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Do you ever find yourself caught in repetitive patterns that hinder the growth and intimacy of your relationships? Whether it’s a recurring conflict, a deep-seated trauma, or simply the inability to stay fully present, many of us struggle to break free from the habits and thoughts that get in the way of true connection. Imagine how transformative it could be to learn the strategies and skills that foster psychological flexibility, enabling you to navigate life's complexities with grace and authenticity.

In this episode, we delve deep into the science and practice of psychological flexibility, exploring how openness, presence, and active engagement can revolutionize not just how we relate to others but how we relate to ourselves. Through expert insights and practical examples, we will uncover the smallest set of principles that do the most good in fostering a meaningful, connected life. So, get ready to learn how to align your actions with your deepest values, respond effectively to life's challenges, and unlock the full potential of your relationships.

Steven C. Hayes is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Nevada, Reno. An author of 48 books and over 700 scientific articles, he originated Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. His book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life was the best-selling self-help book in the US, and his TEDx talks and blogs have been seen or read by 4 million people. He is among the 30 most cited psychologists in the world.

In this episode

04:53 Exploring the origin and philosophy of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

16:07 Integrating science and spirituality within ACT.

17:06 Understanding the nature of learning and vulnerability.

21:42 The role of humility in relationships and life.

23:38 Using psychological flexibility to navigate intimacy.

28:55 Embracing a beginner's mind in everyday life.

30:05 Active engagement and personal responsibility in values-driven actions.

36:22 The importance of validation and accountability in relationships.

37:45 Aligning values with actions for intentional living.

41:34 Breaking down the components of psychological flexibility.

45:28 Tuning into life’s demands through psychological flexibility.

48:19 Continuous learning and personal growth: available resources.

Your Check List of Actions to Take

• Spend time daily to identify what qualities and values are meaningful to you in your relationships and life.
• Incorporate mindfulness exercises, like deep breathing, into your routine to enhance present-moment awareness.
• Cultivate emotional openness by allowing yourself to feel and express your genuine emotions without judgment.
• Practice focusing on different aspects of your environment or experiences, such as broadening or narrowing your attention as needed.
• Participate in group coaching: Join programs like the Evolve and Love experiential group coaching to develop skills in secure functioning, emotional intelligence, and communication.
• Work on skills that help peacefully resolve conflicts and repair relationships through communication and understanding.
• Be kind to yourself: Engage in self-compassion, allowing yourself to make mistakes and learn from them without harsh self-judgment.

Mentioned

Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life (*Amazon Affiliate link) (book)

A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters (*Amazon Affiliate link) (book)

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (*Amazon Affiliate link) (book)

Doing What Matters in Times of Stress (*World Health Organization link)

Evolve in Love  (program)

Connect with Dr. Steven Hayes

Websites: stevenchayes.com

Facebook: facebook.com/drstevenchayes

X: x.com/stevenchayes

YouTube: youtube.com/@StevenCHayes-yo7di

Instagram: instagram.com/drstevenchayes

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/stevenchayes

Connect with Dr. Jessica Higgins

Facebook: facebook.com/EmpoweredRelationship 

Instagram: instagram.com/drjessicahiggins 

Podcast: drjessicahiggins.com/podcasts/

Pinterest: pinterest.com/EmpowerRelation 

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/drjessicahiggins 

Twitter: @DrJessHiggins 

Website: drjessicahiggins.com  

Email: [email protected]

About this episode

Steven, thank you so much. I am beyond honored to have you spending time with us here today, and I'm super excited to share you with my audience.

Well, thanks for that. I'm looking forward to the conversation, Jessica.

Yes, wonderful! Well, for people who maybe aren't as familiar with your work and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, where would you like to just start giving us a foundation of what you founded in ACT?

Yeah, I think maybe an orientation would be, and one that would give you a little more of a sense of anything that I do that's different from others, is I've spent 40 years trying to drill down to the smallest set of processes to do the most good for the most people in the most situations. So while ACT is 43 years old—the first workshop was in 1982, and the first protocol was in 1981—it was almost invisible the first 20 years because I was trying to do that work: what is the smallest set of processes? I can pretty much say that, while nothing is forever, and there's certainly lots of things to add, the things that are inside our conversations over the next hour incorporate some of the most important processes that people need to learn to be able to navigate life well.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy—or training, if you're using it outside of a psychotherapy approach—the usual elevator speech version is, it's a collection of acceptance and mindfulness processes, commitment and change processes, that help create psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility is just a way of describing what that small set of principles are that do the most good, which I can say in a long sentence, or I can even say it in a short sentence. Learn to be more open, aware, and actively engaged in a meaningful life, extending that to your relationships, and taking care of your body. Boom! You drop a pin, that will describe.

