Table of contents
Intro
Today I am changing again to a personal topic related to mental health. This week, I met up with one of my first mentees, who took an internship with me in 2018. When he joined me, he was 19 years old, had finished school the year before and had just traveled the world to celebrate it.
I think it is fair to say that he was already very eager to work, to achieve while simultaneously being very inexperienced. But I saw a lot of myself in this kid, although we are very different characters. However, during that time, I really had issues with my own self-esteem, my own life, and was afraid that I did not have anything to teach him. While I would like to tell you what an impact those few months had, working with/for more, I can clearly say that it does not seem to have impacted him negatively because he turned out extremely mature, successful, charismatic, self-confident and self-critical.
To give you a little background: This kid is 23, has founded his own marketing agency with more than 30 employees, and can work from wherever he wants to. It is so funny to write this because this was something he wrote down when we did a short personality assessment at the time of his internship. So, basically he is free and successful. But also not quite satisfied.
The conversation took me back to the time when I went through anxiety about going to work in my first startup, being on the edge of bankruptcy, not knowing how to explain the eventual failure to my family. Don't get me wrong: I always wanted to kind of live through the struggle of having founded a company, being confronted with challenges, searching for solutions in self-help books and (potentially) implementing them. But I felt overwhelmed, disappointed, unmotivated.
In my search for coping with my anxiety, I encountered by accident a framework which helped me sustainably move forward. First, I listened to a podcast by SWR (one of the regional, public radios in Germany) which explored the pros and cons of different therapies. One of them was behavioral therapy, which in this case also was related to curing anorexia that my ex had suffered from.
Then, I remember listening to a discussion on Lewis Howes’ podcast “Greatness” in which somebody talked about a framework from behavioral psychology which is called “Acceptance Commitment Therapy” (ACT). It is backed by more than 800 randomized controlled studies, so not some wuh-wuh, spiritual, esoteric kind of “I just need to change my beliefs” simplified guru framework. If you want to read a great book about it, you may go for this one: “Values in Therapy” by Jenna LeJeune and Jason B. Luoma.
About Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Basically, the framework looks at how people get stuck when they overthink for different reasons. In my case, it helped me recognize that my mind was adding to the stress of being in a tricky situation with my company, which led finally to me getting in the way of finding meaning and enjoyment in my work.
The framework gives you the questions and areas where you need to debug your behavior and free yourself from the pressure you put on yourself. The goal is to move closer to what you care about in life while avoiding doing hard things like getting in touch with inner thoughts and feelings.
I prefer this perspective much more than conventional psychological approaches because instead of trying to resolve challenging thoughts coming from childhood traumas and stuff (which I despise because I hate to look into my past). Instead, ACT focuses on the conflicts which are created by the symptomatic obstacles of living an engaged and fulfilled life. So it teaches you to accept the negative thoughts and feelings - as they are part of life - as long as you stay oriented to what is important to you and you move forward toward it.
This ability is called “psychological flexibility” and contains six core transitions of states which seem rather simple but inherit a lot of value when you actually go through them.
The six transitions are all interconnected but can be tackled one by one:
- Experiential Avoidance → Willingness
- Fusion → Defusion
- Past/Future → Present-Moment Awareness
- Rigid Stories → Flexible Perspective-Taking
- Lack of Direction → Clear Values
- Inaction → Committed Action
I will quickly go through them to explain some basic stuff and some personal anecdotes.
Experiential Avoidance → Willingness
When thoughts and feelings come up which remind us that we are not fully happy with how things are going and what we need to do, we tend to avoid them. Or even avoid situations in which those thoughts/feelings are coming up, like going to the office, meeting certain people, etc. This is called:
“Experiential Avoidance”
The issue is of course that difficult thoughts/feelings emerge in situations you do not want to get away from, which is why the goal is not to avoid them. Instead, you need to learn to get in touch with discomfort when it is related to the things that are important to you. This is called:
Willingness
Many of the things we are trying to avoid are unpleasant but not actually dangerous. But this does not make a big difference to our sympathetic nervous system. This is why we need to conduct differentiation consciously by recognizing that the desire for avoidance is usually the sign of moving toward the thing.
Cold calling was the area of business where I felt least comfortable with. I procrastinated on calling lists and would spend my time on building sales presentations, workshops where I felt confident. But when I started doing it and actually had a positive experience, my initial discomfort did not feel as scary or challenging anymore. Nevertheless, it did not really move us forward, which frustrated me.
So I started thinking about how to get out of the whole thing because I knew that it could not continue like this for me. And just starting to plan my “exit” gave me immediate relief.
Willingness can be developed through mindfulness practice (sitting in silence while allowing the thoughts/feelings to be present) or my preferred way: Stop trying to get rid of them and instead open up to them to get closer to yourself and what you care about.
What are you not willing to feel?
Whatever the answer is - and the answer is most of the time very obvious - should become the focus of your discussion with yourself. The more you get in touch with our inner self and what is important to you, the less you will get lost in avoidance, which is going to overwhelm you.
Fusion → Defusion
When we get caught in avoidance, we start to believe our thoughts to manifest reality or to be true. That’s “fusion”.
That is why we need to notice that what we think/feel is a physiological happening inside of our minds and have slightly to do with reality. So what we can do is to pay attention to the thoughts which you can work on in order to be aligned with what is important to you.
