Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life
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EXERCISE: Goals Worksheet
Value: _______________________________________________________________
This value will be manifested in the following long-term goal:
1. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
Which, in turn, will be manifested in these short-term goals:
1. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
2. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
3. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
This value will be manifested in the following long-term goal:
2. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
Which, in turn, will be manifested in these short-term goals:
1. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
2. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
3. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
Repeat this process until you have a good working set. (It need not be comprehensive; you can always add and subtract from these at any time.)
There are no hard and fast rules about how many goals you need to have. This is about your life. Think about what you would like to accomplish, and set your goals in terms of how they will fit practically into your life. The numeration in the worksheet above is arbitrary. Perhaps starting with one long-term goal makes sense for you. Or if not, a single short-term goal may be a good place to start. You need not have a particular number of goals to be “doing the right thing.” If you’re getting caught in thoughts of this nature, remember your mind is talking to you again. Use the strategies you’ve learned throughout this book and set your compass in the direction you want to live.
Setting goals is all about workability. If you don’t make your goals workable within the context of your life, it’s unlikely you’ll get very far down the path of your values. Choose achievable, obtainable outcomes that can realistically fit with your life. Doing this makes it much more likely you’ll actually be able to live your values every day. The true goal of this process is to become better able to focus on life as a valued process. Every goal is a step leading you further down the path of your life. The path itself doesn’t end (at least not until your life ends). Being vital means there will always be some new way to pursue your values. Achieving your goals isn’t an end, but a new beginning; a point of closure at which you can refresh your journey by starting anew. Guideposts are important, but don’t be trapped by them. Celebrate goals achieved and keep on keeping on.
Walking the Walk: Actions as Steps Toward Achieving Your Goals
You can talk the talk all you want, but if you don’t walk the walk, your life won’t come alive for you. What we’ve been exploring in this book is important, but what are you going to do about it? If you know where you want to go and don’t go there, then the knowledge makes little difference. ACT is all about action. To make a difference in your life, you need to act.
What actions are you going to take to achieve your goals? To move in the direction set by your value compass toward your first goal, what do you need to do?
Choose a short-term goal from the lists above and write it down in the space below:
_______________________________________________________________ EXERCISE: Making Goals Happen Through Action
Because life is a process, things happen one step at a time. Once you know what you value and what your goals are, you can choose which steps to take first. You have the compass and the road map. Now you need to focus on your steps. Minds are great at this, so this part should initially be easy, at least until the possibility of action creates barriers to action (more on this in a moment).
In the following worksheet, state one of your shorter-term goals copied from above. After writing that down, define specific actions you need to take to achieve that goal. (We’ve left space for five, but it could be greater or fewer). Make sure you write down what you can actually do.
Don’t be vague (e.g., “Do better”), and don’t write down things you cannot directly control by action (e.g., “Feel better”). Write down a specific situated action: this is an act that has a beginning and an end, a specified form, and a specified context. For example, “Build friendships” is not a specific action. “Call friends” is better, but it is still too vague. “Call Sally” is fine. It has a beginning and end, a specified form, and a specified context. Try to include at least one thing you can do today.
For example, let’s say, as part of a longer-term goal of letting friends know you care about them, you’ve decided to contact old friends. One specific action might be to call a specific old friend (“Sally”) with whom you’ve lost contact. But this action may require others. The first thing you have to do is find out how to get in touch with her. To do this, you might call some other friends who know her, look her up on the Internet, find her number in the white pages, or contact members of her family to see where she is. Each of these options would be a specific action that would take you one step further toward your goal of getting in contact with your old friend. Try to get enough actions and subactions written down so that if you did them all, achieving your goal would become highly likely, or even certain.
Short-term goal: _______________________________________________________________
Actions and subactions:
1. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
2. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
3. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
4. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
5. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
What could you do right now (today) from this list? Focus on what is possible. If you are ready to do it, great. Do it. Right now.
