Acceptance and Commitment Skills for Perfectionism and High-Achieving Behaviors

Do Things Your Way, Be Yourself, and Live a Purposeful Life

Patricia E. Zurita Ona

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000488081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is essential for those who are prone to high-achieving, self-starting, and perfectionistic actions; people who relentlessly, persistently, and determinedly pursue their dreams, goals, and aspirations; people who hold their high standards, principles, and values close to their heart.

Chapter by chapter, you will learn acceptance and commitment skills to harness the power of perfectionism and high-achieving behaviors while living the life you want to live. You will learn how to be yourself, keep your fears in perspective, and do meaningful things without dwelling for hours on the different ways to make things right, postponing things because they aren't ready, struggling for days with rumination, anxiety and stress, or wrestling periodically with harsh criticisms.

This book will show you how you can give your best, work hard, and push yourself when you deeply care about things without sacrificing your well-being, hurting your relationships, or compromising your health. You will learn when to engage in high-achieving actions in an effective, life-expansive, and skillful way. You will develop a new workable relationship with all those narratives about not being good enough and treat yourself with kindness, compassion, and caring. Most importantly, you will find that you can be yourself without losing yourself.

Section V

Pause and Play

DOI: 10.4324/9781003083153-27

Yay, you just made it to a very special section of this book!

Let’s do a mini recap before jumping into it. In Section IV, The Workability Game, you learned that, to play the workability game and live a fulfilling life, you need to keep in mind four key principles: (1) the dynamic nature of your mind, (2) the true essence of workability, (3) the choices you make, and (4) the richness of your precious values. In other words, you need to keep in mind that your mind will always do its own minding, what works is what takes you closer to your values, you can make choices to handle every situation you encounter and all the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that come with them, and your values can always guide every action you take. It’s like these four principles are the basis of your new mindset to keep nurturing those perfectionistic actions!

But having a new mindset is not enough. You need to know what to do in your day-to-day life. So, in Chapter 20, Playing It, you learned that to play the workability game you need to catch your choice points, go back to your values, radically accept that your dynamic mind is a busy one, and check often what game you’re playing. So basically, when moving through your day and encountering tricky, anxious, and frustrating moments, you can ask yourself what’s the driver of your actions: is it the fear of making mistakes, is it to protect yourself from not being good enough in any form, is it because of some ruling-thoughts?

And in Chapter 21, Committing to It, we established that playing the workability game is like making a personal decision of going back to your values, over and over, not matter what, and commit and recommitting to be the person you want to be every single moment you’re on this earth without hurting yourself or your relationships.

Now you’re 50 percent ready to maximize, amplify, and enjoy all the benefits of high-achieving actions and live a life worth living; in this section, you will learn the other 50 percent you need: micro-skills to make solid moves every day.

You can open up any chapter, anytime, and you’ll find something helpful right away. Each chapter is somewhat independent of the others, but they’re all related. Of course, I encourage you to read all of them, one after the other, and try on all these new micro-skills. Some of the chapters are playful and lighthearted, others are more on the reflective side of things, but I like to think that all of them are like doors opening into a spectacular view that enables you to be who you are, appreciate who you are, allows you to see further and further, and opens up the possibility for new ways of living life. At the end of each chapter, you will find a mini-section called “Pause and Play” with reflective questions, how-tos, and, really, micro-skills that you can put into action right away.

My hope is that you will make each one of these micro-skills yours by trying them, seeing how they work, and checking how they relate to doing things that matter to you to the best of your abilities.

One last thing: don’t rush through these chapters. Give yourself some time to really make these skills yours!

22

The Great Escape

DOI: 10.4324/9781003083153-28

On a sunny day, I was riding my bike on a narrow street when the bright T-shirt of a pedestrian caught my attention. In a hot-pink color, the word “ESCAPE” was printed in a modern font on a navy blue background. You couldn’t miss it. My eyes didn’t, and my mind didn’t either.

Hundreds of books, movies, stories, and tales have explored the topic of what we are naturally drawn to and what we avoid, what we face and what we hide from, what we lean toward and what we run away from. You see, we humans, we’re not designed to hurt, suffer, or be in pain; our evolutionary make-up has shown us over and over that when experiencing any form of discomfort, we run away from it at the speed of light. No human being will spontaneously say, “I like this painful experience.” That’s just not in our disposition.

Our disposition is to perform a great escape every time we’re hurt.

In Section II, Unpacking Your Personal History, we tapped into the complexity of caring so deeply for something. In Chapter 4, Flipping the Coin, we explored the fact that it’s human to hold onto rules about how things need to be when something is important to us; we get scared about things going wrong, we’re anxious about things being forgotten, we’re worried about looking like failures, and we relate to ourselves in very harsh ways when things don’t go as planned.

None of these experiences sounds fun, exciting, or appealing; in fact, they all sound embarrassing, and like the perfect excuses to run away as soon as possible. But when I say “run away,” I’m referring not only to the behaviors related to getting out of a situation or physically removing yourself from one, but also to the tricky versions of “running away” from the yucky feelings that come along in those moments. When you go into runaway mode from those unpleasant feelings, you do a bunch of things that you’re familiar with: overpreparing, overworking, overthinking, overplanning, or overdoing things and many, many more.

Playing a long workability game, then, means keeping an eye on those choice points that will come your way one after another.

Richard very much appreciated aesthetics since he was a little boy. When he and his girlfriend, Jessica, decided to move in together, he was thrilled and was very much looking forward to sharing his life with her. They both agreed that they were ready to take their relationship to the next level after dating for two years. They liked the same TV shows, both loved dogs, had similar taste in movies, were kind to others, and had a true friendship as the basis for their romantic relationship.

