How to Do Hard Things

Willingness can be developed through formal mindfulness practice: sitting in silence while allowing difficult thoughts and feelings to be present. It can also be developed informally whenever we stop trying to get rid of painful thoughts and feelings and instead open up to them as part of the path toward what we care about.

If you find yourself getting stuck around values, you may need to do more work around the other core processes—defusion, willingness, present-moment awareness, and flexible-perspective taking—to be able to get back in touch with meaning.

Rigid stories about others often come up in interpersonal conflict. When we get stuck in judgments that another person is "irrational" or "misinformed," we lose touch with who they are as whole, complex human beings.

The ultimate goal of ACT is to help us move closer to what we care about in life.  From an ACT perspective, the main thing that gets in the way of this is when our behavior becomes primarily about avoidance. When we’re focused on avoiding difficult thoughts and feelings, we’re not focused on moving toward what we care about.

Many of us experience aimlessness or a lack of meaning at various points in our lives. We might be able to talk about things that once excited us in the past, but when we look around at our lives and the choices available to us in the present, we don't actually feel a sense of vitality or enthusiasm.

Fusion → Defusion

Moving toward a flexible sense of self and others is about recognizing that any story we tell, good or bad, is not the whole truth about a person, and is only true within a given context.

Inaction → Committed  Action Committed action is about finding places in our lives where we might shift our behavior to be more aligned with our values. It's about using the skills above to work with whatever thoughts and feelings are sustaining unhelpful behaviors, and then taking small steps in new directions.

When we find ourselves stuck in the past or future, the step toward flexibility is to gently yet intentionally bring our attention back to the present moment. This can be hard to do when we're really stuck, but is also a skill that can be developed over time through formal and informal mindfulness practices.