Do you have some activities that you just avoid? You never quite get them done and you feel bad about not getting them done?
It could be cleaning out the kitchen cupboards; sorting out your email; exercising; updating your LinkedIn profile; cleaning your car…
We know we should do it, but we kind of don’t choose to do it.
And that would be okay, but if you are like me, your mind sometimes uses this lack of action as evidence that you are lazy, disorganised, neglectful…
I drive a 5 year old car. I almost never wash it. It is usually messy on the inside too. Hats, sunglasses, shoes (including, I am embarrassed to admit, a pair of red Crocs), sundry shopping bags and wrappers from chocolate bars are scattered around the seats and floor. Discarded bits and pieces that found their way into my car but never seem to find their way out.
Why is my car like this?
The logical reason is that having a clean, tidy car is low on my list of priorities. Now and again I write ‘Clean out car’ on my job list for the day, but other, more interesting (Write blog post) or more urgent (Invoicing) tasks crowd it out.
Even though I often have ‘good reasons’ for not cleaning out my car, when someone else sees how messy my car is, my ‘I am not good enough’ story pops up. I worry that they will see me as lazy and disorganised. (Which sometimes I am, but I don’t want other people to know that!)
I could use this concern to motivate me. I could clean my car to avoid the pain of other people’s judgment. In ACT terms this is an avoidance move. An avoidance move is where a behaviour (e.g. cleaning the car) is about avoiding painful internal stuff (e.g. fear of other’s judgement). There is a lot of research to tell us that a life that is organised around avoiding unwanted emotions isn’t healthy. It is clear that repeated avoidance doesn’t lead to a rich and meaningful life. So, perhaps, for me, having a messy car might just align with my values?
This is where is gets tricky. Just because cleaning my car could be an avoidance move, it doesn’t mean that ‘not cleaning my car’ is a move towards my values.
It depends what I do instead of cleaning out my car. If, instead of cleaning my car, I engage in activities that link to my values – writing a blog post; spending time with people I love; learning something new – then, over time, those choices will likely help me to build a rich and meaningful life.
But if, instead of cleaning out my car, I obsessively watch videos of Beyonce, trying to figure out if she and JayZ are happy or not. Then it is likely that I am caught in avoidance, which is usually a bad idea.
So what do we do, when we are in the grip of avoidance? The first step is to take a breath and notice. How are you feeling in this moment? When you pause, see if you can notice, with curiosity and kindness, the whole range of thoughts and feelings that show up. And then, pause some more and see if you can notice what thoughts or feelings you might be avoiding.
For me, as I pause my YouTube video, I could notice that I don’t want to feel:
Bored whilst I clean out my car, or,
Anxious whilst I write a blogpost ‘What if people think it is stupid?’, or,
Challenged and a bit stressed as I try to master a new piece of theory.
Could I make room for those thoughts and feelings? And, if I did make room for them, and chose what to do next based on what really matters to me, what would I do?
Sometimes, just now and again, that might even be to spend ten minutes cleaning out my car.
My Granny died last month, aged 97. Good knock, Gran.
It wasn’t such a sad death really, as the real essence of Granny that we all knew and loved had long disappeared.
I wonder how much of our grief is like this; tiny portions of loss spread out across the days and weeks, regular downpayments helping to spread the cost. Well before she left Granny’s fingers had been prised away from the habits and routines that defined our lives.
Then once she was gone the routines of commemoration take over. I had to read out some words from my Aussie family and then say some words of my own. It was all very life affirming, as death can be.
I was struck by how we remembered Granny. What she did, yes. But also how she did it. Granny could be quite formal, snooty even, but the Real Granny was also silly, curious and generous.
I mean, does this look like a woman who really cares whether your elbows are on the table?
Mindfulness
Comparing myself to Granny’s generation seldom goes well.
She and her friends fought a war for freedom with incredible modesty and courage. I get annoyed with software updates on my smartphone.
I’m more caught up in my head, too. Busy, but not always about important stuff. Granny did stuff for her family and community. If I’m not careful I do stuff on social media.
Of course this isn’t just me, and maybe this is why mindfulness has taken off. This ancient practice has been seized upon as an antidote to the age of distraction, and there’s a lot of evidence suggesting it works too.
