting, present focus of attention during day-to-day life.’  There is increasing research suggesting that this stance is good for us:
This paper finds something interesting – being ‘good’ at formal mindfulness meditation doesn’t correlate with being mindful in everyday life.
I think this is very freeing. Although I know that mindfulness meditation is very good for me, I find it hard to find time for sitting meditation in my busy life. Everyday mindfulness means that each moment I can make a decision to be open and present. And it looks like that has some serious benefits.

Getting Clear About Values

Posted on by Rachel Collis

Having clarity about our values is really important.

Here are some tips Russ Harris gave at a recent Happiness Trap workshop. I found them really useful – I hope you do too!

1. Values are ‘desired qualities of behaviour’. They are about who we want to be in the world. What sort of employee, manager, co-worker, friend, partner etc.

2. Values are not goals. Goals can be achieved whereas values are moment to moment choices. In this moment now, I can be curious but I can never achieve ‘curious’.

3. Values are not rules.  They are qualities we choose freely. As soon as we start to feel we have to follow a value, it loses all it’s vitality. It stops being a value and starts to be a rule. In vital workplaces, people are happy to sign up for the organisational values. In workplaces lacking vitality, staff members follow the organisational ‘values’ because they will get into trouble if they don’t.

4. Values are about my behaviour not what I want to get from others.  In a recent moving post, Rob gave an example of a ‘value’ that lacked vitality:

‘I value my family, for the love and support they offer me.’

Rob wrote about the importance of exploring the feelings underneath this statement to get to something a little more vital. He made an important point. I would also like to add that this ‘value’ is actually a statement of a want or need. And mixing values and needs is problematic. What if my family get preoccupied with their own problems and don’t give me the support I need? Do I then stop valuing them? Whereas, if I can convert this statement into a quality of my own behaviour then it becomes completely in my control.  Each moment I can choose to act on the value or not. Perhaps it is:

‘I value my family. I show this by being affectionate and caring in my interactions with them’

This means that values can be incredibly empowering. They are about how I choose to behave. They aren’t dependent on how others respond to me.  I do need to add a rider here, values need to be flexible. The context determines which values I act upon in any given moment. With a bullying boss, I may choose to act on my values around assertiveness and justice. With an unhappy client, I may choose to act on my values around kindness and compassion. But because it is always about me, I have the power to choose.

Is This Really MY Value?

Posted on by Rachel Collis

When I run workshops on identifying and living values, someone usually asks me:

‘But how do I know if this is really MY value? Perhaps I have just been brought up to believe this is right?‘

This is an important question. When we live other people’s values, our lives tend to lack vitality. So how can we tell?  Here are some tests you can apply to your values, to see if they really are ‘yours’:

Think about a time when you have been living that value. Looking back, are you proud of how you behaved? For example, I am English and I have been raised to value politeness. Looking back, there are times when I feel good about being polite (Thanking a waitress. Giving someone my seat in a crowded bus) and others when I feel uncomfortable with my ‘polite’ behaviour (Failing to challenge homophobic comments. Not giving my real opinion about something important.) This exploration then helps me to see that I don’t really value politeness. I value being kind and thoughtful.  It also tells me that I value being authentic and standing up for my beliefs.

Use the perspective of time. If for the next 7 years you live this value, you let this value guide your behaviour, over and over again. Will it have supported you in being the person you really want to be? Or not? The perspective of time is helpful because of the risk/regret tipping point. We tend to make wiser decisions if we take a longer term view.

Give yourself permission. If I gave you an ironclad guarantee that everyone important to you would think well of you, whatever values you lived – would you still want to live this value? (This one was created by Russ Harris author of The Happiness Trap.) You might notice your mind getting hooked by this one ‘Yeh right! Like they would approve of me if I became an axe murderer’. If that happens, thank your mind, and see if you can do it anyway. It is just an activity! If the only thing holding you back from being an axe murderer is that your Mum would disapprove – I recommend therapy! However, if the only thing holding you back from living a rich and meaningful life is that your Mum would disapprove, I recommend this book.

What is Better than Work-Life Balance?

Posted on by Rachel Collis

A life dripping with meaning and purpose!

