In his book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Steven Hayes (2005) points out that acceptance and willingness deal with condi-tions we can’t easily change. Most clients have carried around troubling thoughts, unhelp-ful personal scripts, scary pictures, and painunhelp-ful emotions for years and have found it very
difficult to get rid of them. They’ve probably tried to avoid, eliminate, or control not only the thoughts and emotions but also the situations that trigger them. As I’ve discussed through-out this book, the problem with doing this is that it keeps clients stuck in unhelpful or destructive behavior patterns and limits their growth. Your job as their coach is to show them that instead of trying to avoid, eliminate, and control their unhelpful thoughts and emotions, they need to start accepting them and become more willing to act.
Acceptance
Accepting pain and suffering, and being willing to move forward while living with these distressful feelings, doesn’t necessarily mean clients want to suffer. It just means they under-stand that trying to avoid, eliminate, or control their mental pain and suffering will not help it dissipate and will only make things worse.
For instance, imagine having a client, named Ann, who wants to become a writer. Ann wants to slowly transition out of her present career and into writing over the next five years.
She has a manuscript in the works and wants to work with a literary agent. Unfortunately Ann has had a very hard time hiring an agent. She has followed all the guidelines for solicit-ing an agent and has put together a strong proposal for the manuscript she wants to publish, but despite these efforts, all of her query letters to agents have not met with interest (she has received over a hundred rejections). Ann is terribly disappointed and very tired, and the thought of sending out another query letter to an agent makes her anxious and fills her head with troubling thoughts, negative personal scripts, scary pictures, and painful emotions like fear and anxiety. She has tried to avoid thinking about the prospect of receiving another rejection and has even tried to eliminate all of her negative thinking about getting rejected, but the more she tries to control her thoughts and feelings, the worse they seem to get.
Your job as her coach is to explain to Ann that what she’s experiencing is normal for writers, especially in the beginning. Rejection is a part of the territory. You also need to reinforce exactly what she already told you, that the net results of her efforts to avoid, elimi-nate, and control her troubling thoughts, negative personal scripts, scary pictures, and fear and anxiety have only made them worse. Once Ann understands that doing what she is so accustomed to doing to get rid of her troubling thoughts and painful emotions doesn’t work, you can help her start developing acceptance. Accepting her troubling thoughts and painful emotions doesn’t mean she wants to feel bad; it just means, rather than try to fight what her mind tells her, she needs to accept it and keep moving forward. She needs to learn that she can continue to refine her proposal and query letters to agents and keep submitting them,
despite her troubling thoughts and painful emotions. If she stops trying to fight what she’s thinking and feeling, her thoughts and feelings will start to fade on their own. The sure way for Ann to keep them alive is to try to work on them.
Acknowledging the imperfection of being human is part of the practice of acceptance.
Being human means being imperfect, making mistakes, contradicting ourselves occasion-ally, losing patience, and thinking or doing a thousand other things that, over the course of a lifetime, we wish we hadn’t thought, felt, or done. Acceptance allows us to acknowledge all of this and to keep moving forward while living with the trappings of being human.
Accepting is not about judging or evaluating; it’s about being real and acknowledging our lives for what they are and our minds for their thoughts, personal scripts, mental images, and emotions. It takes courage to do this. The good news is that, even if your clients do not feel very courageous now, they can develop courage at any point in their lives. People of all ages do courageous things. Your clients can start today to develop the courage they need to accept their lives for what they are and move toward their goals.
Willingness
Acceptance and willingness go hand in hand. Acceptance is more related to thoughts, while willingness is directly linked to taking action. Acceptance involves telling ourselves it’s okay to have troubling thoughts, outdated personal scripts, scary pictures, and painful emo-tions related to a goal. Willingness is our commitment to taking valued action while living with troubling thoughts, outdated personal scripts, scary pictures, and painful emotions.
An interesting metaphor that I use in my book Stress Less, Live More is choosing to go out in a rainstorm (Blonna, 2010). Approaching rainstorms often give some advance notice;
the weather report advises us about them; dark clouds start to approach; changes occur in temperature, wind conditions, moisture, and so on; and we feel the first light drops of rain as they begin to fall.
In most cases, when people hear that it’s going to rain, they don’t let the impending storm put an end to their daily activities, especially if the activities are related to an important goal they have set for the day. Instead, they accept the imminent rainstorm and are willing to continue on with their plans while dealing with it. They can’t avoid, eliminate, or control the rainstorm. They can change how they act in relation to the rain. In other words, they can’t control the rain, but they can control their own rain-related behavior. There are several things your clients already do to deal with rainstorms: they wear special rain gear (such as a poncho or boots), give themselves more time to get to their destinations, and use umbrellas
to shield themselves from the rain. Adapted from my book, Stress Less, Live More (Blonna, 2010), the following exercise is a fun way to defuse from internal potential stressors.