Category: Psychological Flexibility

Psychological Flexibility and Identity: Lessons from Macbeth

Posted on by Rachel Collis

Watching Macbeth recently, it became clear that the plot turns on one line:

‘All Hail Macbeth! That shalt be King’

Three witches deliver a prophecy – and Macbeth is never the same man.

Their prophecy is certainly unsettling, planting a possibility Macbeth doesn’t seem to have considered up to this point. But in that moment, nothing has actually changed. Duncan is still king. Macbeth is still a respected general whose courage and loyalty have earned him admiration. If the prophecy is true, there seems little reason to do anything at all. In fact, the wisest response might have been to carry on becoming the sort of man who could one day make a good king — to learn from Duncan, continue serving him well, and trust that the future will unfold in its own time.

Instead, Macbeth becomes captivated by the future. He doesn’t simply hear the prophecy. He becomes fused with it.

Instead of holding it as one possible future, he begins to experience it as the truth about who he is.

Almost immediately, his attention shifts away from the life he is actually living and towards the role he now believes he is destined to inhabit. As the play unfolds, his choices become increasingly organised around that imagined identity. Each decision narrows the next, until actions that would once have been unthinkable begin to feel almost inevitable.

Here’s the strange part: Banquo hears a similar prophecy: ‘thou shalt get kings, though thou be none’ and responds very differently. He is unsettled, but he carries on with his life. The prophecy remains a possibility rather than becoming an identity. Shakespeare never tells us why these two men respond so differently, but I found myself wondering whether that difference lies at the heart of the tragedy.

Our minds are extraordinarily good at producing stories. Some are uncomfortable: I’m not a natural leader. I’m hopeless with conflict. Others are more flattering: I’m the person everyone depends on. I’m the one who always has the answers. We all have stories about ourselves, and that doesn’t have to be a problem. The trouble begins when we stop relating to these stories as possibilities and start treating them as certainties.

Once that happens, our behaviour starts to organise itself around the story. We notice different things. We interpret situations differently. Gradually, the range of choices available to us narrows, because we are no longer responding simply to what is in front of us — we are too focused on the person we believe ourselves to be.

The tragedy isn’t simply that Macbeth becomes ambitious. Ambition, on its own, is not especially dangerous. The tragedy begins when he becomes so certain about the future that he loses the freedom to respond wisely in the present. Rather than letting the future remain uncertain, he fixates on a particular outcome and bends his behaviour to fit it. Instead of asking, ‘What is the right thing to do here?‘ He increasingly asks, ‘What must I do to make the prophecy come true?‘ Those are very different questions — and the future stops being something that might unfold, and becomes something he feels compelled to force into being.

We can all get caught in a similar trap — thankfully, in much less dramatic ways. A leader becomes attached to being decisive, and stops noticing the moment when people actually needed more time to think. Another becomes attached to being the visionary, and stops being curious about the views of colleagues who ask difficult questions or point out practical risks. Those descriptions may once have reflected something true about them, but over time they can quietly harden into rules. Instead of responding to the situation in front of them, they start responding to the story they tell themselves about who they are.

Banquo shows more psychological flexibility than Macbeth. He can hold the prophecy lightly. He neither dismisses it nor becomes consumed by it. He lets uncertainty remain and stays present to what is actually happening. He continues to live according to his values rather than his ambition.

Shakespeare’s tragedy begins long before Duncan is murdered. It begins the moment Macbeth’s behaviour stops being guided by his values and starts organising itself around a future he thinks he must force into being.

So here’s the question worth sitting with: what’s the story you have about yourself that you have started treating as fact?

Where has “I’m the decisive one”, or “I’m the one everyone depends on”, stopped being a possibility and started making your decisions for you? Banquo’s answer wasn’t to ignore the prophecy. It was to keep living his life in line with his values. What would that look like for you?

The Leadership Lesson Hidden In BTS’s Grammy Protest

Posted on by Rachel Collis

A global pop group may seem like an unlikely case study in complexity leadership, but BTS’s Grammy protest shows something leaders often struggle to trust: influence does not come from controlling people’s responses. It comes from living your values so consistently that, when the unexpected happens, people already know how to act.

For years, I have taught leaders how to navigate complexity. One of the central challenges for leaders is to accept that they cannot control outcomes. They can, however, shape the conditions from which constructive responses become more likely. Often, this happens through the everyday choices leaders make: small, repeated actions that teach people what matters before a crisis or disruption arrives.

A few days ago, I watched that theory play out in real time, in a place I did not expect: the relationship between BTS and ARMY (the name BTS fans use for their collective community). What looked at first like a fandom response to an awards controversy became, to me, a vivid example of how culture carries leadership when direct instruction is absent. BTS had not simply prompted a fan reaction; over time, they had helped cultivate a shared culture of meaning, dignity and refusal to be diminished. So when the Grammys controversy arrived, ARMY’s response did not need to be scripted. It emerged from a culture already alive with those values.


