Working with ACT

On my career psychology blog I wrote about Ken Robinson’s excellent video about finding and connecting with your passion.  I love this talk, and his book ‘The Element’, but I think there are a number of problems with his viewpoint from the perspective of finding one’s passion at work.

Your passion does not always translate into a career.
As Seth Godin once argued, some things are best left as hobbies. For example, my early talent was in sport, but I could never make it professionally and turning that passion into something sport-related is not going to meet the other criteria I have for a job. A passion is one element of many that needs to be considered.

 Passion is learned
It’s rare for us to have a truly natural, God-given talent or passion. More often, the things for which we have a ‘natural’ capacity are in fact learned. If they are learned, then unless we have already learned them we will not know what they are. Therefore, searching for your passions is misleading – we should be creating passion.

Passion is contextual 
The things we love are loved for many different reasons, and for those in difficult jobs the things they love are loved because they are a release from their troubles. Very often, ‘what we love’ is simple behavioural reinforcement of the relief we experience when not working. That’s why so many of us want to run B&Bs or cafes.

The flipside of what we really value is what we really fear.
For example if I value counselling people, I will fear the consequences of failing to help them.  Following a passion often comes with higher states of anxiety and fear. In my experience it can also come with higher states of uncertainty. ‘Is this really my passion’?

Exploring passion is a fantastic exercise. But if we cling too rigidly to the idea of passion, then we risk getting stuck right where we are.

What’s the answer?
We need to hold all thoughts – what we love, what we’re like, what we need to do to succeed – lightly. Thoughts can help us and imprison us. Far better to focus on identifying broad, valued directions to move towards, and developing a willingness to keep moving towards these.

Following your passion means bargaining with life that you must or should feel passionate about something. When we subsequently do not feel passionate about something we conclude we have lost our way.  In contrast, following our values is a moment to moment choice, that is available to us all right now.

Rachel and I will shortly presenting at the World ACT conference in Parma, Italy.

We’re jolly excited by it and have had a lot of fun working out our messages, putting our slides together and generally telling each other how brilliant we are. (p.s. Rachel, you ARE brilliant).

To support our presentation, we’ve put together a number of supporting documents and handouts. These will be available for download on the ACBS website, but for now they are available here:

1. Presentation slides (and full deck is here)
2. Working With ACT Parma Session Handout 25th July 2011
3. ACT Presentations checklist
4. List of ACT in the workplace research
5. List of mindfulness in the workplace research
6. Using ACT in team facilitation
7. Career paralysis – using ACT in career decision making

In ACT, we try to undermine efforts to control our emotional or mental experience in exchange for focusing on valued directions and actions.

That means, we try to rebalance peoples’ focus on what they think and feel more towards what they actually do with their hands and feet. 

I say rebalance because there’s nothing wrong with mental experience.  It’s just that, humans being humans, we tend to experience more and more of life indirectly, or mindlessly, and this has the effect of robbing us of vitality and purpose.  And in the workplace, it tends to mean repeating the same old routine, even when that routine is ineffective.

Trouble is, ACT is counter-cultural. The culture says you do not need to feel bad, ever.  The culture says you can feel good if only you try harder, think better…or make the right choices.

If you doubt me, take a look at this:

“Believe deep down in your heart that you’re destined to do great things” ~Joe Paterno

This quote turned up in my twitter stream yesterday. It looks benign. It looks helpful. But it is seriously problematic.

Firstly, it implies that not only is it very important to get our ‘beliefs’ right but also that we can chose those beliefs. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is a con. We can try really hard to brain wash ourselves. We can repeat positive affirmations over and over. But deep down in our hearts most of us carry a secret  – that we aren’t good enough. That we are too…something. Too selfish, too weak, too loud, too quiet, too greedy, too boring….if you dig around inside yourself and sit with the discomfort for a moment, you will be able to add your own words.

The brainwashing of our society makes the burden of that secret even harder to bear. Because apparently what we should be doing is believing deep down in our hearts that we are destined for something great. So we have failed before we have even started.

The quote also implies that we are all destined to do great things (as long as we get our thoughts stacked up right). And this is madness. What most of us are destined for is a life of ordinariness – raising children, working for a living, loving our family and friends. I think that chasing success and greatness are actually distractions from the challenge of doing the ordinary stuff well. I suspect that we want that distraction because it is actually really hard to do that stuff well.

I think a better quote would go something like:

‘Even on the days when you worry that you are a fool and a failure; be kind and compassionate.  Come back to the present moment and do the next right thing. And let that be enough.’

I am paraphrasing Kelly Wilson here: In Appreciation of Crashing, Bliss Following, Hero’s Journeying, and Practice.

How about it? Will you join me in doing the next right thing and let that be enough?

In 2010, Diener et al did a huge survey  of 136,839 people (who were a representative sample of the population of the world). They found that income is only moderately linked to positive feelings (whether you smiled or laughed yesterday or felt feelings of enjoyment).

Positive feelings are much more influenced by ‘psychological need fulfilment’. Psychological need fulfilment is about whether you have family or friends you could count on in an emergency, and also, whether, when you think about yesterday, you:

• Felt you were treated with respect
• Learned something new
• Did what you do best, and,
• Chose how your time was spent.