How to Do Hard Things

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.

To do this exercise, first take a moment to reflect on what you might want your tombstone to say at the end of your life—maybe something like “was a loving parent” or “helped a lot of people”—and write it down.

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.

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.

Moving toward values is about reconnecting our day-to-day activities to the things that matter most to us. It's about clarifying for ourselves what a life well-lived would look like, and then intentionally bringing those qualities into our life and work in the present.

A simple exercise you can use to explore values in your life through this lens is called the Tombstone Exercise.

Rigid Stories → Flexible Perspective-Taking

Lack of Direction → Clear Values 

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.