Typical examples are:
- Reasons - "I can't do X because..."
- Judgments - "People always are only looking out for themselves."
- Rules - "I shouldn't feel Y" or "I have to work harder than others to be successful."
One rule I suffered from, I took away from school all my life until recently: I was told that I would not be able to achieve anything because of my attitude. Later, it was less about my attitude but about my informal behavior and style of communication. Then, it was the classical “you don’t do it like this”.
Nowadays, I understand that being unconventional is actually one of the biggest competitive advantages I inherit as I am not vulnerable to mistakes. I just do and say things, even if that means getting something wrong.
To summarize: Defusion is about seeing thoughts as real, but not necessarily true. You need to decide to give weight to the thoughts that help you move toward the lives you want to live.
Past/Future Preoccupation → Present Moment Contact
Past/future preoccupation is the most important type of fusion. We get lost in our past or future and stop being in contact with the present. As a consequence, we either “flee” or “freeze” as a sympathetic response, but we usually do not “fight” (thanks for the example Julia).
For me, this would often come up when we were in a tight spot in the business. As a bootstrapped company, cash flow was our biggest challenge. Therefore, sales always were slow, which is why my mind would start imagining a future where we would run out of money. Then I would come out of the situation without skills, with shame towards my parents and friends… I guess you get my point where this led me.
So when the fear of going bankrupt overwhelmed me, I could not focus on anything anymore. I avoided this future state by avoiding actions in the present and started playing video games.
Now, to some degree, it is useful to be able to imagine and plan for what might go wrong in the future, or recall lessons from a painful moment in the past to avoid a similar situation. However, when you find yourself stuck in the past or future, the step toward psychological flexibility is to intentionally bring your attention back to the present moment.
Rigid Stories → Flexible Perspective-Taking
Rigid stories are the classic example of judging another person based on one assumption, statement or characteristic and denying the complexity of being a human being. This leads, by the way, to many interpersonal conflicts.
Another famous example is the “imposter syndrome”. It means that you live continuously with the fear that somebody will realize that you are not as skilled as you seem to be. Still coping with it! You tell yourself negative things about yourself, although the world is obviously communicating something else to you.
For me, this often showed up through comparison: having thoughts that I was a bad founder compared to other founders who were raising lots of money or had much higher sales. It felt like there was something others had that I was lacking; like I had somehow missed out on some important key to success in life.
Ultimately, we are a complex being which transcends our experiences and history into a container of personality which gives you the sense of “I”. You are a combination of all the things you went through but are not the person you could be due to avoidance.
Lack of Direction → Clear Values
Many of us experience days without being motivated or a lack of meaning. We might be able to talk about things that once excited us in the past. But when we look around at our lives and the choices available to us in the present, we don't actually feel a sense of enthusiasm or engagement.
Moving toward values is about reconnecting our day-to-day activities to the things that matter most to us. It's about clarifying for ourselves what a life well-lived would look like, and then intentionally bringing those qualities into our lives and work in the present.
For me, two of my values are “intensity” and “work”. Those mean to be engaged in everything I do 100% in the present moment and to achieve a lot of “output” (which can vary in meaning) by working intensively. So when I notice getting lost in overthinking, doubt and negativity, I get my attention back to being intense (going exercising, spending time with family/girlfriend) or getting to work on something. It is about seeing this moment as an opportunity to connect with myself.
And by the way: Values are not the same as goals.
It might help you to think about your tombstone as a reflection of your life: What does it say? What do people say about you? Intense… I know.
You can almost think of all the other “psychological flexibility” skills as clearing the way for you to contact your values, and values as being what makes all that hard work worthwhile.
Inaction → Committed Action
Clarifying our values and learning a new relationship with our thoughts and feelings is great, but if we don't do anything differently, your life and as a consequence your thoughts/feelings are not going to change. Therefore, committed action is about finding places in our lives where we might shift our behavior to be more aligned with our values.
An example from my life is that I started taking more time for myself to be alone and to do shit (like writing) to get more in tune with myself.
Russ Harris, author of several popular ACT books, offers a framework of 7 "R"s that can help support action in its early stages (I quote):
- Reminders - using apps, timers, or other means to remind us of the new behavior
- Records - keeping track of our behavior throughout the day
- Rewards - giving ourselves positive reinforcement for engaging in a behavior
- Routines - building the new behavior around an existing daily habit
- Relationships - finding a friend to do the new behavior with, or who you can talk to about the progress you’re making
- Reflecting - taking time to reflect on the progress you’re making through journaling, discussion with a friend, or in your mind
- Restructuring - making changes to the environment to make it easier to do the new behavior – i.e., throwing out unhealthy food or preparing at night for a morning run
To change behavior, it needs to be intrinsically rewarding so you can convince yourself to redo it in the future.
In my own life, I often had the desire to write more, but it would always get deprioritized when I got busy with other projects. I would start to write down new ideas, but when I started missing writing sessions, it was hard to pick back up again. But then I blocked time in my calendar to write, and this was the moment when it started to get rewarding, especially when people responded positively to it.
Over time, committed action is about creating larger and larger patterns of behavior in the service of our values. When working with “committed action”, there are no "right" or "wrong" behaviors, and no step is too small - anything you pursue in service of your values is a step toward building a life that matters to you. Living fully is the goal, but it looks different for each and every person.