If you give me a little bit of wiggle room, almost everything we know about how change happens in any evidence-based psychotherapy on the planet. So, to me, it doesn't matter if you call it ACT or Uncle Fred the Wonder Slug, it's all fine. Let's just focus on not the castles in the sky and the certifications and the anointings and the heroes, but focus instead on what people need and get that small set of things that do the most good for the most people in the most areas, in their heads and their hearts and their hands. That's what I'm up to. That's what I've spent my life building.

Absolutely. I'm sure this is part of what could be called your signature talk. How did you come to develop this? Like, was it just organic?

Yeah, well, you're looking at a child of the 60s and 70s, so an old hippie. I don't have any hair now, it used to be halfway done. There were all kinds of things in that era that people were exploring. I thought that we really needed to apply experimental science to it, but probably a different kind that was more focused on the individual rather than just collections of people and randomized trials. Even though ACT has 1200 randomized trials now, including some of the best journals in the world, some amazing studies. But I came to that focus out of my own personal struggles. I mean, if I had not developed a panic disorder, there wouldn't be any ACT. If I had no exposure to the kinds of things people were exploring—in areas in the human potential movement, or in Esalen, or all these kind of loosey goosey things that are out there in the humanistic space back in the day in the 60s and 70s. But also, wanting to put it into or let it be seen through the lens of experimental science.

So known for my basic science work, I have an entire area of what is cognition, where did it come from, how does it develop. Hundreds of studies, and I've spent many, many years on that, which is great if you have a kid who can't speak or doesn't have a normal sense of self, or if you want to increase your IQ and so forth. But the reason I built that is I thought the principles that we had back in the day that were more experimental were mostly drawn from non-human animals. That's great, and they've been rock solid, and you really do need to know about exposure and how it works, or habituation or some of these terms that scientists throw around. But basically, terms that describe how your experience informs your behavior over time, where behavior means all the things you do—what you feel, what you think, or remember what you sense over time.

I also thought we really needed to do something similar with humans. Humans are a little different. What you and I are doing right now is different than the bird outside the window, and it's radically different over time. I mean, we're doing some stuff we couldn't have done 10 years ago, right now, let alone 20 or 30 or 50. Well, that's not true for the bird outside the window. They're doing the same thing they were doing 500 years ago, or maybe 5,000 years ago. They evolved, but slowly. We evolve really fast, and it's because of what you and I are doing right now. So I spent a lot of time trying to understand that. But then inside my own panic disorder, I found that I couldn't move it with all of the things I learned from the science side. I could move it with things that are a little more linked to the more humanistic side, kind of spiritual. Issues like mindfulness, emotional openness, values, what do you want your life to be about? Things like that. So it's that dialectic.

Then, after a three-year struggle, hitting bottom, there's a TED talk where you can walk through even my lowest moment my whole life, which I replicated with a scream, which I've only done three times in my life—once when I was about to die inside a factory machine, and once at the lowest moment of my life, and then once in that TED talk, it never happened again. Out of hitting bottom, I found not a way out, but a way in. And it happened pretty fast. You could call it a spiritual experience. I mean, it happened over a period of a couple hours. Time was not what I was thinking of. But as I say in the TED Talk, I knew I had been on the floor a long time because I was a young man and I could hardly stand up. My bones were set, and the dried track of tears on my face told me I've been there for a long time.

So it was such a transformational shift for me, and I can unpack what that is. But it's not magic. Everybody knows it. It's just that your mind doesn't know what to do with it. You've all had moments like the one that was important for me, and I think I could even prove it to you and your listeners. But the only thing that's different about me is I was an experimental scientist who was stubborn enough to say: Okay, I want to put this under the microscope. I'm not going to just run out and say: Hallelujah, I've got a new way forward. I did one study. Well, three I did, but one was published. The other two were put away because the outcomes were so great, I didn't dare publish them. Because I didn't want people to rush and start doing it until I understood it, and that took 20 years. 20 years we stepped forward, and it became the overnight sensation that took 20 years to produce. I wrote a self-help book that hit number 20 on Amazon and beat Harry Potter for one glorious week.