The backstory

Recently, the National Recording Academy, which runs the Grammys, introduced a new Asian pop category. The decision was immediately contested. To many observers, it looked less like inclusion and more like a form of containment: a separate space for Asian artists rather than full recognition in the major categories. Associate Professor Jay Song, from the Australian National University, put the concern bluntly when she described the Grammys’ decision to create an “Asian” category as “pathetic and defeatist, and somewhat racist.” ABC News

For BTS fans the announcement landed on already raw ground. Many were still frustrated by the 2021 Grammys, when the show repeatedly teased BTS’s performance throughout the ceremony after the group had already lost its category. As Bryan Rolli wrote in Forbes, viewers complained that the Grammys had “incessantly” hyped the Korean pop septet’s performance, with many joking that the show was holding BTS and their fans hostage.

So when the new category was announced, the old language resurfaced. ARMY began talking again about the “Scammys.”

Then BTS announced that they would not submit their music for Grammy consideration. This was a big deal. BTS had spoken openly for years about their dream of earning a Grammy, and their current album, Arirang, seemed clearly in the running.

BTS explained the decision this way: ‘We hope our music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided by region or language,’ and then thanked ARMY for standing beside them.


What emerged

The initial response from ARMY was what you would expect: messages of support for BTS’s decision. But then something more interesting happened. Within twelve hours of BTS’s statement, Aliens — a BTS song that had not been released as a single and was not on the charts — reached number one on iTunes in 78 regions, including the US.

Aliens reflects BTS’s experience of alienation within the Western entertainment industry, their pride as Koreans, and their refusal to be boxed in by industry expectations.

Through thousands of actions and interactions across the community, Aliens emerged as ARMY’s symbolic response to BTS’s decision. Like many others, I read the announcement and then reached for the song. It seemed to hold something of how the moment felt. Then I saw on Reddit that Aliens was rising in the iTunes charts. It felt strangely moving to realise that so many fans across the world had responded in the same way, so I listened a few more times. Soon, Aliens had reached number one across multiple countries.

Across social media, ARMY expressed pride in the way the community had responded.

From a complexity leadership perspective, the important point is that BTS had not directed the response. It emerged.

Although the announcement was significant, ARMY’s response grew out of thousands of shared moments that BTS and ARMY had co-created across the previous thirteen years.

In that time, BTS have not simply built a fanbase; they have nurtured a shared way of making sense of the world.

Culture isn’t created by telling people what is important

Watching this unfold made me think about how leaders shape the conditions in which shared meaning develops.

Across years of shared experience, BTS have sung about identity, belonging, mental health, ambition, kindness, love and self-acceptance. They have spoken at the United Nations about the importance of expressing oneself, and at the White House about anti-Asian hate. They have also spent countless hours on camera sharing ordinary moments of life: exploring new countries, chatting, laughing, playing games, cooking, eating and even tidying up.

Gradually, a coherent way of being in the world became evident: a shared form of meaning-making. So, when something unexpected happened, people did not need to be told what it meant; they knew how to interpret it.

That, I think, is what made ARMY’s response to the Grammy announcement possible.


How Values Create Culture

It seems to me that the thread connecting BTS’s leadership with ARMY’s response was the consistent expression of sincerely held values.

This is where Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) has something important to contribute to complexity leadership.

In ACT, we spend a great deal of time helping leaders clarify what genuinely matters to them, because values shape behaviour.

Only sincerely held values can sustain the kind of behavioural consistency that, gradually, becomes a recognisable pattern.

Anyone can act compassionately for a while. Most of us can use the language of psychological safety in an important meeting or keynote. The real test comes in the everyday interactions of leadership. When we are tired or under pressure, our behaviour drifts. It either reflects what we truly value or becomes shaped by the need to avoid discomfort.

That is why sincerity matters. It makes sustained consistency possible.

If compassion genuinely matters to me, it will naturally find expression in how I listen, how I disagree, how I respond when I am frustrated, how I speak about people when they are not in the room, and in countless other moments that nobody notices individually.

Through repeated everyday moments, people experience those values as a recognisable way of being. That consistency becomes part of the shared culture. From there, coordinated, intelligent behaviour can emerge without anyone needing to prescribe it.

Perhaps this is one pathway by which complexity leadership can be both simpler and more demanding than we usually imagine.


Why this gives me hope

Watching Aliens climb the charts, I realised this was the first time I’d experienced that process from inside a system rather than observing it from the outside.

The feeling that surprised me was pride. Inadvertently, I had become part of a community that had responded to a principled act with another small, symbolic act that felt deeply aligned with a culture formed through years of shared experience.

This is what the BTS example makes tangible: Leaders cannot prescribe or predict every response, but they can cultivate the values, relationships and conditions that help people to make coherent decisions when no instruction exists.

What if the heart of complexity leadership is living your values sincerely and consistently enough that, when the unexpected happens, people already know how to respond?

Looking back, the remarkable thing was not simply that Aliens reached number one. The remarkable thing was that millions of people, spread across countries and platforms, independently recognised it as the right song.

There was no need for a coordinated campaign, or for BTS to tell ARMY how to respond. The judgement had already been distributed through the culture BTS and ARMY had built together across thirteen years of shared experience.

Maybe this is what complexity leadership asks of us: to make our values visible in the small, ordinary moments, so that when disruption comes, people have something to orient by.

