How to Do Hard Things
Unpacking founder psychology with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
When I started a company in my early 20s, I didn't have a great way of dealing with uncertainty and stress. Even though we bootstrapped the company to an exit, I was miserable a lot of the time, and when I finally moved on, I wasn't sure I'd ever want to start another business.
Entrepreneurship felt like a calling, yet my lived experience of it had often been quite painful. I spent years in traditional talk therapy and reading self-help books to try and make sense of my experience, but I still felt stuck. I couldn't see myself doing anything else, yet I couldn't see myself being happy starting another company.
I'd always been a bit of a psychology nerd (I originally got into meditation after reading a meta-analysis of its positive effects), and one day I stumbled upon a book, Values in Therapy, that explored a little-known framework from behavioral psychology that was a lightbulb moment for me. It finally helped me understand why I was so unhappy running my last company, and I finally began to see how I might be able to approach the stress and uncertainty of entrepreneurship in a new way: one that was life-giving instead of soul-sucking.
The framework is called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and even though it's backed by 800+ randomized controlled studies, it is relatively unknown outside of therapy circles. This post explains the basics of ACT, how it impacted my life, and how you can begin to apply it too.
At a high-level, ACT (pronounced "act" not "A-C-T") looks at how our thoughts influence our behavior, and offers tools for debugging when our minds get us stuck. In my case, it helped me recognize where my mind was adding to the stress inherent in running a company, and how that additional stress had gotten in the way of finding meaning and enjoyment in my work.
In talking with friends—both founders and non-founders—I realized that a lot of people go through what I went through, and that what helped me could also help others. I started devouring books and research on ACT, and eventually trained in how to use it with others in a coaching context (when it's not therapy, we call it Acceptance and Commitment Training and still abbreviate it as "ACT").
In this piece, I'll teach you the basics of ACT and how this tactical framework can help you operate more effectively and stay connected to meaning when doing work that matters to you. By the end, you'll have an understanding of how you can use ACT to debug your behavior, and hopefully, to live a more meaningful and productive life.
Let's begin.
The ultimate goal of ACT is to help us move closer to what we care about in life. From an ACT perspective, the main thing that gets in the way of this is when our behavior becomes primarily about avoidance. When we’re focused on avoiding difficult thoughts and feelings, we’re not focused on moving toward what we care about.
Where other psychological approaches might try to resolve challenging thoughts and feelings by rationally reframing them or exploring childhood memories, ACT doesn’t see difficult internal experiences as problems in and of themselves–they are only seen as problematic to the degree that they interfere with living a meaningful and engaged life in the present.
Thus, much of ACT is about helping us change how our thoughts and feelings influence our behavior. Essentially, ACT teaches us how to stay oriented toward what we care about even in the face of negative thoughts and feelings—because those are a normal part of life.
ACT calls this ability "psychological flexibility," and outlines six core skills that we can practice to help ramp up the thoughts that bring meaning to our work and disengage from the thoughts that take us off-course.
The framework is called psychological flexibility, because when we're caught in avoidance, our behavior tends to narrow and become inflexible.
To learn how to apply this framework in doing work that matters, we'll explore each of ACT's six core flexibility processes and how you can apply them.
Here is a list of the 6 core processes that we'll explore in-depth below:
Experiential Avoidance → Willingness
Fusion → Defusion
Past/Future → Present-Moment Awareness
Rigid Stories → Flexible Perspective-Taking
Lack of Direction → Clear Values
Inaction → Committed Action
These processes are all interconnected, but we'll talk about each in step-by-step order, and show how mastering each can lead you to the next one.
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