So that's been my journey, basically. How did I come to it? Personal misery, but then a combination of my background, which is shared by many. It's a generational thing, almost. And also, my stubbornness that I wanted it to yield to experimental science.

Well, thank you for sharing. I can feel your personal experience in this as you share your story, and also just the heart and the meaning, and also the science and really making this more distilled. So that it can be, to your point, replicated, and also allowing people to have more access to explore or implement into their lives.

Well, one of the things you find, if I can roll off what you just said, is a lot of the things you find are almost truisms. They're in the culture, and they're even in the heads and hearts of people to a degree. Almost everybody listening to me can show me very quickly that you know what I'm talking about. The problem is, is that this problem-solving organ between our ears is trying to apply a particular kind of solution: problem-solving. Problem-solving breaks down, weighs, compares, evaluates, predicts, judges, and that's exactly what we have to be released from. So how are you going to take the tool that allows you to do all that and will turn your life into a problem to be solved? Well, wait a minute. If you're a problem to be solved, that means you're a problem now, right? If you're going to be all put together and okay in the future, that means you're not all put together and okay now, right? Yes. Well, what if you can't get there from here? What if we're talking about what would life look like if you assumed or if you embraced inherent wholeness that lies within, and then learn how to put that into your relationships, into your life?

So it's a paradox. We know it from other areas. Somebody playing music or playing sports or dancing, if you overthink it, you can't do it. I mean, try to walk, don't even do it with something deep. Do it with a sticky tape on your carpet, the kind that's easy to pull up, like the blue tape for painting. Get about a four-inch wide thing, put it on your floor, and then try to walk very slowly. Making sure, absolutely certain sure, that you never step off of that line. Really think through what every single step means and how it works and how you have to contract those muscles. You'd practically fall over, because that's not how you learned how to walk. It's also not how you learned how to love, how you learned to have faith in yourself, how you learned to have faith at all, how you learned to be committed to somebody. So this tool that's telling you I know everything, can't even freaking walk down the carpet. That's not how you learned it.

It came in later saying: Oh, you need to contract the muscle in your upper thigh. Babies don't learn to walk that way. If you have an injury in your brain, you don't learn to re-walk that way. That's why they have bars, because people need to have the security to hang on to, to explore a trial and error learning, which is how you learned how to walk. So life is asking you, if you're struggling, to learn and do something you already know how to do. But your mind doesn't, and never will. That's the challenge. But it's not insolvable. You did it when you were dancing, walking, singing, playing music, hitting a tennis ball, playing sports. You know how to do this. It's just the you that's listening to me is not just the you that's categorizing what I'm saying.

Well, and this is something that I really know as a part of your work, is the experiential, and you're really even bringing it into the conversation here. As you were talking about the tape on the floor, I was reminded of, I don't know, at some point in my life—I was not an adult, but I was not young, like really young—I was focusing on the step where I was stepping, and I'm like, I can't look up the steps if I'm focusing on where I'm stepping. I needed to look ahead of where I was and just be in the movement of it. I don't know, it was just so interesting. But that's how I'm relating to what you're describing. It sounds as though when you're saying and describing with us here that while it's innate, and these perhaps seemingly opposing aspects of what you're wanting to help people fully get a sense of how to orient a bit, but that we can get in our own way through our thinking.

Yeah, absolutely.

So when you're mad at your spouse, or when you're worried about something and then you find that you're not thinking about your relationships, in such a way that things are falling off the edge of the table because you're not focusing, etc. I'm moving it over into things that I know your audience is especially interested in, in terms of relationship implications. So one of the things that's a little frustrating, a little humbling, is that means even though you know what need you need to know, you don't know it at the level that you need to know it to be able to deploy it always.

So you're going to have to allow yourself to learn, and be kind to yourself while you do. Because if you immediately move over into judgment—I should know better—next thing you know, you're into some sort of guilt or shame spiral about using a harsh word with your spouse, let's say, without knowing how to clean it up or whatever. If it's trial and error learning, that means it's one step at a time learning, and what's important is to at least get the healthy attempts with a focus on how do I know that that was helpful? Read it. When you're learning how to walk, you know because you didn't fall down. You look a little silly. You're called a toddler for a reason. You can't even balance a single foot. You have to toddle like a Lego block to be able to turn. Eventually, you'll be able to spin on one foot, and maybe even a couple times, like in ice skaters or dancers, or you at your best in your yoga class or your gym work or whatever. Metaphorically, that's going to happen too with these skills as they apply to the challenges you have at work or in relationships or when dealing with past traumas or things of kind.