Yet at the same time there are problems with the mindfulness movement. In his new book Carpe Diem Regained, Roman Krznaric highlights two:
First, the mindfulness movement focuses too much on the self, leaving it thin on moral foundations.
Second, in placing so much emphasis on attending to the present moment, it overlooks how much human beings thrive on striving for meaningful goals.
Krznaric also points out that studies suggest mindfulness may increase wellbeing, but not pro-social behaviour. (Author’s note: please see my comment below for an update on this).
So what is mindfulness really for, if all it does is help us bear these atomised, self-absorbed lives that would be so alien to Granny?
Mindfulness 2.0
Do you remember the early days of the web, when websites were static and focused on giving people information? This was web 1.0, when the focus was all about spreading awareness and knowledge.
The next generation of websites were interactive. Their focus was on changing the way we did things like communicating, finding jobs and looking at kittens. This was web 2.0.
The same leap is now happening with mindfulness – a movement away from simple awareness to using our awareness to do things.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is in the vanguard of this movement. ACT combines hard-edged science with the ability to move people, literally and figuratively. There are four reasons why ACT is the future of mindfulness:
Evidence. It includes all of the benefits of mindfulness – with over 180 randomised control trials now demonstrating its effectiveness in everything from depression, chronic pain, smoking cessation and weight control to workplace effectiveness.
Practical. It offers different ways to be mindful – making mindfulness more accessible to more people than ever before.
Clarity. ACT is based on a clear and transparent philosophy of sciencewhich helps practitioners learn faster and explain concepts more clearly. (Once I got this I never thought in the same way again).
Behavioural. The use of the acronym ‘ACT’ is deliberate, because ACT is a behavioural intervention which focuses less on peoples’ thoughts than on what they want to DO in life. ACT explicitly links mindfulness to values and action: it is mindfulness for a purpose.
I use the ACT matrix a lot in my workshops and with my coaching clients… and on myself! It is a tool that helps to build mindfulness, self-awareness and valued living. It is based on contextual behavioural science and is very easy to use.
I have made a video explaining how I use it:
You can download a pdf handout of the ACT Matrix here.
Kevin Polk (who is one of the people who developed the ACT matrix) has lots of free resources relating to the ACT matrix at his website.
What if your greatest successes are more a reflection of your small, everyday choices than of the big decisions you make?
In his book, ‘How to Choose’, David Freemantle suggests that it is our micro-behaviours that make the difference between success and disappointment. By micro-behaviours, he means the ‘nuances and minutiae of our observed behaviours’. We tend to remember big choices we have made and think they have determined the course of our life. Whilst it is true that these larger choices are important. Freemantle suggests that it is actually our micro-behaviours that ultimately determine our success in these larger events.
For example, a ‘macro-behaviour’ might be to apply for a secondment to a project that interests you. Making this choice and taking this action certainly matters, but all sorts of micro-behaviours impact on how successful your application will be. When you apply for the secondment, do you go and see the person in charge of the project and engage with them in a way that makes them feel confident that you would be a pleasant and conscientious team member? Do you take the time to write a well thought out application? Have your tiny, repeated behaviours over the last 2 years, built you a reputation as someone who is helpful and effective? All of these frequent, small choices will impact on the outcome of your application.
Our natural tendency is to consciously choose the big things but to let our habitual style determine our micro-behaviours. For example, if my family and cultural background encouraged a blunt and straightforward style of communication, I will tend to do that. If my background has trained me to be compliant and avoid conflict. I will tend to do that.
In order to succeed in ways that are meaningful, we need to do something different. Instead of letting our history determine our micro-behaviours, we need to choose these behaviours consciously based on three key factors:
What is happening in this moment?
Which of my values are most important to express in this situation?
What do I want to achieve both in the short and in the long term?
This assessment of what each moment calls for involves the capacity to be really present. To really see what is going on.
It requires that we have a clear sense of who we want to be (our values) and a broad sense of what we want our life to stand for (our purpose).
And, finally, it requires the capacity to unhook from impulses to act in reactive or unskilful ways.
Have you ever had to survive a harsh environment at work? This woman has…
Most of us have lived through an unpleasant time at work. When it ends, we sigh with relief and assume all will now be fine. Unfortunately things aren’t that simple.
