If you’re living a goal-focused life, then no matter what you have, it’s never enough. Not so with the values-focused life, because your values are always available to you, no matter what your circumstance. (Remember Viktor Frankl, who lived by his values while stuck in a Nazi concentration camp.)
So if you’re feeling miserable because you haven’t yet achieved a particular goal, here’s what to do. First find the values underlying your goal and then ask yourself, ‘What’s a small action I can take right now that’s consistent with those values?’ Next go ahead and take action (and do it mindfully).
Your values are always with you; always available. And acting faithfully to them is usually deeply rewarding. So the more you embrace your values, the greater your sense of fulfilment and in the next chapter we’ll learn how to take this attitude even deeper.
Have you ever gazed in wonder at a brilliant sunset or an impossibly large full moon or the ocean waves crashing against a rocky shore? Ever looked adoringly into the eyes of your child or your partner? Revelled in the aroma of baking pies or the fragrant scent of jasmine or roses? Listened in delight to a singing bird or a purring cat or the laughter of a small child?
So far in this book, we’ve spent a lot of time on handling unpleasant thoughts and feelings, but precious little on enhancing the positive ones. This is deliberate. Our whole society, and the self-help movement in particular, is so focused on creating positive feelings that this focus itself has become a major component of the happiness trap. The more your life is focused on having pleasant feelings, the more you’ll struggle against the uncomfortable ones, creating and intensifying the whole vicious cycle of struggle and suffering.
But as a beneficial byproduct of creating a meaningful life, all sorts of positive experiences and emotions will happen. So it only makes sense to appreciate these things to the fullest while avoiding the trap of making them your main goal in life. Every day is a wealth of opportunities to appreciate the world we live in. Practising your mindfulness skills will help you make the most of your life right now, even as you take action to change it for the better. We have always had expressions like, ‘Count your blessings’ and ‘Stop and smell the roses.’ These sayings point to the abundance in our lives. We are surrounded by wonderful things, but sadly, we usually take them for granted. So here are a few suggestions for waking up and experiencing the richness of the world around you:
As you connect with your values and act in accordance with them, you’re likely to notice changes in the people around you. The more you act like the person you want to be with your partner, children, friends, family and co-workers, the more you’ll notice their positive responses toward you. Enjoy those responses; be mindful of them and notice what is happening and appreciate it.
When you act with openness, kindness and acceptance, the chances are, you’ll receive the same in return. (And if you don’t, you may have to make some choices about what sort of people you spend your time with.) So as your relationships improve, make the most of them. Savour those positive interactions. Make sure you’re present. Catch yourself drifting off into the land of thoughts and bring your attention back to whomever you’re with.
A great job, a loving partner, a home of your own: all these are goals. As you work toward them, connect with the values underlying them. Notice that you’re living by those values and appreciate the satisfaction this brings.
If your values include sharing and connecting, then as well as
noticing
the abundance in your life, talk about it with others. Most of us tend to talk far more about the negative aspects of our lives than the positives. Let people know what you appreciate—about them, about life, about yourself. (This doesn’t mean go around with a fake smile, pretending to be happy all the time. It means be genuine, open and balanced. Share the difficult things in your life and the rewarding parts!) And make sure to let people know what they mean to you—what you appreciate about them and what you’re grateful for.
When you achieve goals that are in line with your values, there’s often a pleasant emotion of some sort. Notice how it feels and enjoy it. Even tiny, easy goals can give great satisfaction when achieved. For example, I feel enormous satisfaction when I tidy my desktop, cook a healthy dinner or send a brief email to an overseas relative. So appreciate and savour those feelings. It’s all too easy to miss them when the thinking self tries to distract you with ‘not good enough’ stories.
The more you open your eyes and notice the things you’ve taken for granted, and the more you live by what you value while appreciating what you have, the richer, fuller and more meaningful your life becomes. Mindfulness skills help you cultivate an attitude of openness, interest and receptiveness toward the world around you. This attitude in itself will make life more rewarding. You’ll notice more opportunities, you’ll be more stimulated and interested, you’ll find more contentment and your relationships will improve. I like to put it like this: Life gives most to those who make the most out of what life gives.