As I always say when I talk about these things—and boy, when it gets in relationships, I really need to—I am not an expert at this. I only know that the processes are important in my life. I've gotten better, and that doesn't mean I'm yet great at it. Just ask my wife. It just means I know it's important, and I know something about how to get on your own way enough that you can try and learn and speed up that learning process, so that you're not delaying the time when you're better, even though you'll never be finished.

You're never going to get a gold medal. You're never going to get a blue ribbon stuck to your forehead. 

That's the journey, and it's part of what makes life exciting, is that you can see that over time you get kinder towards yourself and others, you get more caring in your relationships, you're less likely to miss the needs of others, or to be able to stop and kneel down and talk to that child, or make that call, or send that birthday card, or whatever it is that might be important.

Thank you for all the examples you're giving that make this relatable. One of the things I'm just feeling is, a lot of people who listen to this show are pretty well-trained or developed in their industry, and perhaps have a way of operating in life that's been very successful. It sounds as though what you're describing is an invitation to perhaps be willing to let go of what's known and what has been. I'm thinking, you mentioned trauma, whether or not it's adaptive, at the time, coping strategies or protective mechanisms that served a purpose, but often keep us in a similar pattern. There's an immense amount of vulnerability and courage to go to new learning, that might offer real liberation and overcoming pain and difficulty, and really bring into focus more of this alignment with purpose and value. Also, it's confronting an unknown territory. Is that right?

Yeah, that's exactly right. I think, in some ways, it's a little bit humbling to know that the things that you've developed as great skills in one context don't necessarily apply in the same way in another context. So for example, if you're a brilliant problem-solver in business, that doesn't mean that you're brilliant at being able to be vulnerable and to connect with your values and share that with another human being. Those two things put together, shared with another human being, we call intimacy. In fact, if you were to guess, if I just said, do you think that the barons of business are especially skilled at intimacy and intimate relationships, you'd probably guess no. I would guess no. I would guess that they would probably try to navigate it by power, or by transactions, or by let's make a deal, or by problem-solving or. All those things are train wrecks with regard to intimacy. Not that intimacy is all that there is to good relationships, but it is a key part.

I mean, when you say vulnerable, that means wound-able. Good business people are trying to avoid any possibility of being wound-able, in the deals they make, in the way that they carry themselves at work, very likely. Now it does turn out that authoritative parenting and these transformational leadership skills in business do overlap with some of the very same skills that we point to in psychological flexibility and its extension to relationships. So extraordinary leaders who empower those underneath them, sometimes do have those skills.

I'm not very often called to consult a business in the industry. Others who work with ACT do. But I've done a little bit of it. I enjoy asking things to CEOs like, what are the names of the children of the person who just walked me into your office? Often, they have no idea. Where does that person live? They have no idea. I say, well, that's an issue. If we're going to work together, we're going to work on how to bring these psychological skills into your interactions with others around you. You don't need consulting from me on how to run your business, but you may on how to be more present, be more conscious, be more open, people values focused. If you're able to do that, your team may work together better, and the business may even be more successful. There's even data on it.

If you have psychologically flexible workers, they tend to produce—and I'm just using business as a punching bag here because you could do it—but they tend to produce success more, but only if the workplace itself supports psychological flexibility. In other words, if you've got an inflexible workplace, my way or the highway, it's wasted effort. Well, that's true in relationships too. You could have wonderful skills, in isolation, of emotional openness, being consciously present in the moment together, being able to focus on your values and get habits built around them, and have the skill to extend that to your relationships and taking care of your body. That's the longer version of what I said earlier, a slightly elaborated version. You could have those, but if we don't put them together into our relationship, it takes two to tango is a phrase. We're working together on this, and building cooperative systems and partnerships require us working together, which then has significant challenges. 

So in the same way, whether it's business or performance or relationships, these processes that are uplifting our lives, we'll be in a mode of learning them our entire life. We're never going to be finished, and we're going to have to do it together in community and couples and families and neighborhoods and organizations and the world.

I'm so glad you spoke to that. I was thinking, in my own life, people have remarked around: Oh, it must be nice that you have all this knowledge and training and experience and wisdom to offer your relationship. I'm thinking, even if we are walking the talk, so to speak, or if I'm walking the talk, while I might have had experiences of being able to work through pain with my husband or my own insecurity or my own trauma, to be able to feel connected or be present to him, it's almost as if when a new opportunity or if there's something that arises, none of that really matters anymore. We've been together 18 years, and it's like, I can't rely on that. It asks me to show up again in this place of openness and wonder and not knowing, and also being in service of what I am really intending and interested in cultivating. It's quite humbling.