The hostile environment changes us, we learn strategies to cope, to get our work done despite the difficulties. However, the very strategies that helped us to survive a dysfunctional workplace can be counterproductive in a more supportive environment. And in a cruel twist of fate, it is seems to be almost impossible to unlearn something that you learnt when you were scared or stressed. So we often continue to be defensive, aggressive or self-protective even when it is no longer needed. We can’t seem to get rid of the mental junk we have acquired during our painful experiences.
A reader wrote to us about a problem she encountered when she moved from a hostile, aggressive environment to a much more harmonious workplace.
She was really happy in her new job and was doing well but she was given feedback that her communication skills needed work. This hadn’t been a problem for her in previous workplaces. She realised that she had learnt some unhelpful habits in her last role. Now she needed to relearn how to interact in more workable ways. She was worried that she didn’t know how to bring about this change.
So how do you let go of problematic interpersonal behaviour and start to behave in ways that work? Here are some tips:
1. Start with self-compassion. The less you beat yourself up for your failings, the more you will be able to notice the times when your behaviour isn’t working.
3. Do a self-assessment and get feedback from people you trust. There are some good questions about interpersonal functioning here that you could adapt to the workplace.
4. Don’t just change as a reaction to what others want. Spend some time thinking deeply about your values. Who do you want to be at work? How do you want others to experience you? Changing your behaviour is a hard slog, linking the change to your values will help you to keep going.
6. Get really present in your interactions with people. Notice the impact of your behaviour on others. See if you can get out of your head and into this moment now.
7. Accept that when you feel threatened you are likely to revert to self-protective and unhelpful behaviours. Consider what might trigger that in you and make a plan to be particularly mindful and self-compassionate at those moment. Hold those feelings gently.
Becoming the person we want to be is hard. Facing those times where our behaviour isn’t in line with those ideals is painful. Can you turn to yourself in kindness?
It might be the impulse to buy more stuff that you don’t really need; watch TV instead of doing some exercise; let work dominate your life; make poor choices that change your life forever…
In this TEDx talk, Kelly McGonigal explains that the urges provoked by desire (the promise of happiness) have a tendency to overpower current happiness and satisfaction.
Desire for something you don’t have, but would like (in my case, millions of dollars and to write a best selling book!) can create stronger impulses than the feelings of contentment associated with what you do have (for me now: love, health, safety, meaningful work that uses my strengths). Even though what you have now may be much more important to you than what you desire.
When we feel that experience of wanting something, we feel an urge to do something to get that desire met. If we are to handle this tricky emotion wisely then we need to be clear about who we want to be and what we want our life to stand for. We need to have chosen the values we want to live by. But knowing your values isn’t enough.
Last week, Paul suggested that mindfulness helps us to turn our values into action. When desire is moving you away from what really matters, mindfulness can help you to ride out the urges rather than mindlessly chase what you desire .
You can mindfully notice how feelings of wishing and wanting are pulling you in a particular direction and check if that would be a move towards your values. You can become aware when desire is in control of your behaviour, catch yourself and come back to what really matters to you in the long term – love? kindness? connection? your health? security?
I want to be clear here that I am not suggesting that you abandon your ‘big, hairy, audacious goals‘, what I am suggesting is that you also:
1. Compassionately notice when pursuit of those goals feels driven and addictive. Pause and breathe and see if you can ride those impulses like waves rather than act on them.
2. Keep checking in as to how the goals you are currently pursuing fit with your values and life purpose
3. Have the ‘willpower’ to spend some time paying attention to other important areas of your life even though you may feel the addictive pull of the desire for something ‘bigger and better’ calling to you. Your thoughts might whisper, ‘I’ll just send one more email; read/write one more blog post; sign up for that course that promises to make me rich.’ Can you have those thoughts and the feelings associated with them and still spend the afternoon in the garden with your loved ones? Can you have those thoughts and feelings and bring your attention back to this moment now with all its small pleasures and pains?
Kelly McGonigal suggests that the recurring difficulties we experience in handling our desire well is not a sign that there is:
Something uniquely wrong with us – but it is actually part of being human. it is not just you, it is all of us.
Oddly, for me, accepting this makes it easier to deal with. How about you?
[I am running a low cost, one day workshop on ACT at The Relaxation Centre of QLD on Sun 3rd March. All proceeds go to the centre. I would love to see you there.]