Barriers
Unfortunately, it’s often not so simple. (If it was, books like this would not be needed.) Unfortunately, barriers will come up. Some will come in the form of practical problems you’ll face moving down your valued path. But more importantly for the work we are doing here, barriers are going to show up in the form of the experiences you’ve been trying to avoid, or in the form of the thoughts you’ve been fused with.
That’s what the first parts of this book were all about. They were about being in a new place when this moment came.
Focus in on one of the specific actions you wrote down above that you could do today, and choose one that you have some psychological resistance toward doing. Write that behavior below:
_______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ If you were to do this right now, what would you expect to encounter psychologically that would slow you down? Look for difficult thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, memories, or urges. If you aren’t sure yet, close your eyes and picture engaging in this behavior and watch for indications of the barriers. Don’t allow avoidance to get in the way of this process! If you find your mind wandering, or you think, “Damn, I don’t care about this anyway,�
� or you suddenly get hungry or have to pee, be suspicious! Avoidance comes in myriad forms. Stay with this process and in the space below write down each barrier you can detect:
1. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
2. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
3. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
4. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
5. _______________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________
Now that some potential barriers to action are out there, consider the strategies you have learned in this book up to this point. If you’ve developed “favorite” cognitive defusion, mindfulness, and acceptance strategies, you might consider using these. Flipping back through the book could help you remember what these are. If you have no idea at all, it’s time to go back to the early parts of the book and go through them again.
In an ACT approach you do not “get over” barriers or “get around” barriers. You do not even “get through” barriers. You get with barriers. One successful ACT patient described it this way: “I used to run away from pain. Now I inhale it.”
EXERCISE: Expected Barriers
In the following chart fill in a word or two to remind you of the barriers you expect to face along your valued path, as well as strategies you might use to mindfully defuse from and accept these barriers.
You can practice “inhaling” your barriers in your imagination, but the very best way to work on this is in the context of action. Be careful! Your mind will tell you that the strategies you selected are supposed to get rid of barriers. That is very unlikely, and it is a very old agenda. The purpose of these strategies should be to defuse from and make room for the psychological issues that have been stopping you from acting in your own interests.
MANY MAPS FOR DIFFERENT JOURNEYS
So far, we’ve been exploring how you might walk down the path that a single value generates for you. But in chapter 12 we explored ten different valued domains. In each domain you may have written down more than one value. In addition, you may come up with values that don’t necessarily fit the categories we’ve been exploring. If you valued a single thing, life would, perhaps, be simpler. But it wouldn’t be as full and dynamic as it is when you value many different things. If your list of values is full, that means you have an exciting journey ahead of you.
Different journeys require different maps. Since we aren’t moving toward a destination on a physical plane, we can take many different journeys at the same time. You can and should pursue different values in different domains at the same time. Life would be stripped of its richness if we weren’t given this variability.
The work you’ve done in this chapter could be summarized on the following form:
If you wish, you can summarize the information you’ve collected about your values and goals earlier in this chapter on this form. What’s more, you can use this form in conjunction with the questions we pose throughout this chapter as a way to generate road maps for each of your valued paths.
You may want to photocopy it several times and go back to the values you worked out in chapter 12. Start with one of those values, write it down in the space at the top of the form, and do the whole process again. In this way, you’ll formulate a concrete game plan for the next steps on your life path that will span the many different areas you care about.
Sometimes, you’ll find that different valued paths combine quite well. In other instances, they will not. In those cases, you may have to make a choice about what your next turn is, or where you want your life to go. There are no pat answers. We can’t tell you what those choices should be. The choice is always yours to make. We don’t pretend to make life any easier than it is.
BUILDING PATTERNS OF EFFECTIVE ACTION
Many of the problems we suffer with are, in essence, self-control issues. Avoidance and fusion feed patterns that serve short-term interests at the expense of long-term interests. As you begin to move in a valued direction, however, you begin building larger and larger patterns of effective action.