For someone who spends her life helping leaders work in complexity, that felt less like fan behaviour and more like a leadership masterclass from ‘seven normal boys from Korea’


From ‘computer says no’, to ‘no, computer’

Posted on by Dr Rob Archer

There is a famous character in Little Britain called Carole Beer, a computer operator who famously responds to reasonable customer requests with the phrase:

“Computer says no”

This captured something funny and true about our relationship with computers…a tendency to blindly believe whatever they say, and to allow this to override our own intuition (and in Carole’s case, humanity).

I was reminded of this when I watched Mr Bates vs The Post Office, a brilliant series made by one of my clients, ITV.

The Post Office scandal is one of the biggest ever scandals in the UK, where hundreds of sub-postmasters were incorrectly convicted of theft and false accounting, based on the output of a new computer system.

When sub-postmasters recorded financial shortfalls in the new system, people believed the system rather than the humans. 

The blank, unquestioning faith in computers destroyed lives and led to despair, bankruptcy and suicide.

Only the scepticism and courage of a handful of people stood in the way. 

One, Alan Bates, refused to accept that the computer was correct and instead trusted his instincts that something was amiss with the computers. 

He was right.

Learning scepticism of thoughts

In ACT we are taught to treat our own thoughts and emotions with a degree of scepticism. 

We learn to see our thoughts not as ‘the truth’ but rather as hypotheses to be evaluated by whether they are helpful or not.

If we were to act as though these thoughts were true, what would that lead? 

Could other perspectives or explanations be possible?

It’s like the famous Emo Phillips line:

Learning this scepticism of our thoughts can be liberating, as we learn that we don’t have to do everything our minds tell us to do. 

Learning scepticism of technology

It occurs to me that we need to learn this scepticism when it comes to using technology.

We should be teaching people that outputs of technology are products of humanity, and so are flawed, limited, biased and frequently, plain wrong.

In this era of AI, algorithms, quantified selves and deep fakes, it is even more urgent to treat all outputs of technology with a degree of scepticism.

The alternative is a world where we place blind faith in technology, and where we no longer trust our own instincts. 

The very definition of inhumanity. I for one say ‘no’ to that.

The future of work: Why Psychological Flexibility is a Key Leadership Skill of the Future

Posted on by Dr Rob Archer

A few years ago in the UK, a Panorama investigation uncovered systematic abuse of elderly care home residents who were ­being routinely pushed about, belittled and ­humiliated by their so-called carers.

Worse, when whistleblowers drew attention to the abuse it was they themselves who were disciplined by senior management. Empathy for the victims seemed in short supply as it took a TV investigation for action to be taken. 

This is just one example in a long line of depressing stories about toxic leadership.  From MPs to journalists, and leaders in organisations from Big Tech to oil, the modern era seems one where empathy, care and values in leadership can be in short supply.

Values and leadership

Theorists like Bruce Avolio have argued that we need a more authentic form of leadership, which connects leaders to what really matters to them.  This acts as a kind of compass for leaders, which is especially useful in times of uncertainty (read; now).

Connecting leaders more powerfully with their values is also important because it has been shown to generate positive psychological outcomes in followers.

And yet…

There is one slight problem with these ‘authentic’ forms of leadership: they are bloody difficult to do.

Leadership values easily get derailed by circumstance and expedience as well as by existing organisational cultures.  It takes a special kind of courage to execute values in practice.

Yet most modern leadership theories (and training) deal with values as though all that remains after identifying them is to go off and do them.

Good luck with that.

Understanding our values is only half the battle.  Values have a flipside – an admission price.

Put simply, pursuing our values makes life psychologically harder, not easier.  We tend to hurt where we care.

It is much easier to avoid this psychological discomfort – something that psychologists call experiential avoidance.  However in the turning away from our discomfort, we often turn away from our values. 

This is why experiential avoidance is perhaps the biggest driver of substandard leadership behaviour (as well as in clinical contexts, poorer mental health). 

After all it’s far easier to avoid that awkward but important conversation than to have it.

how can we help our leaders live their values in practice?

Psychological flexibility is a concept which started in the clinical context (over 850 randomised control trials show its effectiveness in improving mental health) but is now gaining traction in organisations. 

Many of my organisational clients are introducing this training, not least because psychological flexibility is so practical, and especially effective with difficult situations involving ambiguity or uncertainty – what Todd Kashdan ‘calls the messiness of human life’. 

Psychological flexibility is important in leadership for three reasons:

  1. It helps people clarify and understand their values in practice, not just in theory.
  2. It helps people stay more aware of the present moment, which means that they are more likely to notice opportunities to be empathetic and engaged with other people.
  3. It gives leaders the skills to move towards their values and deal with the psychological cost of doing so.  By building willingness to have difficult thoughts and emotions, it reduces the natural human tendency to avoid them. 

Too many leadership training programmes focus on values and forget to train people in the skills that help them live their values. 

Yet unless we do this, leaders will continue to run from the pain that empathy brings them.

The Marginal Gains Handbook – Practical ideas to survive and thrive in the age of Coronavirus

Posted on by Dr Rob Archer

We are delighted to release VERSION 2 of this free, practical guide of evidence-based ways to survive and thrive in the age of Coronavirus.