Over Christmas I put on an additional 3kg. I have been getting rid of it ever since and I have realised that losing weight is a fantastic practice in psychological flexibility. Just about every minute of the day there are opportunities to be mindful of bodily sensations associated with hunger or satiety, and each day there are dozens of opportunities to reconnect with why losing weight is important to me.
Many studies have examined the relationship between intentions and behaviour and, somewhat surprisingly, the correlation between the two is not all that high. Have you ever had the experience of setting strong goals to exercise or eat well and then not followed through? Timothy Wilson wrote a fascinating book called “Strangers to Ourselves” outlining all the evidence for unconscious, automatic influences upon our behaviour. Meta-analyses have revealed:
Why might this be the case? One reason people fail to act on strong intentions is because they simply forget to start the behaviour. Have you ever said something like “This week I will exercise three times” and then before you know it, the week is over and you haven’t exercised at all? This is why setting specific goals and thinking about contextual reminders is so important. In the literature, this sort of planning is called “implementation intentions”.
But another reason why people fail to act on their intentions is because their responding has become habitual and automatic. When we don’t reflect on our moment to moment behaviour we are very likely to do what we have always done in the past.
Mindfulness helps us act on our intentions
From one point of view, this might be a bit of a problem for the ACT model. If our behaviour is relatively independent of our intentions, then what is the point on getting clear on our values when we might just act out of our habits and unreflected impulses anyway? This is where mindfulness becomes really important. Values clarification on its own is of little use unless we bring awareness to what we are doing and we have the self-regulatory skills to enact new behaviours.
But is there any evidence that mindfulness can help us do what we want to do? Chatzisarantis and Hagger (2007) explored how mindfulness affects the relationship between people’s intentions to engage in vigorous physical exercise and their actual behaviour.
First they confirmed that people’s intentions to exercise didn’t actually predict whether people exercised or not. But the really interesting finding was that more mindful people were more likely to act on their intentions than those who are less mindful, even controlling for the physical exercise was already a habit for the participant. So mindful people, but not non-mindful people, were more likely to do what they said they would do! Isn’t that just the coolest reason for learning to be mindful? “Learn mindfulness and you will do what you say you will do!”
Why does mindfulness help us act on our intentions?
The authors then went on to explore reasons why mindfulness might strengthen the relationship between behaviours and intentions. Before we go any further, what do you think? Why might mindfulness increase the tendency to act on intentions?
Got something?
Perhaps mindfulness increases awareness of goals in each moment and therefore reduces the tendency to forget what we said we would do. Or perhaps mindfulness improves our self-regulatory skills so that we are more likely to be able to manage the difficult emotions that arise when we do something new or challenging. Chatzisarantis and Hagger (2007) tested a third possibility, that mindfulness helps us control counter-intentional behaviours, in this case binge drinking. They reasoned that binge-drinking probably interferes with doing vigorous physical activity (is it just me or do you too have an image of lying on a couch with a pillow over your head?), and that mindfulness might reduce the extent to which habitual binge-drinking interferes with intentions to exercise.
And this is what they found:
Let me step you through this diagram. Start with the dotted line first. What this says is that people who are NOT mindful and who habitually engage in binge-drinking are LESS likely to engage in physical exercise. That is, habitual binge-drinking decreases the likelihood of engaging in physical activity. So far so good, this confirms the idea that binge-drinking ain’t great for getting up in the morning and going for a run! But look at the solid line. For this group, even if they did engage in habitual binge-drinking they were still just as likely to engage in exercise as those who did not habitually binge drink. So some mindful folk still go out on the town, but they don’t let this interfere with their intentions to exercise. In the words of Chatzisarantis and Hagger (2007: 672):
“These results, therefore, corroborate the view that greater awareness of and attention to internal states and behavioral routines helps mindful individuals shield good intentions from unhealthy habits and thus can play a key role in fostering effective self-regulation. In contrast, diminished attention and awareness of counterintentional routines and habits is likely to prevent individuals acting less mindfully from engaging in effective self-regulation, as the negative relationship between habitual binge-drinking and physical exercise suggests (see Figures 2a and 2b).”
So maybe next Christmas I will be better at mindfully saying no to that Christmas pudding!
I am so excited to be joining “Working with ACT” exactly two years to the day since Rob and Rachel started this wonderful blog. Working with mindfulness and values is a big part of my professional and personal life. My aim is to bring you interesting perspectives on ACT research.