You see phrases like that out there where people are aware about some of these things. If you're really going to enter into a situation with a beginner's mind, there's a phrase, in a way that allows a fresh start, there's a phrase. If you're going to do that, it means part of the vulnerability is: I don't know, and I'm uncertain, and I'm willing, and I will find out. If you connect it over, if you allow grounding your next steps in the humility of not knowing, you can trust your history to be able to work it through, without necessarily, in a mindy way, having the formula, the tool, or the thing that you're going to do, that for certain is going to work.

It's like trusting the process.

Yeah, well, take this issue. Open, aware, actively engaged. Open is cognitively open and emotionally open. So cognitively, open means the many, many thoughts that you've had that have worked in the past, or sometimes that you've just adopted by habit that used to work in the past but no longer work. Like playing small, because otherwise it wouldn't work when you're a kid, or hiding, or tantruming, there's all kinds of things. But these kind of central tactics, they're like grooves in the dirt that get so deep, it's hard to jump out of the grooves and take a new direction. So you have habits of mind and practice that are making it hard. But there's also then this issue of, if you're going to do things with a fresh mind, open mind, beginner's mind, what about the vulnerability, the wound-ability? Vulnus is a wound, that's the etymology of the word. The potential wound-ability of: I might get it wrong, I might not be able to, or the other person may not be able to be trusted, or what if they're lying to me? You can get all kinds of things from your history that make it harder and harder.

So it's kind of like a thing where no matter how big you get, there's more big to get. In the area where you've already worked it through, you can navigate freely. At the zone of growth, the question will always be: am I good enough, can I do this, or am I willing to try even with a thought that I can't or it won't? There's always that sense of possibility of failure that is strong enough to make it a zone of growth. If that was worked through, it wouldn't be the area where you'd be growing. It would be the area where you already grew, and in those areas, we navigate really well.

One of the earliest ACT trials was done in a bank, and we were working with folks who were very, very critical workers to the success of the bank. If they made even a single error, it could be huge. So we trained people on psychological flexibility skills, tried to put it into the workplace, and it had a nice impact. But the impact that was most surprising was things like, over the next year, where we actually had things like keystroke loggers. With permission. We weren't doing anything sneaky, we knew every error that was entered from all these computers in this bank. And where did it really show up? It showed up with just fewer errors. But the biggest thing was learning new things.

So think about it. If you ever had a secretary or an office worker or something like that, who's just great, but then the tech changes and they have to learn a new program. There's some folks who are like: Please, please, please don't make me learn that. Please, please, please. I know Excel so well, I just can't. Or I don't want to use Basecamp, I want to use Slack, or whatever the thing is. But the flexibility skills we're talking about show up especially when we don't know what to do. Can we navigate those moments? The little formula I gave earlier—open, aware, actively engaged, extending your relationships and your body—does point to the processes that we know, predict success, and moving through those moments, and being able to get better and better at being us.

Thank you. As you mentioned—and the show is largely focused on intimate relationship—I'm also aware that no two people, if we're talking about a monogamous relationship, are static. They're changing and they're different people every day, and the relationship is growing and evolving, and the dynamics are different. So it is an ever-evolving space, and I appreciate you just acknowledging all the things that go into this. It seems as though we're talking a lot more about the first component, which is the openness and the presence and the vulnerability. Would you like to talk about more of the active engagement? Because there's so much that you bring around choosing and the intention and the power of that.

Well, and they're all interlinked. Those first four—open, aware, and actively engaged—you can divide into two, cognitive and emotional openness I mentioned. Aware means this part of us that is more pure awareness. We don't even have any good words for it. It's more spiritual, witnessing, noticing part of us. Not the self that's being categorized, analyzed, judged. That's the form that you put out. But I mean, if you meet somebody's eyes, especially somebody that you love or care about, you've probably had these experiences of seeing them in a deep way and seeing that they're seeing you in a deep way, and you're interconnected. That sense of self. Being able to then come into the present moment in a way that's flexible, fluid, and voluntary. There's a gazillion things to focus on right now. Just look around the room, and I bet you, you literally have hundreds of things, at least, that could be of importance. What's of importance to this very moment?