DOWNLOAD HERE

This version includes improved ideas for thriving in the age of Coronavirus as well as a new section on parenting in lockdown.

This is from a CEO who’s been using it with his organisation:

Your Covid Marginal Gains booklet has been a great source to help me during this once in a life time roller coaster. It deals with so many layers that we are all going through and gave me confidence in what I was telling my team, give me solace in what I was feeling, and hope for what despair we all go through.

Continue reading “The Marginal Gains Handbook – Practical ideas to survive and thrive in the age of Coronavirus” →

A Guide to Lockdown for Other Parents, from a True Parenting Expert

Posted on by Dr Rob Archer

Anyone who knows me or my children will know that I am definitely both a relationship and parenting expert.

For example, before I proposed to my wife I felt I need to list all of my imperfections (which took a while), and only this morning I dealt with my two-year old’s tantrum by swearing at the top of my voice and then storming out of the room.

I’m available for paid consultancy.

However I am a reasonably enthusiastic consumer of parenting strategies and have lots of clients who are asking for ideas to help deal with the pressure of lockdown.

So here are some ideas which I like, even if the implementation for me is still a ‘work in progress’.

If you have any of your own (especially ACT-consistent ideas and resources) please let me know in the comments below.

The Executive Summary

For all you lazy layabouts who have no time to read another long winded concise and excellent post written by me, let me save you the trouble by drawing your attention to The Blessing of a Skinned Knee in which Wendy Mogel rejects the idea of making things easy for our children, of praising them constantly, of them to be somehow unique and ‘special’ – all of which loads pressure on to both them and us:

In order to flourish, children don’t need the best of everything. Instead they simply need what is good enough. This may include good enough (but dull) homework assignments, good enough (but uninspired) teachers, good enough and good enough (although bossy and shallow) friends.

Consider that “good enough” can often be best for your child, because when life is mostly ordinary…your child won’t end up with expectations that can’t be met on this worldly plane.

Or how about this little beauty:

My advice to parents is to tolerate some low-quality time. Have a little less ambition for yourself and your children. Plan nothing—disappoint your kids with your essential mediocrity and the dullness of your home. Just hang around your children and wait to see what develops.

Disappoint my kids with my essential mediocrity?

Now THAT is a parenting approach I can get behind!

Nothing I’ve read comes close to relieving the pressure on myself and my children during lockdown than this, so I urge you to read the full summary here.

Here are some more ideas:

1. You need respite

It doesn’t matter what you are doing, you need a break from it.  In a study mentioned on the excellent Psychologists off the Clock podcast, soliders in the military had the lowest rates of burnout even when the break was going to war.  In other words, what we need is a break from what we are doing.  Do anything for too long with too little respite and we start to mentally fray.  And here’s a powerful image to illustrate this point:

Ideas for implementing breaks will obviously vary but here are a few:

  • Enlist others. If there is another adult in your house, work in shifts to cover short breaks. If not try to enlist a Granny to read a story or an Uncle to make your kids laugh, even 20 minutes’ respite can work wonders.
  • Manage your energy. When you have brief periods when the kids are occupied, do your low-attention tasks (like admin, most emails). When you get a break from the kids,  tackle high-attention tasks (like problem solving).  Or just take a break and do nothing.  You decide, but do one or the other.
  • Deadlines work. For parents and children alike.
  • Turn housework into a game. The tidy up song is good for this, but giving kids proper, grown up tasks to do on a regular basis (and rewarding this) can be an effective way of lightening the load.
  • Routines are powerful because they reduce fatigue.  So try to at least create a ‘shape’ to the day that everyone understands. Things like bedtime stories, a specific time for homework, meals; all of this will reduce your levels of shatteredness (technical term).

2. Beware perfectionism

We all need to lower our expectations a bit, particularly in terms of how we should be feeling and what we should be achieving.  As Brene Brown says:

When we hit that wall, sometimes courage looks like scaling it or breaking through it. AND, sometimes courage is building a fort against the wall and taking a nap.

  • Set small targets. You are living in a GLOBAL PANDEMIC.  Survival is good!  Anything extra is a distinct bonus.  For example, today I changed my pants.
  • Find a way of noting all your achievements (however big or small) and create meaningful ways to celebrate them. 
  • You cannot do it all. Think back a few months and consider what you would have advised other working parents to do during A GLOBAL PANDEMIC?  What springs to mind?  Let me guess, is it ‘you should definitely seize the chance to teach little Ernesto Mandarin?’
  • Remember the sound of learning.  From the Psychologists Off the Clock podcast, a story about a music teacher who put sign outside the music room that said: ‘This is the sound of learning’.  In other words, learning is often not very smooth or beautiful, so don’t expect things to feel or sound great along the way.

3. Reframe this as a chance for your kids to learn

Before the pandemic I feel like the biggest challenge my 2 year old had faced was that time when I cut his toast in squares, when in fact he wanted soldiers.

In other words, the biggest risk for many (middle class) children is that life was too easy.  Well now we can put that right!

After all, we don’t build a child’s resilience by making life perfect for them.