And now, after all that focus on positive emotion, it’s time for another reminder: don’t get too attached to pleasant feelings. Don’t centre your life on chasing them. Pleasant feelings will come and they will go, just like every other feeling you’ve ever had in your life. So allow them to happen spontaneously, while you focus on living by your values. Enjoy them and appreciate them when they come along, but don’t cling to them! As with all emotions, just make room for them and let them come and go as they please.
At times mindfulness is easy and at times it’s incredibly hard. In fact, one of the hardest things about mindfulness is
remembering
to practise it. Steven Hayes likens it to riding a bicycle. When you’re on a bike, you’re always about to fall over; you’re always catching yourself, continually adjusting your balance. So it is with mindfulness. No matter how deeply connected we are with our here-and-now experience, our thoughts will continually pull us out of it. We have to keep catching ourselves—realising our mind has pulled us off-balance yet again. (And remember how hard it was to balance, when you first started learning to ride that bike? And how it got easier over time?)
Life is like climbing a mountain: there are easy stretches and tough ones. But if you’re open and interested in your experience, then the obstacles you encounter will help you to learn, grow and develop, so that as time goes on, your climbing skills improve. Naturally, it’s far easier to be mindful when the going is easy, than when it gets tough. Yet the more you face your difficulties with mindfulness, the more you’ll find you grow stronger, calmer and wiser. This is easier said than done, but you can do it. Especially once you’ve read the next chapter.
How’s it all going? Are you taking action? Making some meaningful changes in your life? If not, you’ve probably come up against at least one of the four major obstacles to change. These obstacles are so universal, they even form their own acronym—FEAR:
Let’s take a look at these obstacles one by one.
By now you’re well familiar with cognitive fusion. As soon as you start setting goals,
Radio Doom and Gloom
will start to broadcast, ‘I can’t do it’, ‘It’s too hard’, ‘I’m wasting my time’, ‘There’s no point in trying’ and a whole play list of other golden oldies.
The solution is to use your defusion skills: see these thoughts for what they are (just words), let them come and go, and return your focus to taking effective action.
Unrealistic expectations can create a major roadblock. If your goals are too ambitious or there are too many of them, you’ll feel overwhelmed and will probably give up (or at least put it off for another day).
If this has happened to you, the solution is to break your goals down into smaller bites. Ask yourself: ‘What’s the smallest, easiest step I could take that would bring me a little closer to achieving this goal?’ Then do it.
Once you’ve taken that step, ask the same question: ‘What’s the next small, easy step that would bring me a little bit closer to my goal?’ (It’s like that old joke: How do you eat an elephant? One mouthful at a time!)
Here are two other common unrealistic expectations:
The solution for any unrealistic expectation is simple: make it more realistic. If your time frame is unrealistic, extend it, and meanwhile break down your large goal into smaller bites. And as for making mistakes, that’s a fundamental part of being human. Almost every activity you take for granted today—reading, talking, walking, riding a bicycle—was once hard to do. (Think how many times a baby falls on its bottom while learning to walk.) But the point is, you learned by making mistakes. You learned what not to do and you learned how to do it differently, so you became more effective. Making mistakes is an essential part of learning, so embrace it. Let go of aiming for perfection—it’s much more satisfying and fulfilling to be human.
The more you try to avoid unpleasant feelings, the harder it will be to make important changes. Change involves risk. It requires facing your fears, stepping out of your comfort zone—all of which points to one thing: change will usually give rise to uncomfortable feelings.
By now you’re well aware of the whole vicious cycle that results when we try to avoid discomfort. The only effective solution is true acceptance (not tolerance or ‘putting up with it’). Therefore, practise your expansion skills, make room for your discomfort and focus on taking effective action.
Of course, setting and working toward goals will not only create discomfort. It will often generate pleasant feelings, too, such as excitement and curiosity and the pleasure and satisfaction you’ll feel when you finally achieve those goals. But you can’t have the pleasant feelings if you’re not first willing to face the discomfort.
It’s not enough to clarify your values—you need to connect with them. You need to know what’s important in your heart and remind yourself on a regular basis. And you need to make sure your goals are in line with those values. Doing this will provide you with motivation, inspiration and meaning.