Work-life ‘balance’ is tough.  Does this sound familiar to you? At any moment it is important to me that I: hang out with my kids; spend time with friends; be with my partner; get some exercise; do some marketing; write a blog post; write the session I am to deliver next week; do some chores…..the list goes on and on.

Many of us worry that we are working too many hours. We know that this is a bad idea as it limits time to rest, play, exercise, connect with loved ones etc. But my observation is that just knowing we should work less and spend more time on our health and our relationships, doesn’t seem to lead to change.

For people to take action, a number of approaches seem to be helpful:

  • Exploring what it is about work that keeps us hooked in. For me, work is interesting, challenging and meaningful. Work often gets me into flow.  At work I get to use my strengths. Any meaningful ‘work-life balance’ plan needs to acknowledge this. It is important to recognise that sometimes it is hard to step away from the satisfaction that work can provide.
  • Looking at what painful thoughts or feelings are avoided by spending too much time at work. (‘I am not good enough, if I don’t work long hours I will disappoint my clients.’ If I leave work undone I feel anxious). Again, any meaningful plan must involve developing a willingness to experience those thoughts and feelings.
  • Identifying what is important enough to be willing to tackle this issue over and over. This is a moment to moment choice.  It will involve repeatedly getting it wrong. This issue is unlikely to disappear for many years (and when it does and we have retired, we will probably feel sad about it!).  This is where identifying values helps – The Brief Bull’s Eye activity can be a good place to start.
  • Getting better at mindfully and compassionately noticing both when I am living my values around this and also when I am a long way off. This is a wagon I fall off over and over again. And each time I notice I am out of kilter, I gently and compassionately readjust my behaviour.

When I am 80, I won’t judge my life by how many hours I did or didn’t work. I will judge it by whether my life had meaning and purpose. My hope is that if I keep making small moment to moment choices based on my values, then I will look back and feel pleased.

How Can Job Design Improve Workplace Health and Productivity?

Posted on by Dr Rob Archer

A great presentation by my old supervisor Frank Bond is published on the Institute of Employment Studies website.

What’s interesting about this kind of intervention is that when combined with ACT, the benefits of organisational redesign are also enhanced (Bond, Flaxman & Bunce, 2008).

What this study found was that increasing job control significantly improves mental health and absenteeism. But these effects were enhanced in people with higher levels of psychological flexibility.

Those with higher levels of psychological flexibility perceived that they had greater levels of job control as a result of the intervention, and this greater perception of control led these people to experience even greater improvements in mental health and absenteeism.

Psychological flexibility therefore allows people with more job control to better notice, where, when and the degree to which they have it, and therefore better recognise goal-related opportunities.

Brain: ‘Do More, Sleep Later!’

Posted on by Dr Rob Archer

Our brains evolved to scan the environment, seek out possible problems and solve them.  Our brains did not evolve to say: ‘tell you what, I’ve done enough analysing / thinking / scanning for today, I’m clocking out’.  And the brains that did do this, were soon weeded out.  Probably by lions.

So, the non-stop brain is highly adaptive for survival situations.

But what happens if, like now, the imperative is not survival but productivity, and where the information we receive is increasingly limitless?

Well, the response is the same.  We naturally keep scanning the environment, seeking out problems and attempting to explain or resolve them.  And of course, this takes time.

So fast forward to today and we are naturally feeling very busy.  We are trying to cram more in.  Not all of the side effects of this are negative of course, but I want to focus on just one that is.

I came across some Australian research recently which simply looked at the number of hours we work vs the number of hours we sleep.  Here is the result:

Now, I don’t know if this is a bad thing for productivity per se, but I suspect overall it is, especially if we are working in a highly distracted, disengaged way.  But I do know about some fairly conclusive research from the University of Warwick, which found that people who slept for less than 6 hours per night were almost 50% more likely to die from heart disease and 15% more likely to die from strokes.

Our minds naturally seek meaning and coherence from the world around us.  But our worlds have expanded and we have become addicted to activity.  As Ian Price argues, today we even get status from being busy.

So in an age of limitless information, our natural responses may no longer be adaptive.  We may need to re-think our thinking in order to thrive.