Let’s also remember that when we step back it gives our kids the opportunity to step up.

If we expect them to do nothing they will do precisely that.  But if we expect them to step up they will do that too, and this has the bonus of building resilience and confidence.

4. Stay present

One of the reasons that burnout occurs is because we are not mentally in the present very often.

By constantly worrying about the future and ruminating over the past, we drain ourselves of energy and deprive outselves of the little fragments of joy which still appear with children in lockdown, especially if we look for them (the joy not the children).

And of course our kids notice when we’re not paying attention, when we’re scrolling on phones, when our laugh is hollow or a few milliseconds too late.  Under what heading will they file that experience away?

So what percentage of the time are you present?

When I applied this question to myself I noticed that I’m often not very present and that’s usually because I was trying to avoid some kind of emotion (something called experiential avoidance).

Here is an example:

Before bed time we have the habit of watching a few short videos with both kids sitting on my knee.  The videos are really tedious, so I often found myself scrolling on my phone.  This has the function of relieving the boredom, but it was not exactly building joy or connection.

So now I put my phone down and try to get present to my children’s reaction.  I smell their hair, fresh from bath time, and then suddenly this evening I noticed this:

I know this is a tiny example, but how much will I crave just one more of these moments once they are gone?

5. Create buffer zones

For me one of the toughest aspects of parenting in lockdown is that the small buffers between work and family interaction are squezed.

For example – and you must understand this is purely hypothetical – if I have a difficult work call and then walk out of my office straight into my 2 year old, who is asking me to be a horse, but

“NOT THAT TYPE OF HORSE DADDY NO – NOT THAT HORSE!”

Then it is fair to say that – hypothetically – I often don’t handle it well.

There is an emotional hangover with all things, and if we remove natural buffers it is inevitable that things start to go less well.  At least, that’s what I’m telling my wife.

The things that work for me are:

  • Trying to build a minute or two buffer before leaving the office, and tap into the type of Dad I want to be when I re-engage (i.e. loving, active, joyful); and
  • Giving myself a time out if I get hijacked by my own emotions.

6. Connecting to values

Notice those values above: loving, active, joyful.

When I first had children I was terrified – convinced – that I would not know how to do parenting.  I felt like I had no ‘Dad’ template and would really mess it up.

But actually the thing that has helped me the most is to orientate myself, again and again, to a set of values that I try to model.

It is the most enormously helpful idea for lots of reasons.  Firstly, I find it impossible to eradicate the bad bits of my parenting.  I’m impatient and swear too much, for example.  But I am able to put positive stuff in there too.  I am able to go downstairs, right this moment, and chase my children round the garden pretending to be the Coronavirus.  I can tickle them until the 2 year old says

“Dop Daddy, dop!”

This moment can be all about crisis parenting, or it could be about connecting enough of these tiny moment so it becomes about something more meaningful or even joyful.

By connecting to our values, again and again, we can transform the pressure cooker of lockdown into an opportunity to connect with what matters to us most.

Further resources from actual experts

I’ve been listening to podcasts on the topic and can recommend a few here now – please see below and please let me know any that you’d add.

Books and resources for children:

The ACT Approach to Handling Anxiety Like a Human Being

Posted on by Dr Rob Archer

Everyone is anxious right now and frankly, why wouldn’t we be?

But it’s worth remembering that humans are constantly anxious.  Here are five reasons why, followed by five ACT-based techniques to handle anxiety like a human being.

Five Reasons Why We’re Constantly Anxious

1. We’re programmed to see the bear

Imagine your ancestor saw a strange blob on the horizon and turned to a friend and said…

‘Is that a bear or a blueberry bush’?

The optimistic friend said ‘it’s a blueberry bush’ and skipped merrily over, but your anxious ancestor hung back, fearing a bear.

Even if the optimistic friend was right and got a nice lunch, it would have only taken one error for them to be a nice lunch.  Meanwhile your pessimist ancestor missed lunch, but lived to pass on their anxious genes (to you)…

2. The double-edged sword

Humanity’s special weapon doesn’t look like much, but since developing language we have been able to communicate risks verbally and then plan ahead to solve them.

This is an incredible tool for solving problems but it is a double-edge sword, which means we can create anxiety at any given moment.

As a result we are the only species that can sit on a beach in Tahiti with a fruity cocktail and STILL be anxious that maybe we drink too much, or that our choice of hatwear is a little last season.

3. Media and social media

I just did an experiment – by looking at the news for 1 minute I found stories not only about Corona, but also animal cruelty, climate change and the certainty of global recession.

We have created a world with unparalleled riches, but also unlimited access to worrying news.  So remember the golden law…

4. Uncertainty

Many of us can handle bad news if we know how to respond to it.  But uncertainty – will I catch this virus, will my family – is especially anxiety producing because the fact is WE DON’T KNOW.  And your mind would prefer anything to not knowing.

However, this is where the story gets really anxiety inducing interesting.

5. We try to control it

Despite anxiety being an inevitable part of being human, many people see it as something to be avoided or controlled.

The problem is, we can’t avoid or control anxiety.