I found myself, when we were talking—I'm going to out myself—but this is a note of a Monday meeting at 8. A Monday meeting at 8 is very likely to be missed. It's on my calendar, but I have to do special things to make sure. Because normally, I'm up and going with meetings by 9. This is at 8 because it has to be. If you actually look at the recording, you'll see it, my eyes went down for a second. I wrote a big 8 on the note that's in front of me. During that moment, I wasn't with you. It probably should not have been done, because I've actually written down the note: Meeting Monday morning with… No, I didn't put a big 8. I only have a couple notes in front of me, mostly about this, what you do, and maybe being able to serve. That's an example of an intentional process that was not helpful to me. It's not going to help me with the meeting, because I could handle it other ways. And it wasn't helpful for me to be here with you, Jessica. It just wasn't. I caught it, I stopped it, and I tried to learn from it.

We learn from our mistakes too. It's not like we're baby Buddhas walking around. Even the Dalai Lama says sometimes he gets mad. So if you think that you're always gonna be balanced on the tape, metaphorically, no you're not. You're going to fall off. Just make sure you don't do a face plant. If we can catch when our attention wanders, and bring it back to what? Well, to what's of importance to this moment. That could be focused, or it could be changing. It could be broadening your attention. It could be narrowing your attention. It could be a different kind of attention where you notice the space in between the elements, and you start noticing things you'd never notice, like the space between thoughts or the gaps between people. Or the context, we could say. Those are five things to tend to: shift, stay, broaden, narrow, context or content. That's a lot. If you try to do it as a rule, you're now distracted in that. How am I going to interact with you? I'm trying to remember the rule. No, you've got to do it by skill. So that's the middle part.

The one you asked about, about active engagement, I wanted to review those four because they lay a strong foundation for the most vulnerable thing that you can do. We say shared values and vulnerability equals intimacy, which is kind of an ACT formula.

So sharing that without defense or explanation or icing on the cake or rationalization or justification, whew, that's hard. You're not doing it on the first date. Even over time with years, with somebody you're married to, you may hold back on certain areas, like how important it is to you to feel heard, let's say, or to not be judged, or to be able to say things about your past that were shameful. There may be things in there that are really hard to put in front of another person. If you can get there, you're going to use those first skills, being more open and aware, almost certainly. Because we hurt where we care. They're glued together. But when you are able to know, not just with words—and they do change over time, so it's not know once and forever, it's not chiseled into stone—but to able to know in the moment: what are you yearning for, what do you care about, what do you value, what are the qualities of being and doing? Are there things you can do in this moment that you really want to put into the world?

If you know that, well, now you have a little tuning fork for: is this next note going to be true or not? You hear it like a dissonant note. If it's, I'm really yearning to just be myself, and now I'm pretending with somebody else so they'll like me. You can feel it in the moment that it's off, the note is off. The other piece on that side of active engagement is, if I can hear that note, am I willing to step towards the clear note of what brings meaning and purpose into my life? I phrased it in a way that sounds like you're being visited by it, but it's more like the place where you own it.

The words that are coming up for me are congruence or alignment, that I am feeling the resonance of being in integrity with the things that I intend or vision or find meaning and purpose in.

Wonderful words, the integrity, or consonance. If you put it on hold for a long, long time, you're going have to do some work on emotional openness and so forth, to even get into the zone where you can do it. But then even there, you'll find it's an exploration. I mean, what are the signs? 

But if it was something more like, how do I know that this is a comfortable house, this house is actually serving me? Well, then that's going to take more than just an architect looking at a plan. You're going to have to have a sense of what it's like to be in that space. In the same way, metaphorically, some of the reads, the little cues of things like vitality, things like a sense of coherence, or integrity, or so-ness, of it really is true that I care about. There's kind of a, I don't want to say certainty, that sounds like uncertainty is the enemy. I don't want to say words that sound corny or weird, but of so-ness to it.

We don't have good words for it. It's like, it lands in a way, like: Yes, yes, love is important to me. I want to be a loving person. Yeah, I want things coming back. Like, I would like to have kids, or I'd like to be married, or I'd like to have a relationship. But how about the part that you do? How about wanting to be loving in your interactions with others? That's a little different, and it's far more likely to give you the outcome benefits that you would list on a list of pros and cons. Because that's the one you control, that's the one that your behavior is consonant with. You've explored this space, I can see it, because you're giving me words that are sensitive to it, Jessica. So that probably means you spend a lot of time on your podcast talking about some of the very same issues, and they're very important in relationships, what our values are.

