How to Evolve a More Vital Life

Posted on by Rachel Collis

If you are reading this blog, you are probably the sort of person who wants a life that is vital.  According to Steve Hayes, ACT helps us to evolve more vitality by:

1.Undermining Repertoire Narrowing Processes 

What this means in everyday language is that when we are in the grip of strong emotions or have been hooked by painful thoughts our behaviour tends to narrow down and become inflexible. ACT aims to lessen this tendency so that we can choose our behaviour from a broader range of options. This means we can stop doing what we have always done (which tends to get us what we have always got) and start choosing our behaviour based on the circumstances and our values.

2. Situating action in the conscious present

Instead of our actions being triggered by memories of the past, or fears about the future, or inflexible rules; we observe the world as it is and take action based on this connection to the present moment.

3. Choosing your selection criteria

Rather than accepting the criteria the world has given us for what constitutes success or ‘correct’ behaviour, we choose our own values and use these values to guide our actions.

And so we evolve a more vital life

Flexibly choosing our behaviour based on both our values and what the situation offers, enables us to create more richness and vitality in our lives.

The research is growing that the approaches taken by ACT are successful in achieving these outcomes, which is rather cool for those of us interested in empirically supported interventions.

Self Compassion and Stress at Work

Posted on by Rachel Collis

Next week I am giving a speech at the Queensland Nurse Leaders Conference on the topic of ‘Stressed Organisations, Distressed Staff’. One of the ideas I will be exploring is self-compassion. The evidence suggests that self-compassion can help when we are experiencing difficulty. Here is a table summarising some of the research on self-compassion and comparing it to self-esteem:

High Self Esteem but Low Self Compassion High Self Compassion
Lower depression and anxiety c.f. low self esteem Less painful emotions when distressing events occur
Defensive in the face of negative feedback React to negative feedback with more acceptance and with an orientation towards growth and the development of mastery
Fail to learn from mistakes More willing to make needed changes
May not always take responsibility for their actions Take more responsibility for their actions
Can be narcissistic More compassionate to others
Associated with more wisdom, more curiosity, more initiative, higher scores on agreeableness

One approach to increasing self-compassion is to imagine someone who is very compassionate – it could be someone you know, someone famous or an imaginary person – and then consider what they would want to communicate to you when you make mistakes or feel disappointed in yourself.

Handling Painful Thoughts and Feelings

Posted on by Rachel Collis

If we are to live rich and meaningful lives, painful thoughts and feelings are going to come along for the ride. If I love with all my heart, at some point I will get hurt. If I value doing a great job at work, sometimes I will make mistakes and look like a fool. If I want to really connect with someone, I have to show vulnerability.

So, what is the best approach to handling the painful thoughts and feelings that are an inevitable part of life? Russ Harris suggests letting go of strategies that don’t work in the long run, such as:

  • Ignoring your painful thoughts and feelings
  • Believing your painful thoughts and feelings
  • Not believing your painful thoughts and feelings
  • Resisting your painful thoughts and feelings
  • Letting your painful thoughts and feelings control your behaviour.

Instead, Steve Hayes suggests:

  • Honouring your pain the way you would honour a friend by listening
  • Walking with your pain the way you would walk with a crying baby
  • Carrying your pain the way you carry a picture in your wallet

Could you show yourself that compassion when you are in pain?

Why Values in the Workplace Don’t Work

Posted on by Dr Rob Archer

Since identifying and following my own values my life has changed immeasurably.  Not happier necessarily, but I am now truly engaged in what I do and experience a lot of meaning.  If you asked me today whether this life is what I would choose I would not hesitate to say yes.  6 years ago, I would have been stunned into silence.

My experience of values in the workplace is very different.  The usual approach is for a management team to identify the organisation’s values in a darkened room or at a ‘team away day’ in a hotel just off the M4.  Then, the values are declared via an exciting combination of communications experts, office posters and mouse mats.

What follows is the ’embedding’ phase.  This means identifying what behaviours the organisation wants to see to demonstrate each value.  Very often they will identify what ‘good’ behaviour looks like and what ‘excellent’ behaviour looks like.  These behaviours will be embedded into competency frameworks, which are then used to assess each member of staff at appraisal time, and help the organisation find the right cultural ‘fit’ with new recruits.

That, in my experience, is best practice.  And it is utterly useless.

The result is usually a sense of incomprehension (at best), and at worst cynicism.  It leads not to engagement, but a sort of dull compliance, coupled with an acute sense of injustice if a manager breaches the behavioural code.

From an ACT perspective, this is easily understood.  Because these are not values being implemented, but what is known as pliance.   Pliance is where…”wanting to be good or please others dominates over one’s direct, personal experience of what works.”  Pliance (taken from the word compliance) is therefore a form of rule-governed behaviour which does not take into account context.

Rule governed behaviour may be useful in some contexts, but it also leads to a kind of insensitivity to the environment which can harm performance and rob the individual of a sense of autonomy and control – both critical to engagement.

Put simply, values work in organisations is usually not values work.  It is a form of managerial control masquerading as values work.  It is more accurately described as pliance, or rule-governed behaviour, which leads to disengagement and an insensitivity to one’s environment.  Both of these will harm performance and wellbeing.