Imagine I put a gun to your head and tell you not to feel anxious.  Could you do it?

By seeing anxiety as something we can control or need to avoid, we set ourselves up to become anxious about our anxiety.

This leads us to try and avoid anxiety by avoiding the things that make us feel anxious.

If this becomes a behavioural pattern it means we start organising our lives around avoiding anxiety rather than the things that make life meaningful.  This is called experiential avoidance, – a significant factor in many forms of mental distress because it both diminishes our lives in the short term and makes anxiety worse in the long term.

Five ACT-Based Ideas to Deal with Anxiety

1. Make a plan

Worrying about the future is not the same as deciding what to do.  And while your plan isn’t going to be perfect, you are never helpless.

So work out what’s in your control and then make a plan to manage the risks as you see them.  Inform yourself of the facts, but no more.  Try to limit exposure to armchair experts on social media.

That said, however good your plan is don’t expect it to free you from anxiety (because that’s impossible).  So you will need to learn how to…

2. Drop the rope

The problem with anxiety is that the harder we try to avoid it, the stronger it becomes.

It’s like being in a tug of war with some huge monster.  You are pulling with all your might because in between you and the monster is a huge, bottomless pit.  You are spending all your energy pulling because you are sure if you lose you’ll be pulled into the pit.

But the harder you pull the harder the monster pulls.

What’s the best thing to do?

Well your mind will tell you to keep pulling harder.  But the monster never seems to tire.

What’s the alternative?  DROP THE ROPE!

3. Pivot Towards What Matters

Anxiety is the price we pay for caring about something.  This means we can pivot our attention to focus on whatever that thing is for you.

Mark Freeman talks here about pivoting away from the fear that we are going to lose a family member.

My anxiety mostly relates to my young family, because I want to protect and care for them.  I realise I can’t protect them completely which makes me anxious, but I can do some things.  My pivots include challenging cars which speed past our house (we live opposite a playground and yes, I literally run after them), lobbying the council to install speed bumps (they did), and buying this handsome sign.

If you feel anxious about Corona Virus, identify what matters to you in this situation.  How could you pivot towards that, and do something meaningful in the service of what really matters to you, even when you’re feeling anxious?

4. Practice Self-Compassion

In this video Steve Hayes explains a great exercise to view anxiety from a stance of self-compassion.  Self-compassion is a key technique for depowering anxiety and changing our relationship to it:

5. Further resources

My favourite resources on this topic are:

For families

  • A new book for children on Coronavirus written by Elizabeth Jenner, Kate Wilson & Nia Roberts (and illustrated by Alex Schleffer of Gruffalo fame)
  • Heroes in your home – this is a great article written by some top psychologists about evidence-based ways to promote cooperation in the home, ensure safety, and most importantly, have fun as a family.  Heroes in Your Home BRIEF (002)

I will update this list regularly – feel free to suggest ideas in the comments.

What is Meaning in Work?

Posted on by Dr Rob Archer

When I retrained to become a psychologist, my MSc research centred on meaning in work.  That’s because my work to date (as a management consultant) had been pretty meaningless, which left me pretty depressed, but I didn’t really know what to do about it.

So my research questions were:

  1. What is meaning in work?
  2. How can I find it?

I wanted to create a model of meaning in work to help people find it, but first I needed to understand…

What exactly is meaning in work?

There’s debate in academic circles about what meaning is, and I spent months sifting through these definitions.  Eventually I felt the clearest description was in a brilliant paper by Eric Klinger, who argued (1998) that meaning can be seen from an evolutionary perspective.

Think about our ancestors, whose survival focused on successfully finding food and avoiding woolly mammoths in harsh and varied terrain.  We are the children of brilliant problem solvers, who would move and adapt to new challenges every day.  As a species we therefore survived by being able to respond to our environment and meet a succession of context-dependent goals.

The cognitive processes we developed to help us do that (i.e. our thoughts and emotions), all evolved to help us understand the potential dangers and opportunities that came our way during the pursuit of our goals.  It is understanding that enables action to be taken in the pursuit of goals, and successful pursuit of goals = survival.

Klinger therefore argued that the role of human cognition is to manage the process of comprehension, working to sort out

“the ambiguous or confusing stimuli…until they can be dismissed as irrelevant, or channelled into the emotional / motivation / action systems” (p31).

This means that at the heart of the human operating system is an imperative to UNDERSTAND the stimuli reaching us and to place it in context.

This is a serious business, too.

Consider that without understanding we feel uneasy (it’s not for nothing our greatest fear is the fear of the unknown).

Conversely, understanding something brings relief.  Think about the ‘aha!’ moment when you solve a problem. It is pleasant because this is a relief from the burden of not knowing.  Significantly, this holds even if the news is bad – think  about how a diagnosis of a mystery illness often brings relief.

Meaning is essential because it means we are able to act with purpose and agency.   Without it we are unsure and lack direction.

Meaning is therefore comprehension, whether that be for survival (understanding the meaning of a fresh Tiger paw print), or symbolic (like comprehending a word in a sentence) or the existential (like the meaning of one’s work).