After ten days of packing and unpacking, cleaning, rearranging furniture, and eating delivery food almost every night, Jessica was fully moved into Richard’s apartment. Richard was excited and committed to be a caring, loving and supportive boyfriend for Jessica; he deeply wanted to be a “good boyfriend” for Jessica. Couple of weeks after their move, Richard started noticing how annoying it was to see dirty dishes in the sink almost every night, used coffee mugs all over the apartment, shoes spread around the living room, and the occasional sock he found in the couch.

Richard didn’t say anything to Jessica because he didn’t want to come across as a nagging or annoying boyfriend. He thought that saying something to Jessica about it wouldn’t be consistent with “being a good boyfriend” because good boyfriends are supposed to be tolerant, understanding, and accepting of their partners. After a month of hoping that things would change on their own, Richard found himself doing the dishes almost every night, picking up clothes, and cleaning the apartment before going to work. He realized that keeping the apartment as he liked it resulted in him having less time to go to the office early, go for runs on weekdays, or just catch up on the phone with friends.

Richard knew that keeping a clean, organized, and well-arranged home was very important to him, and he also knew that relationships require sacrifices, adjustments, and accommodations. Sometimes, when doing his regular cleaning before going to work, he felt reassured that he was being a good and understanding boyfriend and felt better about himself. Other times, when he felt annoyed, unhappy, or resentful about taking on these tasks, he reminded himself that he wanted to be a good boyfriend to Jessica at all times, including when dealing with the messiness of the apartment.

To the eyes of outsiders, Richard’s responses might seem appropriate. But what would have happened if he hadn’t cleaned up Jessica’s coffee mugs, dishes, and clothes? Quite likely, he would have felt frustrated, angry, and irritated – and also concerned, nervous, and anxious about offending Jessica, disappointing her, or acting as a nagging boyfriend. Richard didn’t want to feel any of those uncomfortable feelings and preferred the good ones that came with taking care of the tasks himself. Richard was performing an escape with his actions, one after another. All of Richard’s responses worked right away – as it happens when you avoid triggering situations – so he didn’t feel any of the yucky stuff he was worried about – but, in the long run, other feelings emerged.

It feels good to get things done. It feels good to do what you need to do to manage yucky feelings, as Richard was doing. It feels good to do what seems to be the perfect response. But – and this is another big “but” – all those good feelings that come when you escape from, shun, avoid are fleeting ones, not permanent ones. It’s a matter of time until you will feel all those feelings you’re running away from.

Pause and Play

Playing the workability game requires that you handle all types of feelings – that you sit with them and learn from them without running away or wrestling with them and without checking how they really work for you.

Here is what you can do:

• Do an inventory of all strategies you use (*) to manage the emotional discomfort that comes your way when there’s the possibility of making errors, exposing flaws, being seen as a failure, or being perceived in a way that doesn’t feel true.

(*) You can get a checklist of the most common strategies that people with high-achieving and perfectionistic actions rely on to handle emotional distress from the page “ACT for perfectionism and high-achieving actions” on my personal website https://www.thisisdoctorz.com/act-for-perfectionism-and-high-achieving-behaviors/

23

Fleeting Feelings

DOI: 10.4324/9781003083153-29

It’s quite likely that, every time you were doing something that mattered to you and doing it as it mattered to you, you took great care to protect yourself from feeling those yucky emotions, just as Richard did in the previous chapter. If you did an inventory of all these subtle, private, or public actions you used to manage all those fears of messing things up, not being good enough, failing, or things going wrong, you might notice that they all have worked right away, like in the blink of an eye, and that they all feel good, relieving, and soothing almost immediately. But all those good feelings that come afterward – after relying on those strategies, – they all create the artificial experience that you have control of those yucky emotions and that the only way to handle them is by using those strategies over and over. Oh boy!

Sorry for repeating myself here but, all these good feelings are short-lived, momentary and passing ones. Like shoes wear out, like waves in the ocean dissolve, like the flavors of our food disappear, our uncomfortable feelings, and all feelings, come and go.

All of our emotions are temporary states. Researchers tell us that our feelings last an average of seven minutes, including the so-called positive feelings and the uncomfortable ones too; they arise and disappear, only to arise and disappear again and again.

Check for yourself: have you ever felt happy for 24 hours straight? Did you ever have a full day when you felt excitement non-stop? After you’ve been with a person romantically for a while, do you still feel butterflies in your stomach every single time you see them? Of course, there are moments when you feel really good about a particular project, task, relationship, or conversation, but do all those feelings remain the same in intensity and duration as time unfolds?

Let’s consider uncomfortable feelings. If you’ve ever had a panic attack, you know how scary it can be. You have difficulty breathing, your heart beats fast, your body feels hot, and it feels like these sensations will go on forever. You may even think you’re dying, going crazy, or having a heart attack. But all panic sensations have a beginning and an end. In fact, I cannot tell you how many times my clients end up in the emergency room only to be told that it’s a panic attack, that they need to see a psychologist, and that there is nothing the doctors can do in that moment.

Eventually, all our feelings cease. But what happens when you are busy …

Chasing Good and Perfect Feelings

Let’s think about a couple of scenarios: let’s say that you’re preparing an essay to apply for a graduate program; so with your best intentions, you make sure to use the right words, check and recheck the essay structure almost every night, ask others to read it multiple times, reread it yourself before going to sleep, and even when going to the gym, you think on a nonstop reel about the best way to show in that application who you are and why you should be accepted. All these actions make total sense because you’re pursuing something important and it feels good to work hard to accomplish your goals. In this scenario, you’re also managing the distress that comes with applying to grad school but doing what you need to be doing to increase the likelihood of y...