How to Do Hard Things

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Lack of Direction → Clear Values 

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.

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.