As Baumeister (1991) argued, meaning in work and life is a process of sense-making which connects an individual’s existence to a wider understanding of the world.  When we have meaning in work we understand ourselves and our work in context.  Which feels good.

Without meaning our work feels as though it doesn’t make sense, we feel less agency over our place in the world and a sense of unease grows. A pretty fair summation of my time as a management consultant!

Conversely when we understand ourselves and our place in the world, meaning grows.  We know how to relate to the stimuli reaching us and we feel more agency over it.  Whilst we still experience difficult emotions, we understand why we are experiencing them and that they are in the service of something meaningful…

And that’s a fair summation of my life as a psychologist.

Sources:

Klinger, E., (1998). The Search for Meaning in Evolutionary Perspective and its Clinical Implications. In The Human Quest for Meaning, Wong, P., & Fry, P., Eds. Lawrence Erlbaum, New Jersey.

Baumeister, R. F. (1991). Meanings of Life. New York.

Fighting for what matters: what I really learned about completing a doctorate whilst raising a family and running a business

Posted on by Dr Rob Archer

So I did want to reflect on what I learned during these past few years because so much of it is Working with ACT-relevant.

But I am wary of writing one of ‘those‘ type of posts, or one of those ‘it was tough but I am so glad I did it!’ things.

Fact is, I am not sure I am glad I did it.  But I’ve done it now, so here’s what I think I learned:

1. Make every session count

If there was one principle that stood out, it was this.  Every time I sat down to work, I focused on taking one step forward.

Sometimes this was impossible, or I even went backwards (the climbing a mountain metaphor helps here – i.e. sometimes you have to go down the mountain to go up again).  However, by accepting the tiniest step as progress, including correcting one typo, I can’t think of a single instance where this didn’t work.

And one day, I woke up and it was done.

2. Create deadlines

There were days when I felt totally overwhelmed and my mind would wander to all the things I wasn’t doing / couldn’t do. If this resonates you need deadlines.  The pomodoro technique is good for this.  So are children.

I would often work during my children’s nap times, which created an exquisite sense of urgency.  Sometimes – agh! – one of them would wake before I’d made any progress.  To my surprise I was still always able to find one thing to do before running off to the bedroom.  It’s amazing how deadlines focus the mind, and a crying child is a very good deadline*.

* My children are for rent on an hourly basis.

3. Intensity beats time

I placed intensity front and centre of my strategy.  This led me to do seemingly strange things, like working for around 60-90 minutes on the Doctorate even when I had more time available and getting involved in kanban, which sounds like is a cult.  I also learned the value of 5-minute runs as a way of breaking things up and thinking things through.

I had ‘TAKE A BREAK’ stuck to my laptop and made it a rule never to stare at my screen defeated.

4. Remember it’s a choice

One especially dismal day I shared my pain on Twitter and got some lovely responses – ‘hang in there’, ‘keep going’ etc, which I was grateful for.

But Mat Rawsthorne said ‘give it up and walk away if you choose’, which felt liberating.

‘Do I choose to do this today?’ was a far more helpful question than ‘Do I feel like doing this today?’, because the answer to the first question was generally yes, and the answer to the second was always no.

5. Ditch social media

Although Twitter etc can be helpful (see above), in general it is DEADLY* to a deep work project such as doctoral research.  I basically had to cut it out altogether.  What’s interesting is I grew to dislike Twitter much more during this time, as I came to see it for what it is.  And if I can’t convince you, let Cal Newport have a go:

* not in the Irish sense

6. I had a lot of help

The fact is I couldn’t have done it without a supportive partner, and I had one who protected my sleep, too.

I literally fantasised about the words of thanks that I would give my family once it was all over, so here they are:

 

So each one of these principles of committed action really made a difference.  But to be honest, they only tell half the story…

Going where you mind says you cannot go

“Where does your mind say we cannot go?”

Steve Hayes, A Liberated Mind

I completed my final write-up in a long, hot London summer with my little children playing in a playground opposite my office.

I can still see them; 2-year-old Orla pretending to be an airplane whilst bouncing on a trampoline.  And tiny Sam, toddling and falling about like a gorgeous, drunken penguin.

Orla
Would you rather eat ice cream with her or do linear regression in a stuffy office?

I have a place in me, perhaps stored in my body more than in words, that remembers the feeling of my own Dad vanishing at about the same age. It’s like a feeling of permanent emptiness where a hug should be.

And so of course that summer it felt like I was doing something similar to my children.  Almost at a cellular level, I had a feeling that I’d been here before somehow, and that this struggle inside my office was not where I should be.

At the time, I wrote:

The brutal truth is, there won’t be another summer where my daughter pretends to be Mo Salah or when my little boy is learning to run and talk.

There won’t be another summer when, at bath time, my babies scream with laughter when I shower their toes.

And there won’t be too many summers when they both shout ‘DAD!’ and jump into my arms when they see me.

In 10 years’ time what will I give to have even one of these moments back?

It’s fair to say I had some low points.

And this led to the final thing I learned.

7. Hard choices need self-compassion

My heroes in life aren’t Buddhist monks who meditate on hilltops or Silicon Valley CEOs whose incredible ‘life hacks’ spare them the need to make difficult choices.