Yes, and I'm grateful that you're giving a little more description of the process. That perhaps if one is, let's say, a little distant or disconnected from what really brings meaning and purpose, because they have been distracted or occupied by other endeavors, that it might take a little bit more of an engagement with the openness and the sensing and the real qualitative experience with it. One of the things that I'm hearing, that it is this, I want to say bi-directional, but is probably more than just two, that it's this exchange with life or person or what one is experiencing. That one can really have a sense of purpose or intention or vision, and then when one is living into it, they're trying it on, the so-ness. Does this feel right? Is this where I want to be, or do I need to fine-tune it or modify it? I think that there can be a way of that being validating or perhaps offering new information. 

To your point, if we're out of alignment, saying I want to be in a loving relationship, and I'm either unconsciously or consciously committing to dynamics that are not loving, I'm participating in that. So not only is it what I want to experience in this receptivity, but it's also what am I participating in, and can I take some accountability for that? It sounds like that's really a part of this as well, what am I taking action and doing and really putting my investment into?

Yeah, exactly. You used the word accountability, and I'll use a word that's a little hard to hear, but I'm going to unpack it really quickly. Take responsibility for it. But then, if that lands like: Oh my god, it's my fault! No, slow it down. Responsibility was originally two words and was put together into one word. It just means the ability to respond. But isn't that cool? This is in an area where really what you do can be a big part of what happens here. That's a lot better than sometimes things that have happened that are trauma-inducing or something where that was not your responsibility. You had no ability to respond. If you were emotionally abused as a child, or God forbid, sexually abused or something like that, that is not your responsibility.

The responsibility part is, where do I have an ability to respond to that level of pain or violation of values or things that in my life now with everything that I now know? I'm no longer a kid, and I now have the ability to explore different places—different places that I can go. That's a tricky area to navigate. But the exciting thing about the work of learning to be more open, aware, actively engaged in life, is each one of those are things that are under your control. You don't know the outcome. You don't know the content. A plane could fly through the window in the next seconds. What you do know is, are you writing a hero's journey or a tragedy? Are you owning up, showing up, and stepping forward. Those are the things you can control, and those are the things that make the most difference going forward.

So life is asking you to learn something, and you're never going to be done. The faster you learn it, the faster you'll be able to move. But you're still never going to be done. 

Okay, now that I'm here, how am I going to step forward to learn what it is that life is asking me to learn? There's that sentence again, learn that small set of skills, I think over and over again. But it's context dependent.

One of the things we're learning, and this is very, very important for people to hear, and there's new statistical methods that show this. I won't go into the geek, but I will point to what the geek shows. We've socialized the entire world to think of themselves in comparison to others. I mean, even six-year-olds know what their IQ is, which is a comparison to others, what their percentile rank is in second grade, which is a comparison to others, what their Big Five personality is, which is a comparison to others. All of these processes we're talking about, while we know that they're of importance when they all get put together, need to be put together in a way that fits your journey, your purpose, your history, your background, your culture, your situation.

So what life is asking you to learn. You yourself might be more in this area of attentional flexibility, or might be more in this emotional openness, or might be more on clarity of your values, or extending it to your relationships. So when we begin to look at all these processes, somebody would ask me, are those things always helpful and always good? I'd say life is asking you to learn them, but are they helpful right now for your goals? The answer is, it depends.

I'll give you an example. If you're kinder to yourself, you're kinder towards others. Self-compassion goes with compassion towards others. So everybody believes, and almost all the studies show. The correlation is about 0.45—not huge, but pretty hefty, getting up there. Enough that you certainly would be proud if you're interested in self-compassion and compassion towards others. If you now look one at a time instead of comparing, about one out of eight people, the kinder they are to themselves, the meaner and nastier they are to others. The thing is, everybody listening to me knows this, because you know somebody like that. It's my self-care day, you take care of the work project. No, it's a joint project. I need my self-care. Uh, okay, but who's going to back you up? That's not my responsibility. Yes, it is. You see what I'm talking about, where we've got selfish self-compassion.

Now when we dig into that, how does that happen? It's often because something is missing. For example, what is the values part of self-compassion? It isn't just self-soothing. There's no self-compassion teacher out there who says, this is the psychological equivalent of an opiate, take a lot of it. Nobody is saying that. They're saying, be kind to yourself, in part so that you can own up, show up, and be kind to others in the world. Well, that requires additional skills other than just being kind to yourself, like the vulnerability, or the attentional flexibility even to notice what the people around you need, the values to care about what they need.