But if you’re remote from your values, it’s all too easy to lose heart, give up or get side-tracked. The more remote you are from your deepest values, the more your goals seem pointless, meaningless or insignificant. Obviously, this doesn’t do much for motivation.
The solution? Connect with your values. If you haven’t already done so, write them down. Read them through and change them as required. Share them with someone you trust. Re-read them on a regular basis. First thing in the morning, mentally go over them. At the end of each week, take a few minutes to check in with yourself and ask: ‘How true have I been to my values?’
So that’s FEAR: fusion, expectations, avoidance and remoteness. And of these four obstacles, fusion is probably the most common. When we fuse with unhelpful thoughts, the demons on our boat grow bigger and nastier. And the scariest of all these demons is called, ‘You will fail!’, which usually hangs around with several of his pals, ‘There’s no point in trying’, ‘You’re wasting your time’ and ‘Look at all the times you failed in the past.’
If we take these demons seriously and give them our full attention, our boat is doomed to drifting out at sea. So when they appear, it’s helpful to remember this quote by Henry James: ‘Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.’ In setting goals for ourselves, we’re talking about what is possible, not what is certain. There’s very little certainty in this world. You can’t even be certain that you’ll still be alive tomorrow. So none of us can ever be certain that we’ll achieve our goals. But what we can be certain of is this: if we don’t even attempt to achieve them, there’s no possibility of success.
Kelly Wilson uses the table below (inspired by the philosopher Blaise Pascal) to help people face the ‘I will fail’ demon. (Table 30.1)
Success IS possible | Success is NOT possible | |
|---|---|---|
| Assume ‘Yes, I can achieve this goal!’ and move in a valued direction towards it. | 1 | 2 |
| Assume ‘No, I can’t achieve this goal!’ and don’t even start moving in that direction. | 3 | 4 |
| Table 30.1 |
On the top row of this table are two headings: ‘Success IS possible’ and ‘Success is NOT possible’. ‘Success IS possible’ means that the universe is structured in such a way that if you apply yourself fully to achieving your valued goal, you will be successful. ‘Success is NOT possible’ means that the universe is structured in such a way that no matter how hard you apply yourself to achieving your valued goal, you will not be successful.
As we move in a valued direction toward our goals, we can never know which of these two conditions applies because we have no way of accurately predicting the future. (Your mind likes to think it knows, but it doesn’t. Let’s face it: if your mind could predict the future with absolute certainty, you’d be a very wealthy and powerful person by now.)
Down the side of the table are two statements: Assume ‘Yes, I can achieve this goal!’ and move in a valued direction towards it (in other words, assume success is possible and give it your best shot); Assume ‘No, I can’t achieve this goal!’ and don’t even start moving in that direction (in other words, assume the worst, and give up before you even start).
There are four possible outcomes, as shown below: (Table 30.2)
Success IS possible | Success is NOT possible | |
|---|---|---|
| Assume ‘Yes, I can achieve this goal!’ and move in a valued direction towards it. | 1 An exciting journey as you move in a valued direction. Along the way you develop new skills and experience personal growth. Then you achieve your goal and feel absolutely fantastic! | 2 A rewarding journey as you move in a valued direction. Along the way you develop new skills and experience personal growth. You feel disappointed that you did not achieve your goal, but you have the satisfaction of knowing you gave it your best shot. |
| Assume ‘No, I can’t achieve this goal!’ and don’t even start moving in that direction. | 3 No exciting journey! No new skills! No personal growth! No goals achieved! And if you later discover that you would have been successful if you’d tried, you feel absolutely terrible! | 4 No exciting journey! No new skills! No personal growth! No goals achieved! All you get is the booby prize: you saved yourself from the disappointment of failure. |
| Table 30.2 |
The outcomes depicted result from the choices you make. In quadrant 1, you go on an adventurous journey, learn new skills as you face your challenges, experience powerful personal growth in the process and on top of all that, you attempt your goal and you’re successful. Life is wonderful!