In animal models, it has been shown that larger patterns of behavior are more resistant to short-term impulsive choices (Rachlin 1995). You can use this basic behavioral finding to serve your best interests. In this section we will explore ways of building much larger patterns, as well as the barriers that come along with doing that.
Taking Responsibility for the Larger Patterns You Are Building
There is no “time-out” from life; no dress rehearsal. This means that every single moment you are building a behavioral pattern. It helps to build larger patterns that serve your interests by acknowledging the patterns that are being constructed as they occur.
For example, suppose you want to be more mindful of your health. You plan to lose weight, eat better, and exercise more. You’ve decided that you’ll go to the gym for one hour twice a week, you won’t eat desserts for a month (just to get used to cutting out sugar, since you noticed that most of your sugar intake is in dessert form), and you will eat no more than 1800 calories a day.
Week one all goes well…you made a commitment and you stuck to it. Now comes week two and your commitment starts to fall apart. You ate a big slice of pie; you haven’t exercised yet (it’s already Thursday); and you forgot to keep track of your food for two days, so you can only make a “guesstimate” as to how many calories you’ve consumed.
Suppose you are upset. You have the feeling of being a failure (again). You find yourself thinking about giving up.
Inside the literal language the issue is content-filled: Can you do any better? Are you capable? Are you doomed?
At another level it is simply a behavioral pattern:
• Make commitment—break commitment
In the past, this has probably been a pattern for you, which may be part of why the breakage happened. But other patterns are looming:
• Make commitment—break commitment—quit commitment
Or perhaps:
• Make commitment—break commitment—quit commitment—feel bad about breaking commitment
Or maybe even:
• Make commitment—break commitment—quit commitment—feel bad about breaking commitment—fear making commitments—give up on making commitments
These behavioral patterns are yet to be fully formed. It is your behavior that will, or will not, form them. Nothing else. Rationalizing them is just another part of the pattern. So is rationalizing them and then feeling bad about rationalizing them.
Step back from your own mind, and watch the pattern forming. If it is forming now, you can form it in the way you would like it to be through your behavior. If you want it to be different, then it is different behavior that must occur. If “make commitment—break commitment” has been a pattern for you in the past, when you now find that yet again you’ve broken a commitment, you have a golden opportunity. You have the chance to create a different pattern: make commitment—break commitment—keep commitment.
If that pattern builds, you can squeeze down the space given to the middle term and get just a notch closer to “make commitment—keep commitment—make commitment—keep commitment.” If there are a few “break commitments” in there, you can gradually weed them out. It is unlikely that you will ever get them all out, but it is empowering to reach toward that distant goal.
The process of building behavioral patterns involves noticing the pattern and taking responsibility for building larger and larger ones that align with your best interests. If you feel guilty when you see these patterns, building effective larger behavioral patterns means taking responsibility for the role that guilt is abou
t to play in the pattern you are creating right now. If you doubt yourself, the same principle applies. If you are afraid of making any commitments for fear you will never keep them anyway, same thing. If you feel supremely confident, same thing. If you brag to others about how well you are doing, same thing. And, if all of this just seems too much, same thing.
You get what you do. Get it?
(And if you react to the seeming arrogance of that statement on our part, you have our apologies AND…same thing!)
Breaking Up Inflexible Patterns That Don’t Serve Your Interests
The biggest problem with avoidance and fusion and the conceptualized self (and so on) is that they get so rigid because they become such large patterns. Contexts of literality, reason-giving, and emotional control are ubiquitous because the language community (the language-driven world that we are surrounded by all the time) continuously supports them, even when they are not needed. Because the contexts are ubiquitous, the behaviors become so as well. Your word machine starts to take over every inch of your life.
That’s why this book probably felt confusing initially: we were breaking down an habitual language pattern. We have been challenging the implicit rules of a language game that has most humans ensnared most of the time.