So the other thing I'd want to say to folks is, if you get on to ACT and psychological flexibility, or put aside even ACT, but psychological flexibility, you'll see that it's there in many, many different traditions. It makes a difference in many, many, many areas, from doing well in sports, to being able to step up to a cancer diagnosis, to having relationships that work, to dealing with panic and depression and classic things like that.

But you are an individual. Don't turn this into a formula, turn it into a set of domains to be explored. Part of your trial and error learning is going to have to be learning how to sense areas where you still need more work, and gently focus on those. When you put all the strengths together, you have more and more of a possibility of getting them to be strong altogether. It would be like a box with eight sides. Because I said open, aware, actively engaged. But each of those first three have two features: your relationships, your body. That's eight things. If you start pulling sides out of an eight-sided object, it eventually just flops into a flat space. It won't hold anything. You can't put anything in it, you can't stand on it. It's just like that. There's a lot of things that need to go together to really learn how to be whole and free and live a life that is filled with peace of mind and purpose. That's the game, that's what life is asking us to learn and to put into the world. We ought to get on about learning how to do that, one perfect human being at a time, or one perfect couple at a time, or one perfect family at a time.

Exactly. Steven, thank you so much. I just feel the tremendous gift of your willingness to speak and share about what you've been able to create and how it's backed by so much research and all the ways in which it's applied, and then the real openness around presenting this. That it really is invitational and inviting someone to explore and make it their own and have an experience and let it guide, and see the wholeness of it and what can come from it. So thank you.

Yeah, super cool. If I could say just a sentence, of course we'll put in the notes and so forth, how to reach me. But if you want to find this, you'll find that there's a lot out there on the internet for free. Be careful about some spammers. Even on Amazon and stuff, there's fake books being sold. It's popular enough that they skim it and make up authors, so there's that. Make sure you're with people who are real, live people, who've helped develop the work. But you'll find things like the World Health Organization has a free book. It's the most downloaded book on the whole WHO website, and it's called Doing What Matters in Times of Stress. It's around the world right now. It's in the Ukraine and so forth, wherever there's conflict, they put it out there because it helps not only ameliorate, but also prevent mental health problems and things of that kind.

So there's lots of resources that are free. You can begin to work on these skills in a piece by piece way. That will lift your life up, and that's something that my life work has been about. The promise is that when you learn more about how to deal with the processes of change that impact powerfully on your life and your relationships, that's an investment that's worth making, because it'll have a broader and deeper impact in many areas of your life. And who knows what's coming. Probably challenges, probably things where we think: I'm not good enough, I'm not able to do this. You don't start working on your strength conditioning when you have to run five miles to escape the fire and you haven't been in the gym for years on end. Better to get in the gym now if you want to work on your flexibility, strength, and persistence. Now would be a good time to start, why not?

Yes. For one that's wanting to jump in, is there a book? I know you've written many books, and I'll put a couple on today's show notes along with your website. Is there one that you would encourage people to start with?

Well, if you're starting with mine, there's two that I'd recommend. There's one that gives an overview that I really like, called A Liberated Mind. It's about five years old. It tells my personal story, the science story, and gives lots of little self-help things that you can start trying. There's an earlier one that's a deeper dive on the self-help side. That's the book that beat the Harry Potter for one glorious week, called Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life. It's hitting its 20th anniversary, and several hundred thousand copies have been sold. It's really a very helpful thing. The way I suggest people do it, if you grab that one, is skim it in one evening. Don't read it, skim it. Set it aside. And if, over the next two days, you get a whisper that maybe you should actually read that book, now that you're oriented to what the whole journey is, go back and do it. Try to do all the exercises. If you hit an exercise where it's just bogging you down, skip it, put a little sticky note, come back and do it later. 

There's some groups and so forth of people who are on that journey. There's one at groups.io called ACT for the Public, and you can ask questions there to help you get over barriers you encounter. That's going to take you a month, and we've done randomized trial on that little $12 book or something like that, depending on which one you buy. I think Kindle is even less. It does about 60% of what a course of ACT Therapy does, which is pretty crazy. Do it that way, thoroughly, every exercise. Take a month, give it your life energy. So you don't have to be rich, you just need to be interested.

Thank you again for sharing with us today.

Thank you so much for the opportunity, Jessica. Peace, love, and life.

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