By way of introduction, I thought I might briefly review one of my own papers written with Sharon Parker. I promise I will focus on papers by other people in the future 🙂 Here is the citation from which you can link to the paper if you would like to read more.
“I don’t do emotions!” This was a comment made by one of my students in reaction to an exercise exploring values and stressors at work. But in reality, we all “do emotions”. A growing body of evidence clearly shows that emotions are a major determinant of performance in all workplaces, including public sector organisations. Emotions alert us to what matters, they allow us to communicate and make decisions that are effective. Emotions are at the heart of thinking about how we wish to live and what we wish to create in society?
Becoming skilful at recognising and influencing emotions at work is a key facet of effective leadership and management. Such skill rests upon the quality of our awareness and perspective taking ability. We need to be able to take the perspective of others to act effectively. We need to be compassionate if we are to respond skilfully to our own and others emotions.
Compassion towards oneself and others is a critical part of building effective relationships and making good decisions at work. Think for example of how you handle situations where you or someone in your team fails to achieve important goals. What would it be like if people were more compassionate towards themselves and others at these times?
Compassion is not just a feeling. It involves four stages:
Noticing another is suffering,
Making judgments about what is going on,
Feeling empathy, and
Taking action.
There are three judgments that can get in the way of compassion towards self or others.
First, we can fail to be compassionate because we judge that the person who is suffering is not deserving of our compassion. For example, we might judge that the person brought their suffering on themselves.
Second, we might judge that the person’s suffering is not relevant to us. Research shows we are much less likely to extend suffering to others who have different goals, or belong to groups with which we do not identify. If we make this judgment, we are more likely to feel disconnection rather than compassion. One can easily see how this judgment is involved in the debate over immigration in this country.
Third, we make a judgment about our personal resources. If we don’t feel as though we can cope with being in the presence of another who is suffering in some way, we are more likely to feel distress rather than compassion. The manager who cannot bear to be in the presence of a person crying is making this sort of judgment. This judgment appears to be involved in the experience of burnout many people feel when they work in jobs that involve caring for others.
Of course, these judgments are sometimes justified. Modern evolutionary theory suggests that such judgments are an important aspect of self-protection and effective group function. Sometimes it is best not to feel compassion, or at least not to act upon it. Our argument is not that we should always feel more compassion. Our argument is that it is helpful to become more aware of the automatic reactions that drive our behaviour. To the extent that we can catch our reactions in motion, we can choose our responses more deliberately and improve our effectiveness.
So how might we learn to catch our automatic reactions, and act more in line with what really matters?
If you have been following this blog you will know that there are two aspects of effective training in emotional skills. First, we need to increase mindfulness. Being mindful means being aware of what is happening in each moment both within ourselves and in the world and bringing an attitude of openness to that experience. Second, we need to be clear about our values and the values of the organisation in which we work. There is no point developing awareness if we don’t know how we want to act in the world. Values act as a compass to guide our behaviour.
What has been your experience of compassion at work? Is it encouraged? Does it have a positive impact?
In this interview,Maarten Aalberse suggests that we have a tendency to feel ashamed about feeling shame and that this causes us problems. He suggests responding to those feelings with empathy and compassion instead of trying to reject these painful emotions. What does that look like?
Shame comes up quite often for me. The other day, a participant in a session I was facilitating said, ‘Well I think this sort of thing is a waste of time. Nothing ever changes as a result.‘ and pop there it was… shame. Gnawing away at my gut. Making me want to crawl into a corner and hide.
My mind went into overdrive: I am a waste of space. All those years of training were a waste of time. I have been deluding myself. It was all pointless. ( I actually feel a bit ashamed letting you know the crazy thoughts my mind can come up with!)
And then, I remembered Maarten’s suggestions and I breathed and asked myself , ‘Can I turn towards this pain with kindness? Can I hold these feelings with compassion? Can I use all of those years of training to choose my next words? Even though the urge to react is so strong?’
This sounded like a good plan, so instead of getting defensive I responded with curiosity, ‘What would have to happen for today to be worthwhile? What would we each need to do?‘
The conversation moved forward and we made a plan.
I think that Maarten may be right. That allowing those feelings to be there and treating them with kindness may lead to more effective responses.
What about you…are you ashamed of shame? What happens when you treat those feelings with compassion instead? Does that work better for you?
Working with ACT 