And both can be avoided.

Influencing our Thoughts and Feelings

Posted on by Rachel Collis

We all have times when we want to get rid of painful thoughts or feelings. It would be odd if we didn’t – pain is unpleasant and wanting it to go away is sensible.

What strategies have you tried to get rid of unpleasant thoughts and feelings?

You might have tried:

  • Distracting yourself (focussing on something else or doing something useful);
  • Soothing yourself  (taking some slow, deep breaths; eating some chocolate; finding someone to reassure you)
  • Challenging the thoughts (Is it really true that I am lazy?)
  • Problem solving the issue that caused the pain (I am anxious because I am running late delivering this project so I will come up with a workable plan to get it finished on time).

Often these strategies are helpful BUT (yes, it is a big but!) they don’t work all the time and the times when they don’t work are often when we are most distressed. At those times nothing seems to stop our mind thrashing about. When we engage with those thoughts and try to make our mind see sense, we often actually increase how hooked we are. When we try to hold back or change the direction of the waves of emotional pain that are buffeting us, we just get exhausted.

The A in ACT stands for Acceptance. One of the things we may need to accept is that although we may be able to influence our thoughts and feelings, we can’t control them and sometimes in trying to control them we get actually get more hooked.

So what could we do instead? The best option seems to be to use mindfulness:

  • Observing our thoughts and feelings with curiosity and compassion
  • Allowing our feelings to rise and fall
  • Letting our thoughts come and go
  • Bringing our attention to this moment now – what we are experiencing through our five senses
  • Connecting with our values – Who do I really want to be? And then,
  • Taking action based on our values.

Stop Wasting Time

Posted on by Rachel Collis

Our lives are terribly short and we are fragile creatures. Wasting the time we have seems wrong. But how do we decide whether we are wasting time?

I watched the movie ‘Click‘ the other night. Not a movie I would recommend to you but at it’s heart was a really good point. It is easy for us to live our lives wishing we could fast forward through the boring bits and the painful bits. But hidden in those moments is the potential for meaning and purpose.

Hank Robb recently suggested writing down every evening what you did that day that was, in your opinion, time ‘well spent’ and also what you will do tomorrow that will make that day worthwhile. This is a wonderful suggestion.

I would like to add some ‘Click’ inspired questions:

1. As you decide whether something is or is not time ‘well spent’ think about the internal rules you use to discriminate between wasted time and time well spent. We often make the same mistake as Adam Sandler’s character and view working and achieving as time well spent whereas a whole raft of research suggests that time spent on family, friends and community is what gives life meaning.

2. Is it possible that something that seems like wasted time could become meaningful if you approached it with openness and curiosity? Listening to a loved one? Eating? Parenting?

Life is precious – shall we make it count?

Ken Robinson and The Element – Holding Passion Lightly

Posted on by Dr Rob Archer

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.

The Smallest Step

Posted on by Rachel Collis

Like many people, the need to take more exercise is a recurring theme for me. I have repeatedly set goals to do the ‘right’ thing – exercise for 30 minutes at least 5 times a week. And not once have I achieved this. Yes that is right ladies and gentlemen, not one single week. So now, when I resolve to take more exercise, my mind has a field day: ‘Yeh right. You won’t do that. It will be just like all the other times’. 

Russ Harris helped me with this at his Happiness Trap workshop. When he spoke about goal setting, he said:

  1. How does this issue relate to what is important to you? For me it is about wanting to do my best to continue to be a healthy partner, mother, friend, hopefully even a sprightly grandmother.
  2. This issue will likely keep turning up in your life. You will get older and wiser and sometime in the next 5 years you will notice that you have fallen back into your old self-defeating patterns … and again in 10 years…. and again in 15 years. Can you feel compassion for that future you? I found acknowledging that this issue keeps on turning up oddly reassuring. I do hope that in the future I will treat myself with compassion – beating myself up certainly hasn’t helped.
  3. Decide on a very small action you could take that would move you towards your value. I decided I would run up and down the stairs in my house twice a week.
  4. What thoughts, feelings, memories and urges are likely to turn up as you take that action?  Are you willing to experience them in the service of that value? Well if you put it like that…

And here I am not only running up my stairs but also standing at my laptop and meeting friends for a walk rather than a coffee.

In terms of behavioural change, Russ did some important things here. He:

  • Linked the behaviour change to values. This builds motivation.
  • Suggested that lapses are to be expected – and that the best way to deal with them is with self-compassion.
  • Encouraged some acceptance of the unpleasant thoughts, feelings and sensations that are likely to arise. Acceptance of unpleasant internal experiences (thoughts, feelings etc.) is associated with a tendency to persist in the face of difficulty.
  • Encouraged focussing on taking one small step forwards. Taking even a small action towards achieving a goal, builds motivation for more action.

When you are next working towards changing your own behaviour or perhaps coaching a member of your team to improve some aspect of their work – remember to work out how the action links to values, make the first step very small and respond to lapses with compassion.


How Using ACT in the Workplace Could Transform….Well, Almost Everything

Posted on by Dr Rob Archer

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

Buying Happiness

Posted on by Dr Rob Archer

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: