Acceptance and Commitment

Therapy (A.C.T.)
Workbook to Get Out From Anxiety,
Relieve Depression, and Break Free
From Stress and Worry, for a Newfound
Mental Health

Gerald Paul Clifford

© Copyright 2020 by Gerald Paul Clifford. All right reserved.
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 Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Theoretical Model of A.C.T.
Relational Frame Theory (RFT) and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
A Clear Definition of ACT
The Core Acronymsa and Beliefs of ACT
The Core Principles of ACT
Chapter 2: Experiential Avoidance
The Background of Experiential Avoidance
Problems Caused By Experiential Avoidance
How Experiential Avoidance Affects Quality of Life
Why Experiential Avoidance Is an Unhealthy Approach
Chapter 3: Cognitive Fusion
Creating Strong Connections to Automatic Beliefs
Formulating Automatic Beliefs About Ourselves
Some Automatic Beliefs Create Disappointment
Cognitive Diffusion and Changing Your Automatic Beliefs
Chapter 4: Dominance of Past and Future
If You Are Living in the Past...
If You Are Living in the Future...
The Curse of the Automatic Pilot
Creating a Connection to the Present
Celebrate the Little Details
Describe the Moment to Yourself
Become an Active Listener
Release Your Need to Know
Become Aware of Your Body
Experience Your Emotions
Be Intentional About Your Actions
Chapter 5: Conceptualized Self
 Identifying the Story You Tell Yourself
Recognizing “I Am” Statements in Your Story
The Identity You Believe You Are
The Identity You Really Are
Retelling Your Story and Shifting Your Conceptualized Self
Chapter 6: Disconnected Values
Why We Disconnect From Our Values
The Impact of Having Disconnected Values
Rediscovering Your Authentic Values
Adjusting Your Decisions Based on Your Values
Living a Life in Alignment With Your Authenticity
Chapter 7: Lack of Activity and Commitment
Awareness Is Not the Same as Change
Commitment to Change Requires Action
Shifting to New Behaviors
Overcoming Obstacles and Challenges
Tips for Staying Committed
Chapter 8: Defining Your Strategy
Evaluate Yourself and Your Life
Start With Your Area of Most Concern
Commit to Offering Deep Acceptance
Identify Activities You Can Engage In
Discover Likely Pitfalls and Short Stops
Chronicle Your Plan In Order
Chapter 9: Engaging Your A.C.T. Model
Opening Up to Unpleasant Feelings
Exploring the Experience of These Feelings
Maintaining Awareness of Them
Giving Your Emotions Space to Exist
 Identifying Actions You Can Take
Following Through on Your Chosen Actions
Chapter 10: Committed Action in Crisis
What Is a Crisis?
The Essential Value of the First Minute
Navigating Emotions in Extreme Moments
Committing to Action Through Your Emotions
The Necessary Discharge of Experience
The Necessary Celebration of Experience
Chapter 11: Where C.B.T. Meets A.C.T.
What Is CBT?
CBT the Process, Explained
Why CBT Complements ACT
Using CBT to Enforce Habits
Incorporating CBT Into Your Plan
Conclusio n
 Introduction
Congratulations on purchasing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)!
This book was written to help you understand and accept yourself on a deeper
level, so you can commit to transforming your life once and for all. Like
everyone, you deserve to have everything you dream of in life, yet you cannot
achieve that if you continually find yourself trapped with your past.
The value of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is that it is a forward-
focused therapy heavily pointed toward supporting you with creating peace with
your past so you can empower yourself to enjoy a brighter future. At the
foundation of ACT is the belief that we cannot change or pasts, nor can we
control what will happen to us in the future. Accepting this means that we can
choose to continue pursuing our dreams and living our desired lives regardless of
what happens to us because we have the potential to choose where to focus and
to focus on.
Throughout this book, you will be guided on a meaningful self-led journey
toward discovering how you can come to peace with all that has ever happened
in your life. You will also explore methods for genuinely accepting all that has
happened, or will ever happen, so you are no longer repressing emotions,
thoughts, or opinions. Instead, you will fully transform the way you feel about
things so you can eliminate the power they hold over you and focus instead on
what you desire to experience.
The greatest value of ACT is that it is not focused on denying, rejecting, or
suppressing your past. It may seem unlikely now, but you will reach a genuine
state of acceptance, which allows you to find peace around things that affected
you in the past. As you reach this point, in your own timing, you will find it far
easier to move beyond your past and start embracing your present and your
future.
Aside from how thorough ACT is regarding your healing, it also provides you
with phenomenal tools that enable you to embrace anything that may happen to
you in the future, too. As you are likely aware, you cannot stop bad or hurtful
things from happening to you, no matter how hard you try. Knowing how to
accept this, and accept anything as it happens, allows you to become more
resilient and flexible, thus allowing you to continually work toward achieving
your dreams regardless of your experiences.
By the end of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), your biggest
takeaway will likely be this: regardless of what happens in your life, you deserve
to experience greatness. You deserve to show up for yourself, enjoy all that life
has to offer, and pursue anything you desire while feeling significant fulfillment
within you. There is nothing on this earth that can stop you from achieving this
state, so long as you are willing to deeply own that you deserve to experience
greatness more than that which hurt you deserves to experience your downfall.
You are the one in control, even if you have forgotten that thus far. If you are
ready to begin the journey of recovering your power over yourself and your life,
it’s time to begin. Please, take your time and be gentle with yourself during this
journey. If you approach the process of healing with a deep, profound sense of
love for yourself, you will go much further. Good luck, and enjoy !
 Chapter 1: The Theoretical Model of A.C.T.
ACT is a form of therapy that is based on the concept of relational frame theory
(RFT.) This therapy model is based on the philosophy of radical behaviorism by
B. F. Skinner, which implies that people’s behaviors are scientific in nature and
can be affected by observable behaviors that we see in others. Aside from its
connection to RFT and radical behaviorism, ACT is also associated with
cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT. However, ACT does have fundamental
differences from each of these similar therapies, particularly based on how it is
implemented and what beliefs are associated with this particular therapy style.
The biggest difference between the ACT and any other form of therapy is that
ACT follows a “just observe” perspective, while other modalities want you to
uncover what has sparked the behavior that you are observing in the first place
and how it can be changed. This seemingly passive experience allows you to
rapidly move into a place of acceptance, then consciously decide how you will
proceed based on what you genuinely want for yourself or from a given
situation.

Relational Frame Theory (RFT) and Cognitive Behavioral

Therapy (CBT)
RFT and CBT are two forms of therapy that are similar to the ACT. RFT is
largely similar due to the fact that it is built around the same core therapy and
belief system, while CBT is similar because it focuses on cognitive reframing.
RFT is best described as being a psychological theory of human language, which
declares that the language you use defines what is actually going on within your
mind. In other words, the action words you use when describing different things,
or experiences, shine a light on how you genuinely feel about them, or how they
are affecting you. This theory was defined by Steven C. Hayes, and he was from
the University of Nevada in Reno and was expanded upon by Dermot Barnes-
Holmes and his colleagues from Ghent University. The idea is that, by changing
the way you describe things to yourself, you change the way you view them and
therefore gain freedom from the pain they have been causing you.
CBT is often described as a psycho-social intervention therapy. Its main aim is to
help people recover from a variety of different mental health conditions. This
therapy seeks to identify problematic cycles a person experiences in their minds
and restructure them, so they are no longer problematic. The idea is that we all
have automatic behaviors, and the more we engage in these behaviors, the more
automatic, or subconscious, they become. By bringing them into our awareness,
we can shift our automatic behaviors, so we are no longer triggered to follow the
thoughts, feelings, and behaviors associated with them, thus causing relief from
negative patterns.
ACT differs from each of these forms of therapy because there is no focus on
language or intentional interventions with this modality of healing. Instead, you
may observe language or observe behaviors, but your purpose is not to focus on
them and intentionally change them. Instead, your intention is to downplay their
importance and focus instead on what you would genuinely like to do or
experience.

A Clear Definition of ACT

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is a type of psychotherapy. Apart from
that, it is also considered to be a subset of clinical behavioral analysis. Various
types of mindfulness and acceptance strategies are used in this therapy in distinct
ways to allow someone to observe and release the grips of the past, while also
using commitment strategies to enable them to commit to a new future. ACT
was originally known as comprehensive distancing, though it took on its own
name over time.
Although ACT sounds straightforward, there are many protocols that can be
used to allow a person to achieve a state of acceptance in their life. The protocol
used depends on the unique way a person is feeling, how they are reacting to
their behaviors, and what they can do to improve their experience.
It is important to understand that the goal of ACT is not to eliminate your
challenging feelings because attempting to eliminate them leads to feelings of
resistance, resentment, and suppression. Instead, you want to be present with
them, accept them, and intentionally move toward preferred or valued behaviors.
Through this, you gain the opportunity to open your mind to unpleasant feelings,
refrain from overreacting to them, prevent yourself from avoiding uncomfortable
situations for fear of facing unpleasant emotions. In other words, you increase
your resiliency and expand your capacity to navigate your feelings and
emotionally complex situations.

The Core Acronyms and Beliefs of ACT

ACT relies on a core concept that defines what you are moving away from and
what you are moving toward. Before you can even approach this core concept,
you must understand that ACT has an entirely different belief system than
common Western psychology. In common Western psychology, the belief is that
“healthy normal” humans are not destructive by nature. Alternatively, ACT
assumes that every human possesses destructive thoughts, and in fact, it is quite
commonplace for them to have negative psychological processes, and this is
natural in healthy minds.
The core belief in the ACT is that the root cause of suffering is avoidance, as
people attempt to avoid situations they believe will bring about negative
emotions. The process of experiential avoidance leads to cognitive
entanglement, which then leads to psychological rigidity. Through all of this,
you lose your sense of resiliency and find yourself feeling trapped in negative
behaviors that fail to bring you toward your desired goals.
The easiest way to summarize the ACT model is to observe the two acronyms
related to it. The FEAR acronym determines what the core of most people’s
problems are, which include:
Fusion with your thoughts
Evaluation of experience
Avoidance of your experience
Reason-giving for your behavior

The above-mentioned points demonstrate the process you go through any time
you engage in negative behavioral experiences. First, you have thoughts that
stimulate fear, and you fuse with those thoughts, causing you to believe they are
true. Then, you evaluate the experience based on the negative belief system you
have accumulated around this experience. Then, you avoid the experience
because you have now firmly associated it with something negative or unwanted.
Lastly, you give reasons for your behavior or justify why you are engaging with
this behavior in the first place. All this does is reinforce your negative beliefs
and leave you feeling unable to proceed with certain experiences, for fear of
having a negative experience.
The healthier alternative to FEAR is ACT. Aside from Acceptance and
Commitment Therapy, ACT stands for:
Accept your reactions and be present
Choose a valued direction
Take action
In other words, recognize anytime you feel negative and accept it for what it is;
however, choose to remain present in the moment rather than becoming
entangled with the fears or concerns growing in your mind. Instead of
overreacting, choose a valued direction, or a direction of focus that will bring
you closer to your goals and desires. Lastly, take action on your chosen valued
direction, so you can actually begin to experience positive momentum. By
following the ACT acronym, you gain the ability to recognize an unsavory
situation and turn it in your favor by exerting resiliency and consistency.

The Core Principles of ACT

There are six core principles of ACT that are designed to help you develop your
psychological flexibility, so you have a greater strength with navigating
unfavorable circumstances. The six core principles include cognitive diffusion,
acceptance, presence, observation, values, and committed action.
Cognitive diffusion means you will learn methods that allow you to reduce your
tendency to cling to unrealistic or unreasonable thoughts, images, emotions, and
memories that encourage experiential avoidance. This is essentially the process
where you eliminate your tendency to overreact and instead keep things in
perspective.
Acceptance allows you to accept unwanted private experiences, such as
thoughts, urges, or feelings. Rather than struggling with them or fighting to
eliminate them from your mind, you merely observe them. There is no further
action that needs to be taken. Similarly to how you would not be phased by a
chair being black instead of brown, you choose not to be phased by your
unwanted private experiences, regardless of what they are.
Presence, or contact with the present moment, allows you to increase your
awareness of what is happening right here, right now. The value in this is that
you stop comparing present situations to previous situations or future worries
and instead, allowing yourself to experience the present moment with openness,
interest, and receptiveness. This largely relies on mindfulness so you can deepen
your connection to the present and gain value from it.
Observing is a process where you must observe yourself so you can access a
transcendent version of yourself. Here, you gain continuity of consciousness,
which is unchanging. An excellent way to see this would be to believe that you
have two perspectives: your acting perspective and your observational
perspective. Your acting perspective enables you to interact with the world
around you, while your observational perspective observes you interacting with
the world around you. Using this perspective is a great way to remove yourself
from the emotional implications of the acting perspective so you can take greater
control over yourself and your experience.
Values are essential as they allow you to determine what is important to you.
Through a clear understanding of your values, you gain the opportunity to
determine your valued direction or the direction you would rather take over
anything else. Your values will be highly personal to you, so it is helpful to
spend time uncovering your real values, as the emotional attachment you have to
them will be fundamental in helping you choose preferred behaviors.
Committed action is where the change really happens. Once you have set goals
according to your values, you have to carry those goals out responsibly, using
committed action. This means that as soon as you make a goal, there is no room
for excuses or backsliding. You must put one foot in front of the other and move
toward your goals; otherwise, you will be holding yourself back and failing to
implement the life-changing benefits of ACT .
 Chapter 2: Experiential Avoidance
Experiential avoidance is what ACT practitioners believe drives people to
experience pain and suffering in the first place. This behavior is broadly defined
as one that causes you to avoid feelings, thoughts, physical sensations,
memories, or other internal experiences, often by avoiding external
circumstances that stimulate them. Though it may seem useful and protective
early on, continued avoidance leads to harmful experiences in the long run. It is
said that experiential avoidance is maintained through negative reinforcement,
which means that you believe something will be negative, so you avoid it, and
you experience momentary relief from that experience. Unfortunately, this can
also lead to negative experiences in the long run, as you continually avoid things
that are meaningful or necessary to your wellbeing.

The Background of Experiential Avoidance

Experiential avoidance is said to be a part of third-wave cognitive-behavioral
research theories, rooted in the practice of ACT. Despite the fact that it is
directly associated with ACT, this behavior has been reported in many other
research forums, as well. The psychodynamic background of experiential
avoidance is that you use it as a defense mechanism to avoid unpleasant or
uncomfortable experiences in life. It was thought that your behavior contributed
to the expression of various forms of psychopathology and that to eliminate
experiential avoidance, you would have to gradually remove your defense
mechanisms, which would eventually lead to good psychological health.
Process-experiential therapy lies in the background of experiential avoidance by
acknowledging that this behavior means a person is not fully aware of or open to
the entire experience of life. As a result, they avoid certain experiences because
they are merely not open to experiencing them.
Behaviorally, experiential avoidance has been recognized as being a learned
behavior that people use to “counter-act” discomfort. They believe that gradually
increasing one’s exposure to these avoidance behaviors enables a person to
increase their resiliency toward the discomfort and distress they experience in
these circumstances.
Cognitive theory suggests that avoidance of any sort is caused by negative
thought patterns, which cause people to engage in distorted beliefs about
seemingly negative experiences. These distortions are believed to contribute to
experiential avoidance because a person has convinced themselves that the
experience must be avoided for them to maintain their wellness, despite this not
always being true.
Lastly, third-wave cognitive-behavioral theory suggests that avoidance is caused
by repeated, unwanted behaviors that often happen automatically within the
mind. They suggest that we cannot control these thoughts, but we can control the
behaviors that stem from these thoughts by not offering any power or value to
the thoughts themselves. This way, you can instead choose more intentional
thoughts and beliefs, and follow those with a commitment to your action. This is
where we arrive at the point of ACT.

Problems Caused By Experiential Avoidance

Engaging in experiential avoidance may seem like a wise solution to immediate
troubles; however, it creates lasting damage to your wellbeing. The more you
engage in experiential avoidance, the more you reinforce that there is something
to avoid, therefore causing you to start having more exaggerated emotional
responses to different triggers in your life.
One significant reason that experiential avoidance is not helpful is that it causes
you to avoid experiencing an inevitable, natural part of life. Distress is
something everyone experiences, and while avoiding it may seem like a good
temporary solution, the long-term impact is that you lose your resiliency. Rather
than being able to navigate challenging experiences, you find yourself
continually running away from everything. Over time, you find yourself
becoming less tolerant of distress, making it so you struggle more with smaller
situations, to the point where it feels as though you cannot reasonably participate
in anything that stimulates stress, for fear of the experience of stress itself.
The fact that experiential avoidance reinforces your avoidant behaviors is
another significant issue with this coping method. Anytime you avoid
something, you reinforce that said thing is bad, which leads to you becoming
more afraid of engaging in that task. This is particularly troubling when the task
in question is a necessary or enjoyable task that is highly unlikely to cause any
problems in your life, such as learning a new hobby or skill that you are not yet
good at. As you continually reinforce your avoidant behaviors, you tell yourself
that feelings of anxiety, nervousness, discomfort, or distress are inherently bad
and should be avoided. In reality, many things you do in life will trigger these
emotions; this does not mean they are all bad, however. Many tasks are perfectly
fine and even enjoyable to engage in, yet if they are new to you, the very fact
that they are new may make you feel anxious and cause you to avoid them.
Stimulating the notion within your mind that these emotions are inherently
dangerous means that you become warier of them and begin to overreact even
more toward them. As you continue this cycle, you find your tolerance toward
distress, lessening each time you avoid a distressing situation.
A factor that few ever consider is that maintaining avoidant behaviors requires a
great deal of effort and energy. Emotions like anxiety, fear, and distress demand
high energy from your body and can be rather overwhelming to endure. The
longer you keep them up, and the more sensitive you get as your tolerance
toward distress is reduced, the more challenging your emotions are to sustain.
This can lead to a myriad of issues, ranging from poor overall mental health to
feelings of despair and defeat. Further, you miss out on many things because you
are not capable of engaging the required level of emotional resiliency to help
you get through the said situation.
As you continue to engage in avoidance, you also lose the ability to gain joy
from the present moment and engage in necessary activities because of how you
are feeling. The deeper you slip into this habit, the more impactful it becomes. In
worst-case scenarios, people completely lose the ability to engage in everyday
life because even the most average or mundane tasks feel excessive. In the
average person, these behaviors form the foundation for the well-known habit of
procrastination, which an overwhelming number of people struggle with.
Some of the specific symptoms people with avoidant behaviors include isolation,
suicidal ideation, avoiding trauma reminders, hypervigilance, avoidance of
social situations or panic-inducing situations, restricted travel beyond “comfort
zones” physically and emotionally, obsessive checking or rituals, addictions,
eating disorders, and self-harm. The reality is, experiential avoidance is highly
destructive to your wellbeing and needs to be stopped, so you no longer
experience the damaging side effects of this behavior.

How Experiential Avoidance Affects Quality of Life

Your quality of life is drastically reduced anytime you engage in experiential
avoidance. As you continue to uphold this behavior, you find yourself rapidly
missing out on necessary experiences that add to the quality of your life.
At first, you may find that you start missing out on social experiences or passing
over the opportunity to try something new because the idea of facing a stressful
situation becomes overwhelming. If you were traumatized, you might avoid the
location in which the trauma happened and the people associated with the
trauma. You may find yourself not taking advantage of opportunities, failing to
follow through on personal goals and not fully participating in social
experiences. Instead, you stand off to the side or avoid the more overwhelming
aspects of social engagements, such as meeting new people or joining crowds.
As your experiential avoidance continues, you find yourself losing even more to
it. You may stop going to social engagements altogether because you cannot
maintain conversations with people without excessively scanning them, or your
environment, for dangers. If you do arrive, you likely avoid communicating with
anyone or enjoying yourself, for fear of what might come of the situation itself.
You will likely start losing some of your friends because you struggle to connect
with people that are not familiar to you. It is possible that you might also stay in
toxic relationships to maintain the security of familiarity and comfort. If you
were traumatized, the areas you can no longer visit without being triggered
might start to expand, and you may find yourself avoiding even more people,
particularly those that remind you of the people you associate with your trauma.
At its worst, experiential avoidance can lead to you, avoiding virtually
everything. You may stop leaving the house because nothing beyond your front
door feels comfortable. You lose relationships with people that were
significantly closer to you, such as best friends and family members because you
are unable to do anything to maintain them. You might even sabotage these
relationships in an effort to eliminate them from your life, so you no longer have
to exert the energy necessary for maintaining them. Some people lose their
marriages, jobs, and homes because they struggle so significantly with the
necessary tasks required to maintain these things.
When it reaches extreme levels, people will even start avoiding themselves and
neglecting necessary self-care routines like basic hygiene or feeding one’s self
because they cannot stand to face themselves. Instead, you might find yourself
staying in bed because everything beyond the comfort of your bed feels
dangerous or too overwhelming to experience. If it gets to its absolute extreme,
you might start having suicidal thoughts because you are trying so hard to avoid
yourself and the pain you cause yourself through these very behaviors.
This is a highly toxic cycle to find yourself in, and it can lead to innumerable
issues in people’s lives. It is without a doubt that maintaining this cycle will lead
to your suffering and will take you deeper and deeper into the pit of suffering
until you reach rock bottom. Fortunately, no matter how deep this cycle gets you,
you can always partake in healthier coping methods to help you relieve yourself
and engage in a higher quality of life. ACT is an excellent way to pull yourself
out of an unhealthy cycle so you can start taking better care of yourself and
nurturing your emotions.

Why Experiential Avoidance Is an Unhealthy Approach

Experiential avoidance may seem appealing at first, especially when it is only
used in small or insignificant situations because it does not have an immediate
impact. You might justify that you do not want to expose yourself to things that
make you feel bad, or that you need to avoid things to protect yourself. In some
circumstances, abstinence is a great tool; however, if you are actively avoiding
something, it is rarely useful.
Genuine abstinence means to witness the toxicity or harm in something and
intentionally withdraw yourself from that experience to avoid inevitable harm
from it. For example, if you have a highly toxic friend in your life and
intentionally end that relationship to avoid the destruction of their toxicity in
your life, that is a natural, healthy form of abstinence. If, however, you begin
avoiding your friend because the idea of exerting that amount of energy is
distressing, or the location they invited you to gives you anxiety, you are now
engaging in an unhealthy form of existential avoidance.
Even so, to a small extent, existential avoidance is okay. As long as you are not
using it consistently and allowing its presence to expand in your life, you are
likely fine. The moment you start letting this behavior expand, though, or take
over, you start experiencing its negative impact. At this point, you are no longer
using this behavior intentionally or meaningfully, but are using it to escape or
run away from something, which is where the real root of this problem lies.
ACT works excellently with eliminating this behavior from your life because it
allows you to acknowledge it and mindfully observe this behavior without
feeding into it. Rather than actively trying to avoid or stop your avoidance, or
feed into it, you acknowledge it and choose to act in spite of it. At first, this feels
uncomfortable because the idea of acting in spite of how you are feeling seems
impossible, yet as you continue to practice this, you discover that it is not nearly
as challenging as you may have originally thought. It simply requires resiliency,
which is precisely what you are developing when you engage in the ACT .
 Chapter 3: Cognitive Fusion
Cognitive fusion is a highly common experience in people who have anxiety,
and it defines the way a person relates to their thoughts or the beliefs they have
about their thoughts and feelings. For a basic explanation, this affects the way
you view yourself based on your experiences and affects the way you view your
experiences. At the core of it, your cognitive fusion is likely focused on being
disappointed in yourself or the way you are behaving, which is what leads to
overreaction and avoidant behaviors. It also leads to you destroying your sense
of self-esteem and confidence because you are constantly reaffirming how
disappointed you are in yourself.
Cognitive fusion is not specific to negative emotions. It can be felt with positive
and negative emotions alike, which is what makes this behavior so challenging.
As you are actively becoming more anxious about distressing things, you are
also becoming more attached to pleasant things. This leads to you having
distorted views of yourself, and your life experiences, because of your
interpretations.

Creating Strong Connections to Automatic Beliefs

Cognitive fusion means you formulate beliefs about certain things, such as your
thoughts, emotions, or experiences. These beliefs are often automatic in nature
and lead to you judging these experiences to determine whether they are positive
or negative. The problem here is your judgments, not your experiences; however,
these judgments and automatic beliefs can lead to highly negative experiences
and avoidant behaviors by proxy.
Without adequate mindfulness and awareness around what is happening, it is
easy to create strong connections to your automatic beliefs. If no one has told
you these are likely untrue, and you yourself have yet to recognize this, you
might assume anything that crosses your mind is automatically true. Thus, you
cling to your initial judgments and maintain a closed mind around them and, as a
result, a closed mind around change.
The stronger your connection to your automatic beliefs, the more significant
your emotional responses will be, and the more challenging it is to stimulate
change. However, it is never impossible to stimulate change so long as you are
willing to take the necessary action to change. Once you realize that your
automatic beliefs are not inherently true, you can start taking actions to detach
from them and make healthier choices.

Formulating Automatic Beliefs About Ourselves

Automatic beliefs are not exclusive to your judgment of the things around you or
the experiences you have. You formulate automatic beliefs about yourself, too,
which determines how you view yourself, or who you view yourself as being.
The beliefs you form about yourself not only shape how you see yourself but
also impact the way you show up in the world around you. Human psychology
dictates that we play the role we see ourselves as being. For example, if you see
yourself as being the caregiver, you will look for every opportunity to play the
role of caregiver. Likewise, if you see yourself as having low self-esteem, a lack
of confidence, no self-worth, being incompetent, and lacking the ability to add
value to the world, you will show up in that way.
Our automatic beliefs about ourselves are formed based on what other people
have told us about ourselves, or what other people have said about
characteristics we identify with. For example, if your dad said anyone that liked
soccer was a loser, and you grew up liking soccer, you might identify as a loser
because you identify with the truth of liking soccer. These automatic beliefs are
ones we rarely realize we have about ourselves, which means you may not
necessarily know what all these beliefs are. However, they exist, and they
heavily impact your relationship with yourself and the way you show up to life.
As you begin to work on eliminating these automatic beliefs, you might find that
they only reveal themselves gradually. This is because you are unlikely to be
thinking these things openly or in a conscious way. Instead, they are automatic,
or subconscious, and they guide you without you even realizing they exist. Self-
awareness and observation of your private experiences is an excellent way to
start bringing these beliefs to light so you can eliminate them from your mind.

Some Automatic Beliefs Create Disappointment

Not all automatic beliefs are negative, however many of them can be, and they
create negative experiences within us. The automatic beliefs you have that cause
you to harshly judge yourself or your experiences leads to a deep sensation of
disappointment, which causes you to believe you are a disappointment
altogether. This experience is not depicted by any level of extreme, either.
Ordinary people experience this, as well as people that have been traumatized or
trapped in unhealthy mental cycles for any period of time.
When your automatic beliefs create a sense of disappointment, it drastically eats
into your self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-worth. This is unlikely to be a
conscious descent, but over time it lowers these qualities to the point where you
start to feel as though you genuinely lack these things in your life.
An excellent way to draw your awareness towards negative automatic beliefs is
to look for areas of disappointment in your life. Notice if you feel disappointed,
and draw your awareness to the root cause of your disappointment, which
generally lies in an activity, emotion, or thought you are experiencing. Following
the trail back to what originally caused the disappointment will inevitably lead
you to a belief that you are experiencing, either regarding the experience you are
having, or who you believe you are because of this experience.
For example, let’s say you start feeling disappointed one evening, and you
realize it is because your friend invited you to come over, but you declined.
Perhaps you find you feel disappointed because you said no to spending time
with a friend despite not having seen them in a while, yet you said it because you
genuinely did not feel like going anywhere that evening. In this case, the
problem is not that you honored your need to stay in, but that you have
formulated a negative opinion about your decision to stay in. Maybe you dig
deeper and discover that you feel negative about not having seen her in a while
because you believe that friends should see each other on a regular basis. In this
case, you have reached the problematic belief: that you are a bad friend for not
seeing your friend in a while. Naturally, something like this would cause
disappointment.
Often, our automatic beliefs that lead to disappointment and us believing we are
negative in some way are untrue. They are beliefs we formed based on what
other people told us, or they are beliefs we formed based on assumptions we
drew from experiences we had in the past. Just because someone said something
does not mean it is inherently true; likewise, just because you experienced
something once does not mean that’s the way it will always be. It is important to
challenge your automatic beliefs and intentionally sort through them, so your
beliefs are more supportive of your wellbeing.

Cognitive Diffusion and Changing Your Automatic Beliefs

If cognitive fusion means to cling tightly to something and assume it’s meaning,
then cognitive diffusion naturally means you would want to gain space and
perspective about something. When you are able to diffuse yourself from
something, you give yourself space from judgment, the emotional implications
of the judgment, and the obsession with the experience. Instead, you gain the
ability to contemplate something, reflect on its actual meaning, and discern your
genuine beliefs rather than automatically accepting everything as being true.
During cognitive diffusion, your number one focus is to challenge the beliefs
you are having. This way, you start to gain some perspective around them and
understand why they exist, as well as how they can be eliminated.
An example of how this may go is:
I feel like I am a bad spouse because I forgot to tell my partner I
love them this morning.
If I’m a bad spouse, I must also be a bad person.
If I’m a bad person, that means I don’t deserve to feel confident,
happy, fulfilled, and loved.
I don’t deserve to feel confident, happy, fulfilled, and loved.
BUT WAIT... is it true that I’m a bad person? (No, I volunteer, I
care for my family, I treat people kindly, I am respectful and
compassionate, those are all good qualities)
Is it true that I’m a bad spouse? (No, I always show up for my
spouse, I make sure they know I love and care for them, and I
respect my partner.)
Do I need to feel so bad about this? (No, it was a mistake.)

These types of inner dialogues are powerful in debunking the myths you cling to
in your mind and making space for you to create and enjoy healthier beliefs. It is
important to have this conversation with yourself every time you formulate
beliefs that create disappointment or other ill feelings about yourself or anything
else.
As you begin to switch the dialogue, be particularly cautious around beliefs that
seem to carry all-or-nothing energy to them and look for more realistic
perspectives that help eliminate the exaggeration from your beliefs. This is an
excellent way to leverage cognitive diffusion to minimize the overreactions that
we can sometimes experience, effectively allowing you to put ACT into action in
your life!
Switch: “I’m never going to be happy ” for “ I’m having the
thought that I’ll never be happy .”
Switch: “I’m never going to get all that done ” for “I’m having the
 thought that I’ll never get all that done. ”
Switch: “I’m going to embarrass myself ” for “I’m having the
thought that I’ll embarrass myself. ”

The more you gain an objective, non-emotional perspective around your

experiences, the easier it is for you to reflect on them and use these reflections to
your advantage. You can begin to shift your perspective around your desires,
allowing you to eliminate the overreactive belief systems. Thus, you begin to
scale back and find yourself creating peace in the present.
Another excellent way to bring an objective, non-emotional perspective into
your experiences is to use the word “just.” This word is known for minimizing
our emotional reaction around experiences, as we justify that it is not significant
or worrisome experience. You could say you are “just” worrying, “just”
obsessing, or “just” anxious, for example, all of which minimizes the
overwhelming impact of either of these experiences .
 Chapter 4: Dominance of Past and Future
Your perception of time and the time period you are living in matter greatly to
your mental health. If you are constantly living in the past or future, you worry
about things that are not meaningful to your present experience. Regardless of
which tense you are living in, you are bringing forth worries that are irrelevant to
your current experience, and that creates challenging emotional experiences. You
must learn to live in the present if you want to stop being managed by an
“automatic pilot” and take meaningful control over your actions.

If You Are Living in the Past...

If you are living in the past, your thoughts are fixated on what has already
happened. Essentially, you use your historical experiences as a gauge to
determine how present experiences are going, and the likely outcome of future
experiences. In your mind, your past gives you prophecies on every outcome
forevermore, therefore causing you to genuinely believe that things will always
turn out the same as they did “that one time.” For example, let’s say, in the past,
you made a joke that someone took seriously, and you felt guilty because you
hurt someone’s feelings. You might stop making jokes around all or most people,
in an effort to avoid unintentionally hurting someone’s feelings. Of course, this
is not a realistic or rational reaction to a solitary experience of hurting someone’s
feelings by accident; however, it is what tends to happen when we live in the
past.
There is a saying that suggests that if you are depressed, you live in the past, and
if you are anxious, you live in the future. The reality is, depression, anxiety, and
many other emotions can be stimulated by the obsessive recalling of past
experiences. Anytime you relive a memory, you experience the emotional impact
it had. In fact, many people will experience a greater emotional impact with each
recollection of that memory because they use it to reinforce their negative
beliefs. Thus, they feel a growing emotional response, effectively leading to an
overreaction.
Once that emotional overreaction starts, it is incredibly challenging to stop it. It
begins to guide your feelings in the present and causes you to feel a sense of fear
or doom about the future, all because of something negative you experienced or
perceived in the past. The more you tap into this obsessive behavior, the worse
this gets, making it exceptionally challenging for you to ever embrace the
present moment. Rather than being able to enjoy the here and now, you are
always worried about the past and what it means about your present and future.

If You Are Living in the Future...

Living in the future is much the same as living in the past, except you worry
about the future more than you do in the past. Your worries about the future may
be rooted in experiences you had previously, which cause you to be distressed by
what is yet to come, though you focus more on the future recurrence of this
experience than the past initial experience. Or, your worries may be rooted in
what you have heard about future experiences or a total lack of awareness
around what they are and how they will play out. When you feel as though you
lack control, you might start to become excessively controlling in an effort to
avoid what you presume will be an unpleasant or distressing experience later on.
You know you are living in the future when your everyday life becomes fixated
on avoidant behaviors because you are avoiding pain or displeasure from future
sources. You begin to assume that you know what is going to happen and how it
will play out, and you refuse to believe otherwise. No one can convince you that
your assumptions are not real or are unlikely, and you believe that you will
virtually always be the one that experiences “bad luck” or “bad outcomes.”
Fixating on the future this way pulls you out of the present, because rather than
focusing on the here and now, you are adamantly trying to stop future pain. The
problem is, you cannot control what will happen in the future, and pain is
inevitable. In fact, the very act of resisting future pain so forcefully is painful, as
you cause yourself to miss out on enjoyable experiences and opportunities due to
your own fears and avoidant behaviors.
As soon as you start to believe you have any level of control over the future, or
that you have any capacity to stop inevitable experiences from occurring, you
have sunk into an unhealthy state. At this point, you are consumed by what is yet
to come and have absolutely no basis in current reality. You make it nearly
impossible to have positive experiences because you are so worried about the
bad that you turn everything into a negative experience. This can be hard to take
responsibility for, however, which commonly keeps people trapped in that
energetic state of fear.

The Curse of the Automatic Pilot

The most significant problem with living in either the past or future is that you
start feeling as though your behaviors are being controlled by an automatic pilot.
Rather than being aware of your strength and ability to make decisions for
yourself, you are fixated on your weaknesses and the struggles you have faced,
or may eventually face. Your primal brain becomes so terrified of having these
unwanted negative experiences that you begin to instinctively protect yourself
from them, thus creating that sensation of being “automatically piloted” by
something inside of yourself.
As you experience more automatic piloting, your behaviors become more
habituated, which means they become even more automatic. The deeper these
habit loops run, the more challenging they are to eliminate because they become
embedded in your subconscious mind. At this point, you are being guided
similarly to how addicts are guided to continually abuse substances: they feel as
though they cannot control the urges, and they feel no sense of relief from the
pain until they engage. Likewise, you feel as though you cannot control the need
to avoid pain, and you feel a sense of pain that you cannot gain relief from until
you follow through on the fear-induced action.
Automatic piloting is a severe experience that can completely pull you from the
present moment, while also turning you into someone that no longer has a
significant sense of control over their day to day experience. You can always
regain your control at any moment; however until you do, you will continue to
feel as though you are run by your automatic pilot. You must learn to release it
and take responsibility for yourself and your experiences if you wish to embody
meaningful change in your life.

Creating a Connection to the Present

The fastest way to apply ACT to your past- or future-obsessive behaviors is to
focus on creating a connection to the present moment so you can increase your
awareness on the here and now. If recognizing your obsessive behaviors was the
process of becoming aware, then creating a connection to the present is your
process of committing to a valued direction. This is the point where you get to
take real, aligned action to make a meaningful change to your experience.
Presence is deepened through your ability to perceive the entirety of the present
moment, which creates a sense of awareness and connection to this time and
space. These behaviors are often called mindfulness behaviors, as their primary
focus is on helping you mindfully connect to the present moment. Each one of
them can significantly support your quest to become more connected to the
present, so you can break your unhealthy obsession with the past or future.
Celebrate the Little Details
Each moment is full of small, wonderful things you can celebrate. A great way to
rapidly connect to the present is to recognize these small things and make time to
intentionally celebrate them and express gratitude for their existence. While you
do not need to spend every moment of every day celebrating, it helps to carve
out time for celebration any time you realize you have become disconnected
from the present moment. For example, let’s say you avoid exercising because
you have associated this with negative emotions; therefore, you have become
experientially avoidant. You are afraid of the future having the same negative
experience as you had in the past. Rather than fixating on your need to avoid
going to the gym at that moment, focus on celebrating yourself for
contemplating going to the gym in the first place. Then, allow yourself to get
ready and celebrate each small step you take toward getting to the gym that day,
from lacing up your shoes to getting through the door and getting started.
We associate celebration with something positive, and each moment has plenty
of positive for you to appreciate. Anytime you are feeling negative or avoidant,
you can start celebrating as many things as possible, which puts you in a mood
of gratitude. Through this, you start feeling more positive, and the pros begin to
outweigh the cons. Thus, you find it becomes easier to get yourself in action
without fixating on the potential negatives of your desired experience.

Describe the Moment to Yourself

Similar to how challenging your beliefs during an experience of existential
avoidance helps you refrain from overreacting to the experience, describing the
moment to yourself is a great way to deepen your presence. Describe the
moment based on what you are doing, where you are, and what that experience
is like for you, paying close attention to the mundane and positive aspects of the
experience, and generally ignoring the negative ones.
If you feel particularly disconnected, there is an excellent mindfulness routine
you can use to help you plug into the present moment and enjoy all it has to
offer. You start by looking for five things you can see, then touching four
different things. Then, you listen for three different things, smell two different
things, and taste one thing. It is helpful to carry a water bottle or gum with you
for this purpose, so you can intentionally drink or chew on something that will
help bring you into the present moment.
Become an Active Listener
Listening is a valuable way to connect yourself to the present moment, as it
prevents you from becoming obsessed with your own thoughts by giving you
something else to pay attention to. When you find yourself detached from the
moment or engaging in something like experiential avoidance or cognitive
fusion, it becomes easy to become so absorbed in your own thoughts that you
hardly hear what is going on around you. You might begin half-listening to
people, or ignoring them entirely as you become absorbed with the thoughts in
your mind, rather than what is being said.
Actively listening, without thinking about how you will reply, is an excellent
way to help yourself plug into the present moment because you replace your
own thoughts with what is currently going on. If no one around you is presently
talking, consider listening to the ambient noise of your environment and
focusing on that, rather than your present experience. The more you create this
sense of connection to your present environment through your senses, especially
without judging them, the easier it is to become mindful and aware of the here
and now.

Release Your Need to Know

Becoming overly attached to the future, in particular, can leave you feeling as
though you must know everything at all times. You might find yourself
attempting to force your way into knowing everything and refusing to take
action until you do, for fear of things going wrong if you are ill-prepared. This
can lead to analysis paralysis, intense fear around acting, and failure to
experience the present joys of life because you are busy sleuthing about future
experiences. Ironically, very few of them go the way you planned, and many that
do go the way you believed they would end up that way because of your
fixation, and not because it would have naturally turned out that way otherwise.
Releasing your need to know allows you to embrace the “acceptance” part of
ACT, while also committing through that acceptance. You gain the ability to feel
confident and safe with your experiences, and with yourself, as you realize that
you will be okay through anything. The more you affirm this to yourself, and
then care for yourself through uncomfortable experiences, the more you realize
you can safely rely on yourself to get through anything, regardless of what it
may be. Thus, you feel safer accepting the future for what it is, and not knowing
all the answers, because you trust yourself and your experiences.

Become Aware of Your Body

When you get wrapped up in your mind, it is easy to quickly lose sight of the
rest of your earthly experience, such as that which you feel within your body. As
you become absorbed in your thoughts, you may miss out on physical cues, or
the power of your physical body, and create a sense of disconnect between
yourself and the real present. In some cases, your body may then do something
seemingly exaggerated to get your attention, or in reaction to your thoughts,
which only makes you feel less safe. For example, if you are anxious about what
is yet to come and you are worrying, your body will start to experience the
effects of anxiety in relation to your thoughts: fast heartbeat, tense muscles,
suppressed metabolism, and other symptoms. What happens when you
experience this level of reaction is your symptoms reinforce your mental
reaction, therefore causing you to feel even worse.
Listening to your body as soon as you feel yourself starting to lose touch with
the presence is an excellent way to correct this. The more you listen to your
body, the easier it is for you to catch signs of it, reinforcing thoughts that are not
true, therefore giving you the power to reverse these reactions. For example, if
you start to feel anxious about a worry that is not a present concern, you can start
breathing slowly and bringing peace into your body, allowing you to release the
anxiety and stay focused on the here and now.

Experience Your Emotions

Suppressing your emotions is a powerful way to knock yourself into the past or
present, or more often, both. You might suppress your emotions about things that
have already happened, or about things that have yet to happen. Either way, you
are holding them up to the point where you can no longer hold them in because
you are emotionally overburdened. Rather than allowing yourself to remain
trapped in the overburdened state, it helps to experience your emotions.
Experiencing your emotions in the present allows you to connect them with their
appropriate trigger, and allows you to fully release them, rather than swallow
them back and pretend they do not exist.
An especially important benefit of expressing your emotions is that, in doing so,
you teach yourself that none of them are dangerous or negative. Instead, all of
your emotions are natural and exist because you are human. If you allow
yourself to observe them and respectfully express them in a way that is
appropriate to any situation you find yourself in, you will have a far greater
relationship with your emotions. As well, it will be significantly easier for you to
heal from the experiences of life.
Be Intentional About Your Actions
If you have spent time stuck in your mind, or worried about the past or future,
then you have likely fallen into the habit of doing this. Rather than intentionally
digging into the present and engaging with the things you are doing, you find
yourself getting distracted, struggling to connect with your present experiences,
and feeling out of touch with what you did each day. You may find that
meaningful or essential things fall out of your mind, as everything seems to just
“fade away,” so you can remain fixated on the past or future.
An excellent way to draw greater levels of mindfulness into your life is to be
intentional about your actions. Remove distractions from your life, and be aware
of things that tend to draw your awareness away so you can intentionally
maintain your awareness at this moment. It also helps to actually engage in, and
savor, your experiences. Move slowly and meaningfully through each step,
whether it be driving, talking, eating, taking care of your body, or spending time
with loved ones. Focus on what you are doing and be as engaged and connected
as possible. When the end of the day comes, put your phone and other
distractions down and spend time reflecting on your day. Become aware of how
you spent your time and what you spent your time doing. If you want, you can
also incorporate a journaling routine into this part of your day as a way to
increase your sense of connection to the present moment .
 Chapter 5: Conceptualized Self
Your conceptualized self reflects who you believe you are and the labels you
have given yourself. Each of us has a conceptualized self or a version of
ourselves. We believe we are based on the way we describe ourselves, the
judgments we make, and the way we label ourselves. Fascinatingly, your labels
can contradict each other depending on when you are asked and what aspect of
yourself you are asked about.
Despite the fact that this is the way you see yourself, many people are unaware
of how they actually describe themselves. Further, they will describe themselves
differently to everyone, which results in confusing conceptualizations about the
self. If you wish to transform the way you view yourself and the experiences you
have, you must learn to identify who your conceptualized self is and modify
your explanation to one that is more supportive of who you truly are and who
you desire to be. Adjusting your conceptualized self, or the story you tell
yourself about ‘who you are’ does not mean you will be lying to yourself about
who you are. Instead, it means you will be more honest and authentic about who
you are and who you want to be.

Identifying the Story You Tell Yourself

The story you tell yourself may be one that fails to support who you genuinely
are and who you desire to be. This does not mean you have been making beliefs
up or lying to yourself; instead, it means the language you have been using to
describe yourself is not aligned with the highest truth of who you are. As
humans, we have a tendency to cling to the most insecure parts of ourselves and
describe ourselves based on them, especially if we feel ashamed of those parts of
who we are. These feelings lead to us bullying ourselves through the stories we
tell ourselves, which causes us to feel terribly about who we are and what we do.
The trouble with conceptualizing yourself as someone you are not is that you
craft a role for yourself that fails to fulfill everything you genuinely are. Instead,
you pigeonhole yourself with a partial description of one aspect of yourself and
force yourself to play the part of that version of you for the long haul. In the end,
you experience a negative self-image and tell yourself poor stories about
yourself, all of which create a negative experience in your life.
The fastest way to identify what story you have been telling yourself is to bring a
small journal with yourself on one of your typical daily routines and write down
any “I am” statement you make about yourself. Anytime you recognize a belief,
come up about yourself, write about it, and keep that in your journal. The more
you become aware of these beliefs, or the stories you tell yourself about who you
are, how you are, and what you are capable of, the easier it is to identify who
you conceptualize yourself as.
Another excellent way to conceptualize yourself is to sit with your journal and
freely write about yourself. Get honest with yourself and write about who you
think you are, how you view yourself, and what you believe to be true about
yourself. You may want to do this across your many moods, as our emotions can
often change the way we perceive ourselves or what we believe about ourselves.
The more aspects you capture, the easier it is for you to get a clear understanding
of your conceptualized self.

Recognizing “I Am” Statements in Your Story

Everything you say about yourself feeds into the story that fuels your
conceptualized self; however, your “I am” statements are particularly important
to be aware of. “I am” statements indicate that you not only believe yourself to
be something, but you believe this to be a part of your identity or something you
strongly associate with. These statements imply you don’t only see these as
something you do, but as an aspect of who you are. If you are not using kind “I
am” statements, these beliefs may be causing you to feel particularly poor about
yourself, even if they are only enacted some times.
As with your overall story, your “I am” statements can change from time to time,
depending on your emotions, your mood, and your recent experiences. As your
“I am” statements change, they indicate how your perception of yourself also
changes with each passing experience you have. Discovering these changes is
important, as it allows you to be more intentional about how you navigate those
emotions without demonizing yourself for having them or reacting to them.
“I am” statements are capable of spreading positivity in your life, as well.
Positive or accurate beliefs you have about yourself are useful to your wellbeing,
as they allow you to see yourself in a healthy way. Negative or self-sabotaging
beliefs, however, especially that are untrue, can cause distortions in how you see
yourself, and how this affects you. You want to move toward using more
positive or neutral “I am” statements, so they are honest and helpful, rather than
negative or self-sabotaging.
The Identity You Believe You Are
The identity you believe you are is rarely the identity you genuinely are;
however, it is the one you are most familiar with. Your identity may be attached
to someone you thought you were in the past, or to someone you falsely believe
you are in the present. Some people also develop their conceptualized self based
on who they fear they may become in the future, or who the people they are
related to are like. If you do not take the time to address who you believe you
are, you will likely discover you have created an identity that is not nearly
authentic to the real you.
Believing you are someone other than yourself is a pandemic in our society;
many people have this experience. It leads to them behaving inauthentically,
struggling with their sense of identity, and feeling entirely disconnected from
their reality. This leads to two sets of troubles: internal and external.
Internally, believing you are someone that is not authentic to who you genuinely
lead to you feeling disconnected from yourself. You can sense that who you are
behaving as and who you genuinely are, are two different people, and that makes
you feel uncomfortable and even unsafe at times. As you continually behave in
alignment with your conceptualized self, rather than your authentic self, you
reinforce that your authentic self is somehow bad or unworthy of what you have
to offer. Rather than feelings of self-confidence, self-assurance, and self-esteem,
you feel a lack of confidence, bad about who you are, and a lack of self-esteem.
The more you reinforce your conceptualized self, the harder it becomes to see
yourself as anyone else. Rather than accepting your wins and recognizing your
strengths, you may fixate on your weaknesses and feel trapped in this false
identity. Anytime you are asked to introduce or describe yourself or are
prompted to face your identity within yourself, you may feel a significant sense
of dread, as you realize you are calling on a description that feels
disempowering, lacking, and disconnected.
Externally, believing you are someone that is not authentic to who you genuinely
are can lead to you experiencing a misaligned reality. Rather than doing things
you enjoy and feel fueled by, you start doing things you dislike or that you
believe are relevant to your conceptualized self, rather than your authentic self.
For example, if you believe you are a bad person and all bad people must work
minimum wage jobs because they are incompetent and incapable of higher
valued jobs, you may drag your feet on your career, boxing yourself into your
conceptualized identity. This can happen in any area of your life, from your
career to the way you manage your finances, enjoy relationships with yourself
and others, show up in love, enjoy hobbies, take care of your health, and
reinforce your faith in whatever you believe in.
The more you live the role of your conceptualized self, the less authentic your
life feels to you. You feel as though you are living the life you deserve, rather
than the life you want, and you have a jaded view about what you genuinely
deserve. Thus, you find yourself experiencing a sense of disappointment within
yourself, as you wonder why you are not capable of changing your behaviors
and becoming the type of person that would deserve what you desire. People that
find themselves here often embody a victim mentality, feeling as though there is
nothing they can do to improve their quality of life or experience something
more enjoyable and fulfilling in their lives.

The Identity You Really Are

The identity you really are is your authentic identity, and it is the one that you
genuinely feel connected to. If you have been disconnected from it, or you are
partaking in a conceptualized role that is irrelevant to who you genuinely are,
you may find yourself feeling ashamed, scared, or overwhelmingly disinterested
anytime you face your authentic identity. You might feel that you wish to be that
“type of person,” but you can’t be because you lack the necessary qualities to be
deserving of such an experience.
As you continually reinforce your conceptualized self, your authentic identity
feels more neglected, and it feels more challenging for you to embrace these
aspects of yourself. Still, you will likely find that certain people or experiences
in your life trigger you to behave authentically, and when you do, you feel the
“most you that you have felt in a long time.” Especially if you have been living
inauthentically, you may find yourself clinging to the people and circumstances
that allow you to feel authentic because it formulates a deep sense of connection
between yourself and the world around you.
Learning to identify and live as your authentic self enables you to bring this
aspect of who you are into your everyday life, which gives you the opportunity
to feel joy in every part of your life. Rather than avoiding areas where you feel
as though you cannot be yourself, and clinging to areas where you do, you feel
confident showing up as your authentic self in everything you do. This creates
harmony between who you are and who you believe you are, which stimulates a
greater sense of fulfillment and joy from your everyday life.
If you have lived inauthentically for any period, especially a long one, it may
seem impossible to identify who your authentic self is. The idea of who you
really are may seem intimidating, overwhelming, or disappointing as you realize
you are not clear on who your authentic self genuinely is. These feelings of
disconnect and disappointment can exacerbate your experience if you are not
careful, as it can lead to an overreaction causing you to feel as though you have
been permanently detached from your authentic self. You haven’t been. What
you need to do is rediscover who you are and spend time mentally and
emotionally reconnecting to your authentic identity by bonding with yourself
and through your experiences. Establishing a healthy, meaningful relationship
with yourself is a wonderful way to deepen your sense of connection and create
more joy in your life.
The process of rediscovering your authentic identity can be challenging and
lengthy, as well as emotional. It is important to be patient and kind toward
yourself during this process, to avoid overreacting or pressuring yourself in any
given direction. Your aim here is not to force your identity in one way or another
but to become curious and genuinely rediscover who you are.

Retelling Your Story and Shifting Your Conceptualized Self

The specific, step-by-step process for retelling your story and shifting your
conceptualized self is easy to explain, yet it may not feel so easy when
actualized. Perhaps the most painful aspect of this work is realizing that you do
not view yourself the way you wish to, and the way that is most authentic for
you. This distorted self-image can lead to a great deal of hurt, and you may feel
betrayed by yourself for allowing you to get to this point in the first place. You
might also feel denial around who your authentic self is. Some people also report
feeling anxious, disturbed, or distressed when they are prompted to spend time
alone, which is necessary when it comes to spending time with yourself. These
are all-natural, normal feelings, and need to be worked through in order for you
to experience freedom from your falsely conceptualized self.
Per ACT recommendations, it is important that you do not overreact to these
feelings, or any other feelings you have upon rediscovering your authentic self.
In doing so, you may drive yourself away from fully discovering and
reconnecting with your genuine identity because you have created an
overwhelming emotional reaction around your experience. The more peaceful,
calm, present, and casual you can keep this experience, the easier it will be for
you to move through it. Recall that to enjoy a truly peaceful and present
experience, you must become aware of and release your emotions; however, you
want to do it calmly and intentionally, rather than with an overreaction toward
how you are feeling.
The first step to retelling your story is clearly identifying your current story. If
you have not already, you need to write your conceptualized story out on paper,
essentially telling yourself who you believe you are and what role(s) you play in
life. Be clear, honest, and specific. This should reflect the way you genuinely
talk to yourself in your private experiences, as this is the only way to honestly
address how you have been treating yourself and repair it. If you feel the need to
exempt certain descriptions because they seem too harsh or unkind, or you feel
any level of shame around having them, this indicates they are deeply
emotionally rooted and require attention. These must be written down so you can
address and heal them.
Secondly, you need to read through that story and discern whether or not it is
accurate, and if it tells the complete truth about who you are. Go point-by-point,
challenging each aspect of yourself, and discovering whether it is authentic to
who you are or if it is an overreaction of a judgment you made toward yourself.
At this point, you can jot the truth down next to your false judgments or
perceptions, as this helps you start to see the reality of who you are and what
your identity genuinely is.
Third, you need to accept the way you view yourself and the way it has affected
your life. Formulating emotional judgments or reacting to this information only
leads to you overreacting, which drives you in the exact direction you are
attempting to recover from. You need to be casually accepting of this
information, receiving it for what it is, and then letting it be.
Fourth, you need to choose a valued direction. Since you are focused on
adjusting your conceptualized self, your valued direction would be to create a
more accurate, authentic self-image that you can subscribe to. This way, you are
identifying yourself per who you really are, and playing the role you genuinely
desire to, rather than identifying yourself falsely and taking on fake roles in an
effort to be who you believe you are supposed to be. You can do this by
objectively observing yourself and writing down the truth about who you are,
including your strengths and weaknesses, with non-emotional language. This
way, it is matter-of-fact, rather than an emotionally charged realization that can
be changed at any time, based on your ever-changing emotional state.
Fifth, you need to commit to your valued direction. Per ACT protocol, once you
have accepted where you are at and identified your new chosen direction, you
must commit to your new chosen direction. Regardless of how you feel, you
must take action toward embodying that direction and fulfilling it, as this is how
you have decided you will be able to follow through on something meaningful
and important to you.
As you follow through on the fifth step, it is inevitable that you will have a
variety of emotional reactions to the embodiment of your authentic self. You
may also experience regressions, as old triggers stimulate your emotions and
cause you to shy away from showing up authentically. Fortunately, this is all
stuff that can be navigated by becoming aware of how you are feeling, accepting
it for what it is, and continually recommitting to your chosen valued direction.
The more you do this, the more you reinforce your authentic identity, and the
greater confidence you feel in becoming that variation of yourself. As you
embody your authentic identity more frequently, you will feel a deeper sense of
connection to this part of yourself, which will guide you toward a more positive
experience.
 Chapter 6: Disconnected Values
The further we veer away from our authentic selves and experience the
challenges of living in misalignment from who we genuinely are, the more
disconnected we become from our values. Disconnected values imply that you
have failed to accurately identify what matters to you or what is important to
you; therefore, you have difficulty knowing who you are and making decisions
that are in alignment with your authenticity. Since your values are your primary
change motivators, you must discover what your authentic values are and
reconnect with them, so you can empower yourself to live a better life and
motivate yourself to embrace change.

Why We Disconnect From Our Values

There are many circumstances that might motivate us to disconnect from our
values in life, especially those relating to trauma or feelings of insecurity. To be
fully disconnected from your values means you are no longer living in alignment
with them, and you may no longer be aware of what they are or why they are
meaningful to you in the first place. Your values represent the most important
things in your life, and the very things that inspire you to live. They give you a
foundational understanding of who you are, as well as guidelines upon which to
base all of your actions and decisions. The clearer you are about your values, the
easier it is for you to live in full authenticity and reap the many rewards of living
a joyous and aligned life.
A common reason one may disconnect from their values is if living in alignment
with all their values seems to be causing pain. For example, let’s say you value
connection and friendship, and you also value artistic expression. If you find
yourself surrounded by friends that do not value artistic expression, you may
disconnect from this value in an effort to fulfill your value of connection and
friendship. Over time, you might find yourself gradually disconnecting from
many values in an effort to fit in or reap in the assumed rewards of releasing
them. Most often, there is some sort of materialistic promise or societal gain
offered that motivates you to behave this way in the first place.
Another significant way people disconnect from their values is when they begin
to value someone else over themselves, such as a friend, family member, partner,
or child. Valuing someone over yourself leads to the mindset of “I’m less
important,” which can lead to you upholding their values and supporting them
more than you support yourself. You might start to make decisions for your life
that are in their best interest, which leads to you losing sight of what you value
and falling out of alignment with your authentic self.

The Impact of Having Disconnected Values

The most significant symptom of disconnecting from your values is a lack of
happiness. When you no longer live for the things that light you up and strike
you as being the most important thing in the world, you stop feeling any sense of
joy in your life. You also lack fulfillment and the vivacious energy to show up to
and experience the life you are living. You may begin to embrace life with a lack
of energy and enthusiasm, overlook various aspects of your reality, and continue
to make poor decisions for yourself.
Another side effect of disconnected values is that you start conceptualizing
yourself as being unworthy and unimportant. You might begin to falsely believe
that you only live to serve others, creating people-pleasing tendencies, or a
tendency to do whatever it takes to fit in with the people around you. Because
you view your identity as being so poor and disconnected, you might also start
creating entirely fake identities and forcing yourself to be someone you are
genuinely not, in an effort to “escape” the reality of who you are. This creates an
overreaction where you assume that being you is the worst thing in the world;
therefore, you must be anyone except yourself.
As you continue to experience a disconnect from your values, the quality of life
you live drops significantly. You stop taking opportunities, doing things you
enjoy, and living a life you love because you trap yourself into thinking you are
someone you are not. As this keeps up, you find yourself becoming worse and
worse until eventually, you can no longer stand to be around yourself. Some
people even experience intense mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual
burnout because they have forced themselves to live inauthentically and based
on disconnected values for so long that they no longer feel driven to do anything.
Rediscovering Your Authentic Values
Your authentic values are the only thing that can give you the energy you require
to live the life you desire. Rediscovering your authentic values means
uncovering what is genuinely important to you and adjusting your life, so you
are living for your authentic values. Similar to discovering your authentic
identity, doing this allows you to come into alignment with who you really are
and enables you to start living a life that lights you up and brings you joy.
Through the inclusion of your values, you also gain the opportunity to
experience real motivation toward living a life that is fulfilling for you.
Your values are the “secret sauce” that gives you the fuel you need to get
anywhere you want to in life. They light you up, invoke deep emotion, and give
you such a meaningful reason to “why” you ought to do something that it seems
impossible to say no or do anything else. You must learn to rediscover these and
embrace them in your everyday life if you receive the drastic benefit they have
to offer you, and the quality of life you gain by living in alignment with them.
To rediscover your authentic values, you should start with a “beginner’s mind.”
This means you want to release everything you believe about values and your
values in particular, and instead focus on learning your values as though you are
doing so for the first time. Once you reach this state, begin writing down all of
your personal values in your journal, per what you think they are. If you search
online, you can discover lists with more than 400 values to choose from; I
suggest finding one and reading through it so you can evaluate what you really
care about. Be sure to rate each value from 1-10, with ten being the most valued,
to get a sense of where your priorities fall, as priorities do impact values.
Next, you need to chunk your core values into related groups, which allows you
to get an understanding of what the central themes are within your values. From
there, you want to highlight the word that best describes the authentic value you
have from each group you made. Then, you can define your top personal core
values. You can highlight as many as you desire, though the common range
seems to be between 5-10 core values, as this is memorable yet provides you
with enough insight to drive you.
After you have defined your core values, you must give them a rich context, so
you establish a meaningful personal and emotional connection to each value.
Write about them in a way that is inspiring, and that is easy to repeat to yourself
so you can reflect on your values often. Then, reflect on all of the values you
have defined and notice if you genuinely feel connected with them or not. If not,
give yourself time to sit with the values you have highlighted, then try this
exercise again until you reach the point where you have highlighted values that
feel authentic to who you genuinely are. This may take time, but it is well worth
it to revisit as often as needed to ensure you always feel a significant connection
to your authentic core values.

Adjusting Your Decisions Based on Your Values

Until now, you have been making decisions based on disconnected values. This
leads to you making decisions that are misaligned, acting based on how you
believe you are supposed to or doing what everyone else tells you is right.
Rather than living a life you want to live, you are living in a reaction to everyone
and everything around you. Once you have uncovered your core values, you can
use them to help guide you toward making intentional decisions for yourself and
your wellbeing.
Values are genuinely intended to be used as a guide, or a set of “rules” you live
your life by. Through choosing based on your values and your priorities, you
enable yourself to create a life of intention, rather than one where you merely
coast by, which is what leads to many troubles in the first place. Getting used to
making decisions based on your values can be difficult, though. Likely, you
experience habitual people-pleasing tendencies, as you have betrayed your own
values for others. For this reason, you might find it easier to choose what you
think you are supposed to choose, rather than what you genuinely want to
choose.
Adjusting your decision making to match your genuine values requires you to
adjust that habit so you can start living a life that you are proud of, and that feels
good for you. This way, you increase your feelings of worthiness, love,
deservingness, self-esteem, confidence, and fulfillment, as you continue making
the choices that are right for you, rather than the choices that are right for
everyone else.
You making decisions aligned with your values does not mean neglecting to
consider other people and their needs as a part of your decision-making process.
Instead, it means remembering to consider your needs as well, which is
something you have likely failed to do if you have been living based on
everyone else’s needs.
The four most important questions you can ask as a part of your decision-making
process include:
1. Which approach best aligns with my core values? You should
always make the decision that best aligns with your core values,
while also helping you meet your desired goals. If the solution is
not obvious, mull it over or talk to someone so you can get help
finding the option that will honor your values and help you reach
your desired outcome.

2. What are the specific details related to this commitment?

 Sometimes, decisions may seem aligned with your core values
until you inspect them further and realize they have details that
do not. Some details may not be flexible; however, many are. If
you discover that a decision seems good, except it fails to align
with certain values, see if you can identify a different approach
that supports everything.

3. Does this honor other people’s values? When you make

decisions that affect other people, such as parental decisions or
managerial decisions you might make on a day to day basis, you
need to consider their values, too. It is important to make
decisions that honor everyone’s values, so you are all able to have
your needs met in each scenario. This strengthens your abilities
as a parent, coach, leader, and individual.

4. Does this give me strategic direction toward my big picture

goals? Your big picture goals should align with your values and
ideally should contain aspects of your values in them. It is always
important to look at where you will be with the outcome of a
decision and whether or not it has the necessary supports to guide
you toward your big picture goals. When making a decision,
always favor those that guide you closer to your desires, as the
others may not be meaningfully aligned with your goals.

Answering these questions should help you identify where the aligned decision
lies, or at least recognize if no aligned option has been discovered yet.
Once you have discovered the aligned answer, you need to be assertive in
making that decision. As mentioned previously, it may feel strange to assert
yourself and make a decision this way; however, it is essential that you do. The
more you practice making aligned decisions and respecting your own values and
boundaries, the easier it will be to create a life that feels genuinely fulfilling for
you.

Living a Life in Alignment With Your Authenticity

The majority of people are living their lives for everyone else. Not intentionally,
that is merely how our society is shaped, and most people believe that is what is
expected of them. It is uncommon to go against the standard unless you have
become aware of areas where the standard is no longer working and decide to do
so. Upon following your own values, however, you seamlessly step away from
the people-pleasing reality that many follow, and instead give yourself the
opportunity to follow your needs. Through this shift, you are able to reclaim a
sense of connection to your life, and therefore the energy, motivation, and
validation you need to pursue the things that are meaningful to you in life.
You will likely find many new opportunities to start making decisions that align
with your values and living a more authentic life as a result. It is common to first
go through the most problematic areas of your life and make these shifts, then to
realize that there were indeed many other areas that had been affected by this
habit, too. What most people fail to realize is that your fundamental skills are the
same no matter how they are used. When you make decisions in love, and when
you make decisions in finances, for example, you make them the same way.
Something in your mind guides you to the things you must consider when
making your decision, then encourages you to make a decision based on this
habitual process. Due to how this works, you may find yourself making poor
decisions in all areas of your life, yet the problems have concentrated around
certain areas of your life, making those parts seem much worse than the rest. The
reality is, if you want to change this habit in one area of your life, you need to
change it in all. Discovering how to make more aligned decisions and how to
meet your own needs is important, as it provides you with the information you
need to make meaningful choices.
 Chapter 7: Lack of Activity and Commitment
Mindset is at the root of everything. The way you think, process experiences,
and believe – all affect the way you live your life and the interactions you have
with the people and world around you. As you make changes in your life, it is
natural to focus on changing your mind first, ensuring that you have the
necessary mental foundation upon which to build the rest of your change. Once
you have established a healthier mindset, however, you must take action toward
genuinely fulfilling those other necessary steps of change. Among them includes
a change in your actions, which facilitates a change to the practical outcome of
your experiences.
Failing to follow through on taking new steps and committing to a new way of
doing things means that the entirety of your work done on a mindset level is
rendered irrelevant. As soon as you fail to follow through on the physical steps
of your committed change, you reinforce that your new beliefs are likely untrue
since you cannot even tangibly experience them. Thus, you rapidly revert to old
ways of thinking.
Your brain requires evidence to prove the changes you have been implementing
are valid, real, and worthy. You must follow through and create new results
through your fresh actions, which creates evidence that your new beliefs are,
indeed, true and that you are safe to have faith and believe in them. Once you
begin this cycle, your primary focus is to continue to remain committed to
change, so you can feed your brain with new evidence and use that evidence to
continually fuel your personal growth. This cycle will continue as you reach into
higher and more enjoyable levels of self-fulfillment and personal growth.

Awareness Is Not the Same as Change

Far too often, people dig deep into their mindset work and develop great
awareness around where their troubles are, yet they fail to then implement
practical steps to change their experiences. An excellent example of this is about
people and the way they maintain their health. Often, people fail to maintain
their health because they lack the knowledge to improve their health, or they are
unaware of the necessary steps. Once they become aware, they continue to
maintain poor health despite knowing everything required of them to achieve
new outcomes. Why? Because awareness is not the same as change.
A transformed awareness provides you with a firm foundation upon which to
build change and offers you a pivotal moment in time. Before that awareness,
change seems impossible because you genuinely lack knowledge around what
needs to change, how, or why. After, changes remain unseen because you lack
the knowledge around how to tangibly implement change and commit to
accessing your new results. Decision-making skills and implementation skills are
not things we are specifically taught about as children. We learn about colors, the
alphabet and numbers, and many other things through our parents and school.
However, we are not generally taught things like decision-making, commitment,
confidence, or other such skills. Instead, we are left to “figure these ones out” on
our own, as we are guided through other lessons. These skills are then seen as
the by-product of everything else.
Since we are not directed on how to make sovereign decisions, we often find
ourselves looking to others so they can validate our decisions. This leads to the
foundation of people-pleasing behavior, rather than the making of value-based
decisions. When we find ourselves at a point where we need to make decisions
or exert commitment, we still feel unsafe or incapable of using these skills.
When no one guides us through the process, we simply break off from it and
ignore it, hoping the pain or discomfort goes away. It doesn’t.
After discovering the necessary awareness that allows you to identify and
implement change in your life, you must start making better decisions and
following through on your commitments. We have already discussed how you
can align your decisions with your values by identifying your values and using
them as guides or “rules” to how you make your decisions. Using the same
process will help you with your ability to remain committed, too.
Aside from making the decision, you must then exercise commitment by seeing
that decision through. This is where you take that shifted mindset or perspective
and implement it in your life so you can use your new knowledge to genuinely
improve the quality of your life. Through this, you gain the opportunity to have
new experiences and liberate yourself from old, unwanted behavioral patterns.

Commitment to Change Requires Action

There are varying beliefs around what is required in order for you to commit to
change. Many believe time spent exploring the past and uncovering the reasons
behind your lack of commitment will help you expand your commitment now.
While deeper self-understanding is always valuable, this approach is not the
quickest or most efficient method for you to get where you desire to go.
Commitment to change requires action, as you must take steps toward genuinely
implementing that change in your life. Expanding on the healthy lifestyle
example, we might consider that the person not implementing these changes is
not doing so because they are not committed to making changes. Prior to seeing
changed results, they must make this commitment. They can get to the point of
making it by using their values to align the outcome with their deepest
motivators, thus creating an inner desire to commit to taking action. Then, they
can take committed action so they can see the tangible effects of these
experiences in their life.
Perhaps the hardest part of physically taking new action is that it requires you to
break free from your existing habits and routines, which can feel uncomfortable.
Some people genuinely experience feelings of distress toward these changes, as
their original structure brings a sense of comfort and peace to them, and going
against it feels as though they are disrupting their comfort and peace. To work
through this, maintain your motivation by reaffirming your values and reviewing
how this decision aligns with your values. Then, use that to motivate yourself to
take one step toward change. Continue putting one foot in front of the other as
you create more change for yourself, and the momentum you create will lead to
entirely changed actions. Through that, you will reach the point of experiencing
a genuine change in your life, which includes changed results.
It is necessary that you continue to take these changed steps, even after you
reach your desired outcome. Often, once we see the fruition of our efforts, it can
be easy to lose that momentum as you feel as though you have now “made it.” If
you stop taking these actions, however, you discover that your momentum slips,
and you lose the results you had worked toward. This process creates a sense of
insecurity and can disrupt your self-esteem and confidence, making it more
challenging for you to embrace change again in the future. Through maintaining
your actions and staying consistent, you can avoid this and maintain the results
you created through your initial commitment to change.

Shifting to New Behaviors

According to James Prochaska from the University of Rhode Island, there are
five stages of change that must be enacted if we will experience complete
transformation in our lives. Failing to embrace the five stages of change means
you find yourself rapidly reverting to old cycles, as you fall back from any effort
you may have already put in. This can be disheartening and leads to a lack of
change overall. It is also entirely common and is the number one reason why
people fail to follow through on their desired changes. In fact, we can even
blame one’s failure to complete the five stages of the reason why almost nobody
maintains their new year’s resolutions each year!
The five stages of change include precontemplation, contemplation, preparation,
action, and maintenance. In order to maintain any change in your life, or shift
any behavior you might have, you must engage in all five of these five stages of
change. Missing even one can leave you struggling to genuinely connect with
and maintain your desired change, which leads to the dreadful and demotivating
backslides.
Precontemplation is the first stage of change, and it actually marks everything
that comes before change. At this point, you are engaged in the behavior that
will soon be changed, yet you have no intention to change that behavior. At this
point, you are likely unaware or under aware of what needs to be changed, and
may even be in denial if people attempt to point the behavior out to you.
Contemplation is the second stage, and this is the point where you become aware
of the fact that a problem exists and have seriously considered your need to
change it. At this point, you have not yet taken committed action, so you are
merely contemplating change. This is why we say “awareness does not equal
change,” and this is the point where many people get caught up and fail to ever
move beyond. This stage can be clung to if you believe it will be hard or painful
to lose or release the unwanted behavior, so you simply decide not to, even if it
continues harming you.
Preparation is the third stage, and this is the point where you intentionally begin
gathering information and planning for how you will change. This part is
extremely important, as fifty percent of people that skip this stage will revert
back to the unwanted behavior within three weeks of starting their changed
behavior. Remember, those regressions can lead to feelings of disappointment
and low self-esteem or self-confidence, so you want to avoid them as much as
possible. They can be avoided by preparing or educating yourself on what it
genuinely takes to make said change, and planning for how you will embrace
each stage. It is essential to also plan for those cravings, withdrawals or urges to
revert back to old patterns, as they will arise, and having a plan in place prevents
you from giving in to them.
Action is the fourth stage, and this is where you begin to modify your behavior.
At this point, you are engaging in overt behavioral change by making different
choices, acting differently, and engaging in different experiences to create your
changed results. This stage requires considerable time and energy, as you must
consciously become aware of unchanged behavior and “manually” change it,
which requires significant effort on your behalf.
Maintenance is the stage where you work to prevent relapse while consolidating
the gains you have attained during the action stage. The maintenance stage
generally lasts a minimum of six months, though it can last for the duration of
your life, especially in situations where addictions may be involved. As you
maintain your gains, you essentially follow through on the plan you made for
how you will commit to new actions, regardless of what challenges you face or
how they affect you.

Overcoming Obstacles and Challenges

As you endure the process of transforming your behaviors, it is inevitable that
you run into obstacles and challenges. Whether it be your own urge to regress to
old patterns, or the external world influencing you to regress, or merely placing
obstacles in your path, all challenges can be difficult to endure. Learning to
recognize and overcome challenges is an excellent way to remain true to your
“maintenance” stage of change, allowing you to continue to experience the
change you have worked toward. This way, the change becomes lasting, and you
benefit from it on an ongoing basis.
There are two excellent tools you can use to help you navigate any obstacles or
challenges you might face. Consciousness-raising and self-reevaluation are both
techniques you can use to draw your awareness to your challenges and re-
commit to your original goal, effectively allowing you to maintain your changes.
Consciousness-raising is a practice where you intentionally build your awareness
and mindfulness around the current situation, allowing you to become more clear
about where your challenges are. This also brings to your awareness any threats
you might face, such as inner cravings or external pressures that might make you
want to regress. Drawing your conscious awareness of necessary areas of your
life is not always as simple as declaring you will become more aware of it and
then scanning your life for those moments. While this certainly helps, if you are
not typically paying attention to this area of your life, it means there is still
plenty that can be missed. There are also practical steps you can take to help
draw your awareness deeper into this area of your life, so you are more likely to
get a grasp on those challenges and correct them before they lead to regressions.
One excellent way to raise your conscious awareness is to have a tracking diary.
Tracking diaries are used to track every time you engage in any behavior
surrounding your desired changes. For example, if you are trying to change your
diet, you would track everything you are eating, or if you are trying to wake up
earlier, you will track your sleep and wake times each day. Tracking things is an
excellent way to keep yourself accountable for change, as it requires you to
physically log your changes and take responsibility for them.
Another excellent way to raise your awareness is to talk yourself through the
process. Explaining each step of the process to yourself ensures you do not
engage in automatic or habitual behaviors without first thinking about what you
are doing, which means you become more aware of your processes. The more
aware you become, the easier it is for you to recognize your behaviors and
identify opportunities for change. It can also help to reflect on these experiences
in a reflection journal later on, so you can keep track of where you felt your
strengths and weaknesses were, and identify opportunities for improvement to
your process.
Self-reevaluation is an essential process in managing obstacles and challenges,
too. This occurs naturally when you raise your consciousness, though it is
something you can also focus on more intentionally. Self-reevaluation means
regularly evaluating how you are doing and what you are doing. As you take
stock of your behaviors and recognize where change needs to happen, you gain
the opportunity to gain greater insight into what you are doing. Self-reevaluation
can be done immediately after you engage in a new process, or a while after,
once you have had time to reflect. If you want to take it to another level, you can
try evaluating yourself both immediately after and later that day, to see how your
perspective shifts as you gain more space from experience.
Tips for Staying Committed
Maintaining your commitment is a skill within itself. It takes effort to uphold
your commitment, especially through obstacles and challenges, when it seems
like it would be easier to just give up and go back to “the old way of things.” In
those moments, you genuinely forget how troubling the “old way” was, and
justify that it would be easier than what you are doing now. Fortunately, there are
eight ways you can motivate yourself to stay on track, even when it seems more
challenging to do.
Firstly, set clear goals for yourself. If you engaged in the preparation stage
properly, you should have clearly defined goals and plans for how you will
navigate obstacles and challenges when they arise. Review your goals for how
you intended to navigate these experiences and recommit to fulfilling those
goals, even if it seems challenging at that moment. Rather than worrying
excessively about how you will recommit, focus on recommitting and, at the
same time, commit to taking the next right step and trusting that the rest of the
process will get easier as you continue developing your momentum.
Revisiting your goals frequently is important, as revisiting them when you are
both empowered and disempowered allows you to view your goals from
different perspectives. Each time you revisit them, give yourself time to reflect
on why you chose these goals in the first place and how you intend to fulfilling
them deeply. Sit with your goals as long as you need to in order to get back to
the place of excitement and positive emotional momentum, then use that to start
taking action toward fulfilling your goals.
Routines are an excellent way to commit to your goals and keep yourself
committed through challenging times. Though routines may seem boring, they
instill positive habits that maintain your momentum and move you toward
successfully achieving your goals. It is helpful to take your time, identify what
routines work best for you, and continue implementing those routines each day.
Over time, you will discover that it is actually more challenging to break your
routine than it is to maintain it because you have become so used to it that the
experience itself brings you comfort and familiarity.
Maintaining your inspiration is an essential part of staying committed. There are
plenty of ways to boost your inspiration, whether it be talking to an
accountability partner or watching a video that revitalizes your motivation.
Building a social circle of empowering people that are pursuing similar goals is
an excellent way to boost your inspiration, which keeps you committed to
achieving your goals.
Sometimes, all you need to maintain your inspiration is some perspective. If you
find yourself struggling to commit to a necessary activity, look at the bigger
picture to understand how that action fits into your success. When you realize
that each action you take has a positive impact on your results, it becomes easier
to justify taking that action so you can see the outcome you desire.
When all else fails, accountability is a powerful tool. Learn to hold yourself
accountable by setting non-negotiable standards around your behaviors, and
uphold those accountability factors each time you see yourself slipping. The key
to holding yourself accountable is to recognize where accountability is needed
and immediately jump into an action associated with your valued direction. The
faster you get into action, the less likely you are to talk yourself out of it.
Burn out is a serious concern when it comes to maintaining your commitments,
especially if they demand more from you than you are used to. It is important to
regularly schedule breaks and time to unwind, especially during high-intensity
goals, to prevent yourself from burning out. If you are prone to burning out or
concerned that it might become an issue, consider burn out during your planning
stage so you can create a plan around how you can deal with it properly. If you
do reach burn out and do not have a plan to navigate it, remember, you can
always take a break, but you should never quit.
Finally, you need to stay the course. Once you have started putting effort into
achieving a goal, it is harder to stop the momentum than it is to maintain it, even
if that seems untrue during moments of difficulty. Recognizing this and staying
the course is important to avoid losing out on the benefits you would have
gained had you maintained your efforts.
 Chapter 8: Defining Your Strategy
Now that you are aware of the many protocols involved in ACT, it’s time to start
defining your strategy for how you will implement it in your own life. Although
ACT is primarily forward-focused, it is helpful to engage in a meaningful
planning stage, to ensure your behavioral changes are sustainable. This way, you
are more likely to maintain them and stay committed, rather than find yourself
backsliding or regressing once the going gets difficult. The key to effectively
enacting the planning stage with the ACT is to plan intentionally and set a
deadline for the planning stage. This way, you do not get caught in analysis
paralysis and find yourself trapped in the planning stages, which is where many
people find themselves stuck and struggle to get beyond.
To avoid getting stuck, I encourage you to follow this chapter through and, once
you are done reading it, commit to accepting your findings and moving forward
with your planned actions. You can always revisit your plans as needed,
especially for planned reevaluations; however, there is no need to remain trapped
in the planning stages. Doing so only holds you back from ever creating the
results you desire.

Evaluate Yourself and Your Life

Before you begin implementing any plans or transformations in your life, it is
essential that you first evaluate where you are and how your life looks in the first
place. Gaining an accurate overview of your current situation ensures you have
the opportunity to clearly recognize your strengths and weaknesses, and discover
areas where you are struggling the most. It helps to not only understand what
these struggles are but why you are experiencing them and how they are
affecting you. The clearer you understand them, the better you will be at creating
a plan to overcome them.
Conducting a proper evaluation of yourself and your life can be done by going
through each of the eight areas of your life and evaluating how those areas of
your life are going. It helps to do this three separate times, as this allows you to
look at each area of your life from a different perspective, giving you the most
accurate evaluation overall. Evaluations can often be clouded by emotions,
thoughts, and opinions, all of which can change from moment to moment, so this
method allows you to get the most in-depth understanding of your problem areas
and how they are affecting you.
Start by taking your journal and writing down each of the following categories
on their own separate pages: wealth, health, career, relationships, romance,
relationship to self, hobbies, and faith. Then, under each page, rate how you feel
about this area of your life overall, using a scale of 1 – 10, where one indicates
you feel bad, and ten indicates you feel good about that area of your life. After
you have rated a section of your life, write down a few reasons as to why you
gave yourself that rating, and what it actually means for you.
Now, under each category, identify all the strengths you believe you have in that
area of your life, followed by all the weaknesses. Be as thorough as you can,
listing everything that comes to mind without judging it for now, as we can look
deeper into why these answers came up later. For now, you simply want to get
everything out on paper so you can get a strong overview of what is going on in
each area of the eight most important areas of your life. Complete this part three
times over, at different times during the day, to ensure you get a full snapshot of
what is genuinely happening in your life.

Start With Your Area of Most Concern

With your general overviews in hand, you can start deepening your
understanding of your evaluations by adding reason and context behind your
ratings. Start by observing the area of your life that you experience most concern
with. This could be one of two things: a specific category of your life, or a
pattern you see rising across all areas of your life. For example, you might
realize that your wealth is of concern because you are not managing your
finances well, which leads to you dealing with financial concerns on a regular
basis. In this scenario, you would want to focus on adjusting your behaviors
surrounding your wealth management habits. Or, you might realize that across
all areas of your life, you have a tendency to be reserved and withhold your
desires in favor of doing what you believe you “should” be doing. In this case,
you would want to focus on adjusting your behaviors around people-pleasing
and start being more assertive about what you genuinely want from your life.
Once you have identified your area of concern, you want to dive deep into what
has gotten you to this point. This is the only form of backward thinking we will
do during ACT, yet it is important as it allows you to clearly define your plan, so
you are more likely to maintain your behavioral changes.
The deepest part of your dive will be in providing context to why you have these
behaviors in the first place. You do not necessarily need to understand why they
began, though it helps to understand why they actively happen each time they
do. Is it habitual? Are you trying to avoid something? Do you think it will
provide you with something? Question yourself about why you continue to
maintain these behaviors, as this helps you understand your motivation. With
that, you can motivate yourself to behave differently.
Toyota, the automobile company, defined the five why strategy is excellent for
work such as this. What it means is you continually ask yourself “why” until you
get to the primary reason, which generally takes no more than five asks.
In action, the five why strategy might look something like this:
- “I do not engage in my friendships, so they are not thriving.” Why?
- “Because I just don’t feel like answering the phone or hanging out.”
Why?
- “Because when I do, they expect things from me.” Why?
- “Because I have a hard time saying no.” Why?
- “Because I don’t want to let anyone down.”
In this case, the individual is not making time for their friends because they are
afraid of letting people down due to unmet expectations. This allows the person
to understand what is driving them to sabotage their relationships, so they can
adjust their behaviors and have stronger friendships.
Complete the five why activity for every concern you have in your life, per the
area of your life you have decided to prioritize right now. You can redo this
activity, and the entire process, when you are ready to focus on healing other
aspects of your behavior and experience, as well. In the meantime, start with just
one area to avoid overwhelming yourself or confusing your direction.

Commit to Offering Deep Acceptance

As soon as you identify the core motivators behind your problematic behavior,
you can stop worrying about the past. Now, rather than concerning yourself with
what initially caused this behavior or how that affects your present, you can
focus on developing deep acceptance around the behavior itself and the
motivators that trigger it. Genuinely accepting this as your experience is an
important way to relieve any negative emotional attachments to your behavior,
which can actually worsen your behavior rather than improve it.
We have a tendency to want to punish ourselves out of unwanted behavior,
believing that through punishment, we can eliminate the undesirables and find
our way to preferred behaviors. Unfortunately, punishment only leads to shame
and worsens your experience, making it more challenging for you to shift
anything as you become less willing to face it in the first place. By moving into a
state of acceptance, rather than punishment, you gain the ability to create peace
with your past and present experiences so you can move toward something more
positive.

Another benefit behind deep acceptance is that you stop blaming. Be aware of
blaming behaviors, even if you are blaming yourself, as blame is a strong
indicator that you have not yet reached acceptance. Feeling the need to blame
indicates that you have strong feelings toward this experience, still, which means
you are creating shame and disappointment in yourself around it. If you discover
yourself blaming anyone or anything for your experiences, stop and shift into a
state of acceptance immediately.
To engage in deep acceptance does not mean to permit something or write off
the pain or challenges associated with it. Instead, it means you have decided to
acknowledge these truths and accept the entirety of the experience for what it is,
even if it is painful or disappointing. As you accept the experience for what it is,
you agree to lay it to rest and stop it from taking up any further real estate in
your mind. Rather than worrying, obsessing, or mulling over it relentlessly, you
are putting it back down and placing your focus elsewhere, on more meaningful
experiences.

Identify Activities You Can Engage In

From the point of acceptance, you are ready to plot your steps for changed
behaviors. This is where you define and propose what you intend to commit to
as you embrace your journey of transformation. You are not yet committing to
anything; instead, you are merely identifying possibilities of what you could
commit to and how these routes might affect your overall experience.
Identifying the activities you can engage in as an alternative to what you have
already been doing requires you to understand your values, so you can move in a
valued direction. It helps to compare possible approaches across your entire list
of values to ensure you choose the direction that respects as many of your values
as possible. For example, expanding on the above scenario of the individual
struggling to engage in relationships, they might observe that they could engage
in relationships without feeling obligated to meet other’s expectations. To do
this, they would define a set of expectations they have of themselves, and use
this to ensure they are engaging in a way that feels good for them, and that
nurtures their relationships. If they were prompted to do anything that went
against their expectations of themselves, they would decline and instead focus on
maintaining integrity with their own expectations, rather than anyone else’s. This
way, they felt good about engaging, even if it felt uncomfortable to say “no”
sometimes. As this individual defined their expectations, they would choose
ones that honor their values, ensuring they were showing up in a way that met
their genuine needs. Any possible expectations they proposed that did not meet
their values would either be shifted or removed, as they would not align with
that person’s needs.
You must do the same thing. Identify possible actions you can take to create a
positive experience for yourself, and compare them against your list of values.
Any time you see a possibility that fails to fulfill your values, you can either
eliminate it from your list or adjust it, so it fulfills your values. Once you
identify the most aligned action you can take to improve your experience, you
have something positive you can commit to. From there, your primary objective
is to commit, and remain committed to, that valued direction anytime you are
engaged in that particular area of your life.

Discover Likely Pitfalls and Short Stops

The most crucial part of planning any change in life is identifying the most likely
pitfalls and shortstops ahead of time, so you are aware of the challenges you
might face. Knowing these challenges in advance means once they arrive, you
are not blindsided or suddenly overcome by emotions that make it feel as though
you must revert to old behaviors. Instead, you can identify how you will progress
toward new behaviors and use that to your advantage.
There is one excellent question you can ask yourself that will allow you to
rapidly identify blocks that prevent you from creating your desired results. The
question is this: “Why have I not already made these changes?” Whether or not
you aware of the changes needing to be made, the blocks have already existed as
a way to prevent you from making said changes. A lack of awareness may have
been one of your original blocks. You might also discover that you experience
blocks through your beliefs, habits, thoughts, emotions, or even from external
influences such as your environment or the people you surround yourself with.
As soon as you identify your likely blocks, you want to complete the same
process of identifying the best-changed behaviors to engage in when these
blocks arise. This might include shifting your thoughts or emotions, gaining
perspective, or physically taking different actions that prevent you from
regressing into unwanted behavioral patterns. As with your other behavioral
shifts, you want to identify the best way to proceed using your values as a
guideline to deciding on your new behaviors. If you must, pivot or
reconceptualize your behaviors to create an approach that will bring you your
desired results in a way that genuinely aligns with your personal needs.

Chronicle Your Plan In Order

Lastly, you need to chronicle your plan in order. Writing your game plan or
strategy down in order ensures you have a clear understanding of what needs to
occur for you to effectively fulfill your changes. This part does not require any
further planning or strategizing; it is simply a way of keeping you organized and
focused on the end result. Despite the fact that it may seem less important than
other parts of the planning stage, this part is essential as it guides you toward
creating clarity around your approach. The clearer you are, the easier it is to take
action because there are no areas where you can become confused or hung up on
how to proceed.
To begin the chronicling process, start with a fresh piece of paper. At the top,
write down what your problematic behavior is and why it needs to be changed,
so you clearly understand why you are making changes. Then, define what day
to day actions you will take to help shift away from your unwanted behaviors.
Lastly, define how you will maintain your changed behaviors in the event of an
obstacle or challenge that would otherwise prevent you from sustaining your
changes.
By the time you have completed your finalized plan, you should be able to look
through it and spot the five elements of a SMART goal: a specific goal,
measurable actions, accurate actions, realistic actions, and a timeline for when
you will check-in. These check-ins will be conducted to help you identify where
you are doing excellent and where you still need to improve your skill. It is
important that you avoid conducting check-ins outside of your scheduled ones,
as doing so can lead to you observing yourself from various perspectives that
may not serve your outcome. When you do the check-in, it should be intentional,
and with the desire to objectively observe how you have been doing so, you can
seek meaningful opportunities to continue. If your “check-in” results in you
declaring nothing is working and it is a waste of time, it is essential to pause and
refrain from checking in again until you calm down. These all-or-nothing
perspectives are frequently associated with anger and frustration and will not be
helpful in getting you your desired results.
 Chapter 9: Engaging Your A.C.T. Model
Creating a plan is excellent, but without action, a plan is merely words thrown
on paper. You must engage your ACT model if you discover how you can
benefit from this particular therapy in your everyday life. What ACT will look
like in your day to day life may be different from how it will look in other
people’s daily lives, and it may take some practice for you to discover how it
works for you. It is vital to maintain a journal during this time, as journaling
allows you to keep track of how you are doing and organize your thoughts along
the way. It also serves as an excellent tool during check-ins by providing you
with a clear overview of what you were thinking, how you were feeling, and
what steps you were taking to implement your changes.
Overall, there are six steps you will take on a daily basis that allow you to
benefit from ACT. These steps should be enforced anytime you observe yourself
facing “the problem,” as this allows you to approach it differently and, therefore,
experience different results. These six steps include opening up to unpleasant
feelings, exploring them, maintaining awareness of them, giving them space,
identifying a course of action, and taking it. Taking these six steps properly
ensures that you are able to observe and shift away from problematic behavior,
rather than find yourself trapped in it.

Opening Up to Unpleasant Feelings

When unpleasant feelings arise, your knee-jerk reaction may be to ignore them
and force yourself to pay attention elsewhere until they seemingly disappear.
This reaction does not genuinely eliminate those emotions; rather, it suppresses
them, so they are no longer in the foreground of your awareness. They continue
to cause troubles in the background, though you are less likely to be aware of
them because you are intentionally ignoring and repressing them.
Instead of following this troublesome approach, it is more valuable to open up to
your unpleasant feelings. It may seem painful or challenging to face your
feelings at first, as your avoidant behaviors have led you to believe that these are
massive, dangerous feelings for you to have. Once you sit with your emotions
for a few minutes, though, you realize that they are not as scary as you may have
originally thought. In fact, many of them pass in as little as 60 seconds as long as
you do not attach yourself to them or avoid and repress them.
If your suppressive behaviors have been habituated, it may be more challenging
for you to break these habits at first. It can be helpful to break the process down
into stages by first observing and labeling your emotions, then, over time
creating more opportunities for you to sit with them and genuinely experience
them for what they are. It is perfectly fine to take this at your own pace, as long
as you are continually working toward implementing changed behaviors.
The only time you are letting yourself down is if you stop, in which case you are
harming yourself by holding yourself back from change. If you do discover you
have stopped, it is important to review your action plan and start over as soon as
possible so you can continue making changes. At that point, you would start by
accepting yourself for stopping and accepting the experiences you had as a result
of stopping; then, you would rebuild your action plan to suit your current
situation.
As you start being able to open up to and observe your emotions more freely,
you can start enduring the process of experiencing them and using them to your
advantage. This way, you are no longer suppressing emotions; instead, you are
embracing them and honoring them for what they are. This creates a more
integrated, balanced, stabilized foundation for you to approach life with.

Exploring the Experience of These Feelings

Upon opening to your feelings, you need to explore the process of experiencing
them. Avoidant behaviors lead to you entirely avoiding the experience of various
emotions, which means the actual feelings you have relating to them may seem
foreign to you. Not knowing what an emotion feels like can stimulate anxiety,
stress, and other troubling emotions because it leads to you feeling insecure in
your body. Suddenly, the feelings you are used to having vanish, and you start
feeling something uncomfortable and possibly overwhelming.
Part of exploring the experience of each feeling is to become curious and allow
yourself to be willing to experience them for what they are. Rather than
assuming or creating conclusions around what you believe will happen, be
willing to experience what actually happens when you embrace your emotions.
You might be surprised to learn that while some emotions can be overwhelming
and tricky to navigate, they are all temporary and tend to subside on their own.
In fact, the sooner you become aware of them and experience them, the sooner
they subside.
Another thing many people are often surprised to discover is that the experience
of your emotions is generally a lot less overwhelming or painful than you have
made it out to be. Recognizing this means you can stop exaggerating the
experience in your head, effectively preventing you from overreacting to it, as
well. This way, rather than blowing it out of proportion, you can honestly
experience each emotion as they naturally arise.
If you have the opportunity, it is excellent to pull yourself aside and give
yourself private time to navigate your emotions. Whether it be anger, fear,
anxiety, frustration, depression, or anything else, giving yourself a quiet space to
genuinely work through your emotions means you have awareness around what
they are and how they feel. This way, rather than having to decipher which
experiences were related to your emotion and which were external, you have the
space to work through it on your own. Further, removing yourself from
situations is an excellent tool for calming yourself down if you have an intense
emotional reaction to something.

Maintaining Awareness of Them

As you navigate the experience of your emotions, you will discover that they
inevitably reach a point where they start to fizzle out. Though they might not
entirely disappear right away, they will begin to subside, and you will return to
“normal.” Once you pass the peak of your emotions, it can be tempting to
resume your attempt to suppress them so you can return to your regular
activities. Unfortunately, this can lead to the same troubles as you might
experience through initial suppression because it prevents you from fully
releasing the emotion and bringing it to genuine closure.
Maintaining awareness of your emotions does not mean exaggerating them,
though it also does not mean ignoring or neglecting them. Instead, it means
recognizing that the peak has passed, yet emotions continue to exist. Through
this, you resume your regular daily activities, though you maintain awareness
around the fact that this emotion is present and affecting your daily experience.
You might still have experiences relating to that emotion until it has been fully
expressed and released.
An excellent way to maintain awareness around your emotions is to check in
throughout the day. Without obsessing over the emotional experience, check-in
with yourself every half hour to an hour and see how you are feeling and if you
are still being troubled by your emotions. Observe objectively without making
your experiences mean anything. This way, you are not attaching to, forcing, or
repressing your emotions and creating worse repercussions for future
experiences.
During the experiential stage is where you are deepening your acceptance
toward your emotions. Rather than denying them, repressing them, or
overreacting to them, you are simply sitting with them and becoming aware of
how they affect you, and why. This growing awareness means that, during future
encounters with that emotion, you can expect what it will feel like and anticipate
your thoughts and emotions. This way, you can gain control and intentionally
decide upon your valued direction and take action toward it sooner, rather than
later.

Giving Your Emotions Space to Exist

Perhaps the most important part of all of this is giving your emotions some space
to exist. Denying, pushing away from, suppressing, forcing, or overreacting to
your emotions all prevents you from giving them space to exist, which results in
you dealing with them in even more problematic ways. The thing about
emotions is, by the time you feel them, you can guarantee the physical and
physiological reactions are already occurring within your body, tensing or
relaxing your muscles, triggering the creation of hormones and chemicals, and
affecting your circulatory system and metabolism. These tangible experiences
cannot be suppressed, even if the thoughts themselves can be. Though you might
be able to act like they don’t exist, they do, and you can’t stop that.
Instead of trying to, you need to give your emotions space to exist, so those
physical and physiological functions are able to reach completion and be
released from the body as an alternative emotion, such as relaxation or
contentment, set in. By allowing your body to follow natural, normal functions,
you ensure that you are not retaining any residual discomforts or symptoms of
your repressed emotions.
Giving your emotions space to exist is not the equivalent of stopping your life
for your emotions. Certainly, there will be times that you cannot reasonably
express your emotions or excuse yourself to experience them privately. During
these experiences, you must discover ways to honor those emotions while going
through your daily obligations. The best way to do this is to maintain your
awareness, accept yourself for the way you feel without trying to change your
emotions, and look for opportunities to release some of your energy so the
emotion can be brought to fruition. If your daily activities do not allow for this,
consider adding intentional sessions to the end of your day where you recall any
emotions that troubled you that day and allow yourself to express them at that
moment. This way, even though it is after the fact, you can bring those emotions
to fruition and release them.
Although this does not mean your emotions themselves will no longer be
triggered, it does mean that the triggering thought or experience no longer
triggers those emotions because you have neutralized it. This way, you do not
live as an emotional hostage to your past.

Identifying Actions You Can Take

Balancing your emotions accounts for the first part of acceptance and
commitment therapy, as you engage in deep acceptance around yourself and
your intrapersonal experiences. Once you reach that state of balance, you must
start looking for ways to integrate it into your physical reality. That is achieved
by implementing the “commitment” part of acceptance and commitment therapy.
Identifying actions you can take should be easy, considering you have already
identified your core values and defined valued directions you can take based on
your desired outcomes. Still, you might need to look for opportunities to apply
your preferred action to each unique situation. For example, if you know you
want to start responding to frustration with calmness and intention, you need to
identify specific actions you can take in each situation that allow you to
experience calmness and navigate the situation with intention. In some
situations, you may have to return to your decision-making skills and evaluate
each possible direction so you can understand how it will benefit you and if it is
worth the effort. Once you discover the best course of action, that is the action
you must commit to.
On rare occasions, it may seem impossible to identify the best course of action to
take. Sometimes, we are faced with challenges where we must decide between
two or more seemingly low-quality options. These are certainly more trying
times in our lives, though they are important opportunities for you to learn how
to make the best decisions for yourself and stand by yourself through those
decisions. As always, make your best choice based on what you believe will
allow you to reach your goal while honoring your values.

Following Through on Your Chosen Actions

As always, there is no point in conceptualizing a plan of action if you are not
going to actually take the planned action. You must learn to follow through on
your chosen actions so you can experience change from your previous behaviors
and cycles. Understand that following through on action does not require you to
repress or ignore your emotions. Instead, you can commit to following through
on your chosen actions and physically taking action while continuing to honor
the emotional experience you are having. This way, you are honoring yourself
for where you are emotionally at, in that moment, and honoring your future-self
by implementing the necessary steps for change in a way that leads to a more
positive outcome.
Following through on your chosen actions can be as uncomfortable as opening
up to your emotional experiences when you are new to this approach. However,
as with every other emotion, this experience of discomfort is temporary and can
be recognized and accepted for what it is as you continue to follow through on
your desired action anyway. As you continue engaging in this new behavior,
your mind will grow more familiar with the actions, which will result in a
greater sense of comfort. The long-term benefits of change will also begin to
manifest, and you will feel better overall as you realize the original difficulty is
no longer affecting you the way it once did. Thus, you start feeling infinitely
better, and it genuinely begins to feel as though you have a solid foundation
upon which to build a more resilient, positive future for yourself.
 Chapter 10: Committed Action in Crisis
Taking a changed approach to anything in your life works wonderfully with
generally easy-going experiences. For example, in your typical everyday life,
you are unlikely to experience heavy resistance toward your behavior; therefore,
it is proportionately easier for you to follow through. The experience itself may
still feel challenging, and the emotions can be daunting; however, they are not as
overwhelming or all-encompassing as the experience you have when you reach a
genuine crisis.
Dealing with anything in the face of crisis is painful to virtually everyone, which
is why those are the moments when relapses tend to occur. As soon as you start
experiencing some form of emotional crisis in your life, your mind starts seeking
comfort as a necessary relief from the pain you are experiencing. If your relief is
achieved through avoidant behaviors typically, this means you will feel an
overwhelming urge to engage in those avoidant behaviors so you can feel
protected from the challenges.
Naturally, crisis poses a serious threat to your success, as this is when you will
feel the most resistant toward maintaining change. Not only will you feel
resistant, but you may also actually sabotage it by justifying why you can no
longer sustain changed behavior, or why an alternate route may be the best
direction for your desired results. Of course, this is not generally true, as it
instead leads to you falling back into old patterns around your behavior and
feeling a blow to your self-esteem and confidence as you realize you lost all your
progress.

What Is a Crisis?
A crisis is any experience you have that triggers a significant emotional response
from you, especially relating to a specific problem you have been correcting in
your life. For example, let’s say you want to quit smoking, a crisis would be
anything that causes you to have serious, incredibly overwhelming cravings to
smoke. This might be anything from waking up or drinking coffee to spending
time with certain people or in certain places. These triggers are generally when
we want to engage in the old behavior most, which is why we have such epic
emotional responses when we resist engaging in familiar, comfortable behaviors.
You know you are in crisis when you start feeling a sense of doom around your
present goal. If you feel as though it is bound to fail, there is no reason for you to
change, or you will feel miserable either way, you know you are approaching
crisis. This all-or-nothing emotional experience can be intense, painful, and
convincing. It is also not quite as bad as you make it out to be, as long as you
become mentally willing to accept it as a temporary experience. Yes, it will still
be painful; however, it will not be life-ending, although it may feel that way.
A crisis is named such because it is the point where most people will actually
jump ship and revert back to old patterns. As time goes on, a crisis can feel more
challenging to navigate, as it begins to feel as though you will never stop having
these intense, draining emotional experiences. Rest assured, the longer you
maintain your new behaviors, the fewer crisis you will experience as you start to
genuinely experience the manifested reality of your changed behavior.
Realizing crisis is a short-lived experience might be helpful for some, but it is
unlikely to provide adequate relief or support during these times. Although a
shifted perspective helps, there are other steps you can also take to help you
begin to experience relief from your intense emotions. This way, you can bring
them to closure and find peace while effectively maintaining your changed
behaviors long-term.

The Essential Value of the First Minute

The most critical time you have when addressing any emotional experience
occurs in the first minute of an emotion being triggered. During those first 60
seconds, you gain the opportunity to decide upon your initial impression of that
experience, which sets the tone for how the rest of the experience will go. It is
imperative that you think about a perspective that is sustainable, helpful, and that
supports you with keeping yourself in control throughout your emotional
experiences. It should also assist you with maintaining awareness around your
emotions so you can express them intentionally and with purpose.
Connecting into that first minute is a skill within itself, as the average person
experiences automatic emotions, meaning they are unaware of that precious
moment. This leads to them skipping their opportunity and jumping straight into
a habitual emotional response, which is often the very response that is leading to
problems in that individual’s life.
Creating awareness of that first minute starts by becoming more mindful on a
daily basis, so you are in regular observation of your emotions. You must also
work to label your emotions throughout the day, regardless of what they are, as
this allows you to become aware of your shifting emotions, as well. As you
continue to increase your mindfulness around this daily experience, you expand
your awareness around each emotional experience, which means you become
more aware of what it feels like to change emotions. As this awareness expands,
you start to identify “the minute.”
When you can comfortably identify that minute, you can begin using it to your
advantage. The easiest way to shape your awareness in that minute is to say, “I
feel ___, and I’m open to exploring how to navigate this feeling in a positive,
productive manner.” This way, you immediately recognize the intensity of the
emotion and accept it for what it is, and set the intention of identifying solutions
that lead you toward your goal, rather than toward regressions.

Navigating Emotions in Extreme Moments

In extreme moments, opening up to, experiencing, and giving space to your
emotions may seem especially challenging. Feeling this magnitude of emotions
could seem scary or dangerous, often because we realize what we are capable of
in those moments, and that power scares us. You may worry that you will lose
control and harm someone, and might even argue that you “have in the past,”
and therefore you are fully capable of doing so again. The reality is, you have
the opportunity to decide how you will respond to everything, which means you
can decide to refrain from behaving in any way you do not desire to behave in.
Once you accept the way you are feeling and the fear you have about it, you can
start allowing yourself to experience that emotion. You may need to adjust your
external experiences to hold space for that emotion, especially if it is particularly
overwhelming. Moving into a quiet space, calling a supportive individual, or
journaling about how you are feeling are all excellent ways to accept and release
your emotions as they occur. Avoid controlling, denying, or forcing your
emotions during these periods, as doing so can lead to intense, unwanted
emotional experiences.
Aside from your increased need to maintain awareness, and release your
emotions intentionally, navigating your emotions in extreme moments is quite
similar to navigating them at any other time. As with any other emotional
experience, they are temporary and can be fully released. Though they may feel
more intense or intimidating, they are not dissimilar from your average emotion;
they have merely triggered a stronger response of the troubling emotion.

Committing to Action Through Your Emotions

Perhaps the most challenging part of navigating a crisis is continuing to remain
committed to your actions despite how you are feeling. During a crisis, it may
feel like you cannot think about anything other than getting back to familiar
experience, and you might have intense distress anytime you are asked to do
anything other than regress. It may seem like you are incapable of doing
anything other than the actions necessary to fulfill your previous cycle.
However, you must learn to commit to your changed actions and follow through
on them, regardless of how you are feeling.
These are the times when commitments are usually broken, as they are genuinely
at their most challenging to maintain. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to
maintain commitment, even when you genuinely do not want to. These steps will
not enlighten you toward less intense emotions immediately, but they will set
you up to create that relief over time. Before you know it, the challenging
emotion will begin to subside, and you will feel complete closure from that
feeling.
One excellent way to commit to taking action is to spend 3 – 5 minutes
meditating before you do anything. During this time, you give yourself adequate
space to experience your emotions and recognize them for what they are. You
can also focus on stimulating the motivation to work toward your desires, which
is primarily achieved when you are open and willing to change, rather than not.
You can also commit to your actions by being intentional about what you want
for yourself and taking the actions that fulfill those intentions. As you become
accepting of what you desire and willing to create it, it becomes easier to
increase your level of intention around your behaviors. In doing so, you also
give yourself space to be flexible in the results you get, which makes remaining
committed in the future easier, too. Although you might not always fulfill your
exact desires, you will always improve so long as you continue trying. Being
open to observing that improvement as it naturally flows is an excellent way to
trust the process and continually work toward doing better.
Lastly, you need to give yourself the opportunity to feel without obsession.
There is no reason to obsess over your emotions or offer them 100% of your
conscious awareness. You can accept your emotions as they are and focus,
instead, on your desired outcome and the actions you are taking, while giving
your emotions full permission to continue existing. In doing so, you realize that
your emotions are free to exist, yet maintain healthy emotional boundaries that
prevent them from taking over and calling the shots. This way, you remain in
conscious, intentional alignment at all times.
The Necessary Discharge of Experience
Crisis experiences are inevitably draining, regardless of how temporary or short-
lived, they might have been. When you experience a crisis, the intense emotions
lead to extreme behaviors in the body, all of which demand and use a great deal
of your energy. If you wish to fully recover from crisis, you must always engage
in the discharge experience, allowing you to fully release the remnants of the
emotion, while also giving yourself space to recover.
The release can be any activity you engage in to fully let go of the final emotions
you are experiencing. Journaling, venting to a friend, or speaking with your
therapist are all great ways to fully let go of those emotions. This is your form of
“winding down,” so you must choose an activity that allows you to genuinely
feel as though you have wound down from the day you experienced.
The recovery happens after the full release has happened. At this point, you just
relax and do your best to sustain a low-stress experience, so you have the
opportunity to recharge. It is especially important to maintain healthy self-care
steps such as eating nutritious meals, getting proper rest, and tending to your
hygiene. Maintaining these aspects of your life helps you fully recover from
your crisis, which means you no longer carry the emotional burden of that
troubling experience.

The Necessary Celebration of Experience

Following your recovery, or during it, you must engage in necessary celebration
as a way to recognize and appreciate yourself for your efforts. ACT may seem
easy; however, the follow-through can be more taxing than one might expect.
Recognizing this and celebrating yourself for a job well done is a wonderful way
to summarize an intense experience with a positive outcome, so your brain
begins to see it as being less daunting. This way, you are more willing to
embrace the emotional experience in the future and more capable of coming out
the other side successfully.
Celebrating yourself can be anything you want it to be, though it does not need
to be anything elaborate. In fact, studies have shown that simple celebrations that
can be repeated effortlessly at a moment’s notice are the best type, as they are
most sustainable and reinforce our habit patterns. An excellent celebration would
be to say pleasant things to yourself, pat yourself on the back, or offer yourself 1
– 3 minutes of engaging in a guilty pleasure, so you feel good about your
experience. It is important that you repeat this same celebration after each time
you successfully come through a crisis, as this ensures you come back to a
feeling of security and positivity.
 Chapter 11: Where C.B.T. Meets A.C.T.
You may recall that at the beginning of this book, we briefly discussed the
connection between CBT and ACT. While these two therapy styles are different,
they carry many similarities and complement each other beautifully. Researching
CBT, or at least understanding it more effectively, is an excellent way to become
more aware of how you can maintain long-lasting change to your life. ACT is
excellent for facilitating change in problematic areas, while CBT shows you how
to turn that change into a habit, so it becomes your new approach.
While you do not need to know everything about CBT, we will briefly discuss it
here and explore how you can apply it to your ACT strategy to further improve
your results. This way, you experience complete relief from your unwanted
behavioral patterns possible, and you can enjoy freedom from past cycles.

What Is CBT?
CBT is a form of psychotherapy that seeks to aid people in recovering from
experiences such as depression by adjusting their automatic responses to stimuli
in their environment. This therapy was designed as a way to naturally treat
depressive symptoms in people that either refused medicinal treatment or failed
to respond to it. These days, CBT is regularly advised alongside medicinal
therapy as a way to gain a holistic approach toward treating individuals suffering
from mental and emotional illnesses.
CBT is based on the concept that we all have automatic reactions to things in our
lives. These automatic reactions stimulate the production of thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors in that order specifically. They are triggered in response to a
stimulus in ourselves, or in our environments, and they cause us to engage in an
automatic, habitual behavior that is associated with whichever the original
trigger itself was.
Identifying your own automatic reactions means you can identify everything
associated with the CBT loop, which includes your trigger, thoughts, emotions,
and behaviors. Once you become aware of the many aspects of your CBT loop,
you discover ways you can adjust your automatic experiences, leading to more
intentional and preferable ones. This takes practice, though it becomes easier
over time as your more intentional reaction becomes automatic over the previous
one. The one drawback of CBT is that it is not capable of actually erasing
unwanted neuropathways. In fact, almost nothing is. This means that, despite the
fact your automatic behaviors have changed, you might still experience the urge
to fall back into past cycles. Often, past cycles can be retriggered relatively
easily and can bring with them intense obsessions as you grow afraid of losing
that perceived comfort again if you were to once again engage in changed
behaviors.
CBT is often referred to as talk therapy, as the therapy itself does not include any
specific medications or medicinal treatments to assist in the healing of the
problematic emotional or mental experience. CBT was developed as a
reasonable alternative to conventional treatments for depression, post-traumatic
stress disorder, anxiety, and other conditions back in the 1950s, though it was not
popularized until much later. These days, it is one of the most common forms of
therapy used to treat people dealing with troubling experiences. While it is not
always capable of entirely healing an ailment, it certainly helps people regain
control over their mental faculties, providing greater relief from troubling
experiences.

CBT the Process, Explained

CBT exists on what is known as the “CBT loop.” This refers to the four parts of
the process that are involved in any behavior being carried out. It starts with a
trigger, then it becomes a thought, feeling, and finally, a behavior. The idea is
that if you can change the thought, you can effortlessly shift the feeling and
behavior because they are no longer being activated in a habitual or automatic
sequence.
The trigger of the CBT loop can be anything. Anything that has the capacity to
stimulate your senses can indicate to your brain and body that something has
been triggered, so long as you associate that specific stimulus with an emotional
experience. This is why people are affected by triggers like specific perfumes,
colors, tastes, locations, and social encounters exist. As long as your brain can
associate one thing with another, it creates the opportunity for a trigger to exist.
Triggers are the signal that tells your brain to activate that particular emotional
response, which is designed to provide you with the necessary energy and
motivation to enact the habitual behavior sequence.
The thought portion of the loop is where you become engaged in the trigger. If
the thought did not immediately follow the trigger, the trigger would cease to
exist as there would be nothing to trigger in the first place. According to the
beliefs of CBT, the thoughts are an automatic or habitual response to the trigger,
and it stimulates an emotional sequence within the body. This happens when
your thoughts perceive something as a threat, rapidly fire through statements that
validate the threat to justify the emotional response. Then, once it was justified,
it would trigger the emotional response.
The emotional response is the third portion of the loop. Emotions are natural by-
products of thoughts, as the thoughts are responsible for triggering the body to
release chemicals and hormones that create those emotional experiences in the
first place. As soon as those chemicals are released, you feel them in your body
and begin to experience the automatic emotional reaction to the thoughts which
were triggered by the trigger.
The behavioral response is the fourth portion of the loop. At the end of this
response, your mind reinforces the automatic behavior as being “effective” and,
as a result, allows it to remain in effect in your life. The behavioral response is
how you habitually and automatically respond to the trigger that initiated the
entire cycle to start in the first place. This is often where people recognize
significant troubles in their lives, as they realize their thoughts have spiraled so
out of control that their behaviors are now being affected.
Every behavior you have that you wish to change can be fitted to the CBT cycle
and healed using this system.

Why CBT Complements ACT

CBT is especially useful alongside ACT, as CBT provides the foundation for
longevity, while ACT provides the foundation for significant change to occur. As
CBT is another forward-focused, results-oriented form of talk therapy, it works
wonderfully in conjunction with ACT.
With ACT, you are looking for ways to create immediate change. Your primary
focus is on recognizing and accepting the emotional experiences while
committing to engaging in changed behaviors. The entire emphasis of this
therapy is on the changes in the immediate moment. You are focused on
identifying everything motivating you toward unwanted patterns and using
acceptance and commitment to shift away from an automatic behavior and
toward an intentional one. The entire focus is to maintain your commitment to
this shift so you can continually benefit from it over time.
With CBT, you are focused on completely subverting the original automatic
behavioral loop with a new one by changing from the thought level. If you apply
this with ACT, you identify ways you can become more mindful of your triggers,
so you can identify your automatic thoughts and pivot toward new behavior
through acceptance and commitment. This way, as you navigate these more
challenging situations, you have the opportunity to rely on several excellent
strategies and a powerful understanding of what is going on to get you through
your changes and maintain them long-term.

Using CBT to Enforce Habits

Using CBT to change your habits and enforce new ones is an excellent way to
take control of your life and deepen your ability to engage intentionally. There
are five necessary steps you can take to incorporate CBT into your process for
changing habits and reinforcing your ACT behaviors. It is important to call on
all five steps to support you with this change, as this provides you with the
greatest opportunity to leverage your psychological tools and embrace lasting
change.
The first step is to become more self-aware so you can deepen your mindfulness.
Mindfulness is at the root of all change, as it is the state of awareness that allows
you to recognize what is going on in the moment, thus giving you a sense of
presence that keeps you connect with what is happening in the here and now.
When you get used to observing yourself, it becomes easy to witness new habits
forming within your field. This way, you can either reinforce those habits if they
are ones you want or pivot them if they are not serving your overarching needs.
Changing your behavior when you recognize repetitive patterns beginning to
take root is an excellent tool you can call on from CBT techniques, as well. This
particular step is also highly aligned with ACT, as it allows you to call on your
acceptance and commitment techniques to help you commit to changing your
behavior. Remember, this step can be the most challenging for many, yet it can
easily be overcome with acceptance and a willingness to remain devoted to your
bigger goals.
CBT features a variety of techniques you can use to replace habits with other
ones intentionally. Cognitive restructuring or reframing is the best one to call on
for ACT, as it focuses largely on your perspective and the way you describe the
events you are experiencing to yourself. Intentionally using language that
reframes it with a different emotional connotation allows you to pivot away from
unwanted habits in a meaningful, lasting manner.
Relaxation and de-stressing are two excellent ways to reinforce your habits.
When you are stressed, you are more likely to hit a crisis, which means it
becomes far more challenging for you to embrace change. Using CBT
techniques, you can keep yourself generally calm and relaxed, so you are less
likely to reach a crisis in the first place, effectively preventing you from
enduring as many challenges in your process of making changes. You can use
meditation, contemplative journaling, spa rituals, or anything else that suits you
to relax so you can release stress from your mind regularly.
Rewards are an essential part of CBT, as they provide you with the opportunity
to reinforce your changed behavior and assert it as being positive for yourself.
As I mentioned previously, rewards can be as simple as a pep talk or a pat on the
pat, or as complex as a call to a friend or a special gift or experience you have
wanted to have. Ideally, your rewards should be easy to recreate anytime you
engage in positive behavior, so you are more likely to embrace change overall.
Applying these five methods of CBT to your habit changes means that the
change you affect in your life through ACT will be easier to maintain using
techniques from CBT. This creates an even stronger foundation upon which you
can build the remainder of your life, feeling confident in yourself, your stability,
and your resiliency.

Incorporating CBT Into Your Plan

Incorporating CBT into your ACT plan does not require you to abandon ACT or
favor CBT practices over anything else. On the contrary, CBT can be
incorporated seamlessly into your ACT plan in such a way that it complements
your efforts and reinforces the results you are likely to create with your efforts.
Anytime you can reinforce your new structures, it is important to do so, as they
are particularly delicate and can easily be sabotaged before they ever reach true
fruition.
The best way to incorporate CBT into your ACT plan is to look over your
findings from your days of journaling and observing your behavior and look
over your finalized plan as well. Then, identify areas where you have defined
certain habits that affect your behavior in these circumstances. Once you have,
you can start identifying CBT techniques that can be used to either break or
pivot unwanted habits or build entirely new ones where none exist yet. CBT
techniques should be applied to the ACT techniques you will be using to ensure
they are reinforcing your existing plan and complementing your existing efforts.
This way, you gain the maximum benefit from both modalities, enabling
sustainable and significant change in your life.
It may be useful to do some examination of yourself using the CBT model
exclusively, too. This provides you with two excellent values that can make
transforming your life significantly easier. The first value you gain is that you
have greater awareness around yourself and your behaviors, which leads to an
expanded perception about who you are and why you have the experiences that
you do. This perception may give you unique angles for approaching your
healing from, or simply a greater capacity to accept yourself and be
compassionate toward your experiences while remaining committed to change.
The second value you gain is that you have a clearer understanding of how the
CBT model can be applied during these circumstances. This way, you can easily
fit your CBT practices to your ACT plan, effectively moving you through every
challenge with ease. Through the process of fitting your circumstances to the
CBT model, you also gain the ability to identify additional areas you may be
able to reinforce your changes and maintain positive behavior.
 Conclusion
Congratulations on completing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (A.C.T)!
This book was designed to help you discover the tremendous value of ACT and
similar therapies that can support you with changing and maintaining your
behaviors.
Psychologists and researchers have uncovered impressive facts about our minds
and the way they work, and along the way, they have discovered many therapies
that can be used to help treat an ill mind. Whether you are struggling with
intense mental or emotional illnesses, or unhealthy habits holding you back,
ACT is a powerful psychotherapy that can be used to transform your habits. As
you continue to explore this therapy and apply it to your daily life, you will
uncover how transformative it is.
Although ACT may seem simple, the reality is that upholding these behaviors in
your life takes consistency and discipline. Your emotions can be incredible
driving forces, and they can motivate you to embrace change or not. If you allow
your emotions to rule the show, you will always find yourself trapped in a world
created through your emotional experiences themselves. If, however, you
recognize the experience of your emotions and accept yourself and that
experience and choose to move on regardless, you change the script. Rather than
letting those emotions hold you back, you accept them for what they are and
decide to embrace change, regardless. This process takes practice and
consistency, but over time it becomes significantly easier to uphold your
changed behaviors.
CBT is an excellent complementary therapy that can make maintaining your
changed behaviors even easier. If you desire to go even deeper and uncover
exceptional ways to transform your life, combining CBT techniques with ACT
techniques is a great way to do so. As you do, you discover ways to inspire
change and create longevity, which results in total transformations that can be
reasonably maintained.
Right now, you might be thinking about many things and experiencing many
emotions. The idea of being able to transform your life is both exciting and
daunting. On one hand, you realize you have the power to create a better
experience for yourself and enjoy an improved quality of life. On the other hand,
you have all the responsibility that comes with that. It is perfectly reasonable if
you are feeling overwhelmed, unsure, doubtful, excited, curious, interested, or
anything else. Regardless of what you are feeling, you must immediately begin
to look for acceptance in your feelings. Review the skills we have discussed, and
use them to help you reach a point of acceptance. This is a great way to practice
accepting your feelings as they are and choosing to act regardless, as your next
step is to take action and implement these new skills into your everyday life.
The best place to go from this book is straight into action. We have already
completed your ACT game plan together and defined how you would use it and
what would be required of you to maintain it. Now, you must genuinely take
action on the steps you have committed to! This is where true commitment
comes in, as you follow through on that which you agree to, which is where you
begin to experience the opportunity to create genuinely changed results.
I recognize taking action may seem scary at first, and you might feel like you
cannot reasonably do anything. If you have been trapped in previous cycles for
any period, you are possibly still feeling overwhelmed and incapable of
adequately identifying your emotions, let alone facing them, and allowing
yourself to experience them. Remember, it is perfectly okay to need to take this
at your own pace. As long as you are continually moving toward resolution, you
are doing excellent. Have grace with yourself and accept your best for being
good enough, as change can be difficult work and any improvement is worth
celebrating.
If there is one significant piece of advice I can leave you with, it’s to always
celebrate yourself, too. It may seem small or insignificant; however, it does play
a meaningful role in rewarding yourself and motivating yourself to maintain
your changes. The more consistently you reward yourself, the better you
reinforce your changed behaviors and cement those into your mind as
meaningful and worthy of the effort.
I genuinely hope this book has helped you uncover meaningful steps to changing
your behaviors for life. If you feel this book has supported you with changing
your life and enjoying a greater quality of life, I ask that you please consider
reviewing it on Amazon Kindle. Your honest feedback would be greatly
appreciated, as it allows others just like you discover this excellent guide for
transforming their own behaviors, too. Further, it helps me understand what you
gain from my books, so I can write more excellent titles just for you!
Thank you, and I wish you the best of luck! Remember, be graceful with
yourself and celebrate yourself as often as you can. You can do it!