In quadrant 2, you attempt your goal and you’re ultimately unsuccessful. Naturally you feel disappointed, but at least there is the satisfaction of knowing you tried. Years later you won’t be tormenting yourself thinking, ‘If only I’d given it a go...’ Instead, you can look back with pride and say, ‘Hey, I gave it my best shot!’ Moreover, you can appreciate the journey, even if you don’t reach your destination. You can appreciate the process of connecting with and acting on your values and the personal growth that comes from facing your fears. And you can appreciate that you spent your time on an adventure: heading toward shore instead of just aimlessly drifting out at sea.
In quadrant 3, you don’t even try to reach your goal. So no adventurous journey, no new skills, no personal growth from facing your fears. And then suppose you find out later that if you
had
really applied yourself, you would have succeeded. At that point, imagine how terrible you’d feel: a painful sense of loss and of missing out.
If only I’d tried!
In quadrant 4, you give up on your goal without even trying and then you later find out that even if you had really applied yourself, you still would have failed. Once again, you have had no exciting journey, no personal growth. And you have not achieved your valued goal. Your only satisfaction is that you saved yourself from the disappointment of failure. This is the booby prize: you don’t get what you want, but at least you didn’t fail. (Or the other booby prize: you proved yourself right, that you really couldn’t do it!) You then try to console yourself with, ‘At least I didn’t waste my time trying.’ But it’s empty consolation. Why? Because you spent all that time miserably drifting out at sea when you could have been heading toward shore on an exciting adventure.
Based on these four possible outcomes, which seems the best bet: to attempt your goal or to give up on it without even trying?
If you give it a go, in the best-case scenario you will feel fantastic. In the worst-case scenario you’ll feel disappointed, but with the satisfaction that you gave it a go, you took on a meaningful journey, and you experienced personal growth.
If you don’t even try, at best you will still feel disappointed, and at worst you will feel absolutely terrible—and there’s no personal growth.
Of course, your mind will not be swayed by this logic for long. The ‘give up’ story will appear again and again. Therefore, again and again, you will need to detect and defuse it.
Your mind will also tell you lots of ‘what if?’ stories. ‘What if I try and I fail?’ ‘What if I invest all that time and energy and money and it all amounts to nothing?’ ‘What if I make a fool of myself?’ If you let yourself get hooked in by these stories, you can easily waste endless hours debating with yourself instead of taking action. So acknowledge the stories, thank your mind and let them come and go, then choose actions that are aligned with your values. Make your choices based on what you
truly care about
instead of on keeping the demons below deck. And especially be alert for a type of unhelpful thinking known as reason-giving.
The mind is very good at coming up with reasons for not doing the things we really want to do. Take physical exercise. In most western countries, over 40 per cent of the adult population is overweight or obese, and in the United States alone it’s over 50 per cent. Yet almost all of us, deep down inside, value our health. Sure, many of us neglect our health (some of us much of the time), but that doesn’t mean we don’t value it. It just means we’re not taking action. To clarify this, ask yourself: ‘Which would I prefer: a healthy body or an unhealthy one?’
The fact is, most of us would prefer to eat healthier and exercise more. So why don’t we? Well, part of the explanation is that our mind is a genius at giving us reasons not to: ‘I don’t have enough time today/this week/this month’, ‘I’m too tired’, ‘I can’t be bothered’, ‘I hate exercise’, ‘It’s too cold outside.’
The first thing to realise is that reasons are just thoughts. The second thing is that thoughts do not
control
your behaviour. Does that sound surprising to you? Well, check your own experience. How often have you had the thought ‘I can’t do this!’ and then gone ahead and done it? How often have you thought ‘Yes, I am going to do this!’ and then not followed through on it? How often have you
thought about
taking hurtful, harmful, hostile or self-defeating actions but not actually done so? (It’s just as well that thoughts don’t control our behaviour otherwise most of us would be in prison, laid up in the hospital or dead.)
To demonstrate conclusively that thoughts do not control your behaviour, do these two exercises:
How’d you go? No doubt you found that you could take those actions even though your thoughts said you couldn’t. Of course, thoughts can
influence
your behaviour, even though they can’t
control
it. And the greater the degree of fusion with a thought, the greater the influence it will have on your behaviour.