My heroes are the ones who struggle and fight for something, and who live all of their values fiercely and imperfectly.

I care for my children, but I care for evidence-based psychology, too.  To fight for only one of these would be a shallow victory.  Yet to fight for both meant the fight of my life.

So what will I want my children to do when faced with a similar situation? 

The same.

I want them to care for their kids of course, but I want them to struggle and fight for what matters to them too.  Otherwise, what’s the point?

From this perspective – and only from here – I reach a place where I can finally grant myself some compassion.

Because this was the summer where I stared at one of my most powerful demons and didn’t flinch.

And this was the summer my kids saw their Dad doing that.

And maybe this was the summer – who knows? – that their choices expanded a little.

And many summers from now, when the time comes for them to fight for something, maybe they will have a feeling stored in a place beyond words that they have been here before, and that this struggle is where they are meant to be.

Everything is Dysfunctional: Applying Psychological Flexibility to Organisations

Posted on by Dr Rob Archer

“But every organisation is dysfunctional!”

I was describing the frustrations of running a small business to a friend who works in venture capital.  In my mind I felt like the kind of dysfunction I was describing would shock her.  Far from it – she seemed surprised at my surprise.

What’s odd is that as an ACT practitioner I am used to the idea that our own thoughts and emotions can frequently be unhelpful.  Yet somehow I’d allowed myself to believe that organisations – built by dysfunctional humans like me – should be run in an entirely functional way.

The Dysfunctional Beatles

In early 1967 the greatest band in the world were in trouble.

John was behaving even more cynically than ever, only really coming alive when working on his own material.  His relationship with Yoko was also causing resentment among the others.

Ringo was convinced he was surplus to requirements and considering his options in other careers – photography and furniture making.  George was also feeling cut adrift, thinking that the others were deliberately excluding his songs.

Whilst Paul may have appeared the happiest, he was himself only a couple of years from his own breakdown.  The author of Yesterday aged 26, was beginning to doubt himself.  The Beatles were pulling apart.

The Dysfunctions of World-Leading Companies

In 1982 Tom Peters wrote his seminal book In Search of Excellence, looking at some of the best run companies in the world.

It’s a compelling read, until you realise that nearly all of the companies chosen as ‘excellent’ have since either underperformed or gone bust (think Atari).

Phil Rosenzweigh called this the “delusion of connecting the winning dots“.  Yet we still do this.  We pick the most successful organisations and then buy the myth that their success is down to their culture and leadership.  Think Laszlo Bock from Google, pretending their success is to do with culture; Sheryl Sandberg lecturing on work-life balance, or anything to do with Steve Jobs.

Yet look harder and it is easy to find stories of Google’s dysfunctional working practices (actually, this article did not appear in Google searches but did appear on Duck Duck Go).  Facebook’s total lack of work life balance for its actual employees.  Steve Jobs being an unbelievable jerk.

Take a look at this clip of Microsoft in 1995 and ask yourself if that can possibly have been a functional place to work:

Think of investment banks, family-run businesses, the NHS…pretty much everything is dysfunctional.

It’s funny how the idea of acceptance – particularly accepting my own difficult thought and emotions  – has freed me so much in my own personal life, yet when it comes to the places I work I expect organisations to work exactly as I think they should.

I’m not suggesting that working in dysfunctional organisations is easy or that we shouldn’t try to fix them.  But I am suggesting it’s not the only way of assessing whether our jobs or careers are right for us.

The Dysfunctional Beatles (2)

In May 1967, amidst their heightening dysfunctions, the Beatles released Sgt Pepper. 

It was a staggering achievement, made all the more remarkable by releasing Stawberry Fields and Penny Lane earlier that year, neither of which made the album.

The Beatles were overflowing with creativity and inspiration whilst growing increasingly frustrated with each other.

The following year, with relations at an all-time low, they released the incredible White Album, having earlier released Hey Jude, which was also not on the album (!)

Finally, in 1969 they released the mighty Abbey Road and in the death throes of the band, Let it Be (which was released after they had split).

In other words, some of the greatest music of all time was recorded amidst some of the most stressful and dysfunctional working relationships.

It’s the same everywhere.  Dysfunctional companies run the world; they power things, finance things, change the way we work and live, and in the case of the NHS they save lives and give dignity to people when they need it most.

What Are You Building Amidst Dysfunction?

In ACT, one of the key ideas is that we can move towards our values and goals in the presence of difficult thoughts and emotions.

The test with our own careers, therefore, is not just how dysfunctional something feels, or how frustrating your colleagues are, or how undervalued you feel.  (Of course, this is not an argument to just put up with these things – that is not what acceptance means).  It is just not the sole measure.

The other part of the equation is what are you building in return?  How often do you get to move towards your most important values and goals, amidst the dysfunction?

When I was a management consultant the answer to that was ‘almost never’.  But as a psychologist, it is every day – my most meaningful contribution to the world ever.

In the same way that mental health is more than an absence of disease, your job’s worth is more than an absence of dysfunction.

Instead of buying the story that dysfunctional organisations leave us helpless to make a difference, we can learn to hold our stories lightly, and find room to create something of value, amidst the dysfunction.