Especially if you’re ill, being healthy is a transformative innovation. But innovation is difficult. And not because coming up with innovative ideas is tough–just listen to a 3 year old talk for an hour and you’ll probably hear a million innovative ideas about how to get to the moon or defeat ninjas. Innovation is difficult because implementing innovation and getting from Step A (the innovative idea) to Step Z (the innovation as functioning reality) requires lots of collaboration, dedication, and leadership, and all three of those things can be very scary to many people. When it comes to innovation, having an innovative idea is irrelevant if you can’t implement it. Innovation is the implementation of a great idea.

There are fantastic project management and design thinking tools we can borrow from the world of business and apply in our own lives to make the process of innovative personal change simpler and more effective.

There seems to be a myth that mental health just happens, that there are healthy people and unhealthy people and if you have a mental illness, that’s it, there’s nothing you can do about. That’s ridiculous. It’s as absurd as saying there are successful companies and unsuccessful companies and nothing can change that.

There are always going to be elements of an organization’s DNA that might predispose it to having advantages or disadvantages, but any company can change and innovate with a great project management process. And any person can innovate with a great project management process that helps them implement change on a macro and micro level, making holistic changes in day-to-day activities that help them embrace uncertainty and act healthy, while constantly taking steps towards long-term, sustainable health.

Your life is a complex, wonderful, dynamic project. Applying project management tools in your life can help tremendously in creating personal change, just as they help create organizational change on complex, dynamic projects (that are sometimes also wonderful).

Over the course of the next week or so, I’m going to post a variety of project management tools and techniques and how you can apply them to personal change, whether that’s getting over OCD and addictions, or learning how to run a marathon:

1. Make Healthy Ideas Tangible

Particularly with anxiety disorders and addictions, or when your mind is clouded with depression, it’s easy to lose sight of who you are and where you want to be in the future. Long-term, sustainable health gets lost in making short-term decisions to try and cope with, check on, or control uncertainty. One way you can help yourself is by making healthy ideas tangible and persistent. Write down what you know you need to do. Don’t leave healthy decision-making to your brain. This is something that’s as true for project teams as it is for individuals. If you can’t see an idea, it’s unlikely it’s going to be implemented.

Making ideas tangible and visible at work is an increasingly popular and very effective way to design successful products and effectively manage teams. When an idea is locked in somebody’s head, it’s very easy for that idea to be forgotten, to get rationalized into something that won’t lead to success, and or to separate the idea from the person and address, which can cause people to avoid tackling ideas, to get defensive and manipulative, and to lead to lots of nothing getting done. Making ideas tangible at work promotes health in the workplace and helps ideas evolve because it creates relationships between people and ideas by separating them. That might seem counter-intuitive, but being able to address an idea objectively at work is as useful as being able to objectively assess what’s going on in your head. Here’s a photo of tangible ideas at work that was shared on the EVERYBODY HAS A BRAIN community recently:

When it comes to implementing change in your personal life, the same design thinking principles of making ideas tangible, making them persistent, and breaking big ideas down into smaller, actionable pieces, are going to help you tremendously.

When I was doing Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) to get over OCD, design thinking tools helped me implement the exercises I needed to do. I was only seeing my therapist for 1 hour each week. But I had to make decisions that affect my mental health every hour of every day. Using design thinking tools helped me get through the week, get through the spikes of anxiety, and stick to doing what I knew I needed to do. With each new compulsive behavior I cut out with ERP, I would write down on a sticky-note what action I was going to take instead of the compulsive behavior. I would put that sticky-note wherever the compulsive behavior usually got triggered. When my brain would invent reasons to engage in the compulsive behavior, I had the sticky-note there to remind me of what I really wanted to do.

So what can you do today?

1. Figure out an action that’s going to help you be healthier.

2. Write that action down on a sticky-note.

3. Place the sticky-note wherever you have the most trouble taking that healthy action.

4. Do what the sticky-note says, not what your brain says. <- This is the most important step and often the most difficult. Learning to follow your values instead of reacting to fears takes practice. But the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it.

Be yourself seems like it would be an incredibly simple task and yet it’s something so many of us struggle with. In many ways, that’s a struggle driven by trying to avoid anxieties. If you spend much of your life avoiding anxiety, you inevitably end up as somebody you know you’re not. And getting back to being yourself involves facing a significant amount of anxiety. This week, the EVERYBODYHASABRAIN community is going to be tackling the topic of how to deal with the anxieties involved in being yourself. Join us: everybodyhasabrain.tumblr.com/

Next week, in honor of Valentine’s Day, we’ll be tackling relationship fears.

If you’re doing ERP, be prepared for that big spike in anxiety. It’s not a bad thing. Don’t avoid it. Just as exercising makes your heart pound, especially if you haven’t exercised in a long time, so too does ERP make your brain pound and sweat and shout. But that’s a sign you should do more of it. ERP exercises your brain. Anxiety is just your brain sweating.

When you fight intrusive thoughts, you place value on them in your brain, particularly to your subconscious, the part of your mind that’s throwing these thoughts and impulses at you. Your subconscious is a lot like a poorly trained puppy that keeps bringing you disgusting gifts.

Unfortunately, we’re the ones who inadvertently trained our subconscious puppies to pee all over our work, rip up our favorite relationships and constantly bring us rotting thoughts that stink up our brains.

The subconscious puppy in your head likes attention. So whatever you give attention to, it assumes you like, and brings you more of that. Even if it’s something you hate, the subconscious puppy has no way of understanding that you hate it. Your subconscious puppy doesn’t understand English. It knows some words but it doesn’t understand what they mean. If your subconscious puppy brings you the thought equivalent of a rabbit carcass, and you yell at your subconscious puppy for bringing that dead rabbit into your life and you keep talking about how you never want to see a dead rabbit again and you list all of the reasons why dead rabbits make terrible gifts, and you try to throw the dead rabbit away, or you take it and hide it somewhere inside of you, well, your subconscious puppy is going to bring you two bloody, rotting rabbit carcasses tomorrow. Why? Because you spent so much time playing with the subconscious puppy yesterday when it brought you one dead rabbit, surely you’ll play with it twice as much if it brings you two dead rabbits.

Whatever you do, whether you like it or not, your brain will encourage you to do more of it, because if you’re not dying from something in the short term, the more primitive parts of your brain are programmed to assume it must be beneficial to you.

Whenever you identify a thought as negative, you paint a big bulls-eye on it and your brain is going to bring up that thought more and more. Negative things are dangerous things. Dangerous things can kill us. And your brain wants you to stay alive, so it wants you to avoid dangerous things. Once you identify an experience as negative, it’s going to find every chance it can to remind you of that experience, to remind you of how dangerous it is, so you can avoid it. But the more you avoid it, the more it’s going to believe that avoiding it is keeping you alive, and it’ll bring up those thoughts even more.

So prove it wrong. Another thing your brain loves as much as keeping you safe, is conserving energy. If you show your brain that something doesn’t kill you, it’s going to quit reminding you about it, because it has other things to spend energy on. Acceptance is a great way to show your brain that all of these worries in your head are literally not worth your energy.

This was an excerpt from The Acceptance Field Guide: Navigating anxiety and depression in an uncertain world, which explores how to practically apply the concepts of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy to overcome anxiety and compulsive behaviors in your daily life.

The Acceptance Field Guide is available for $2.99 on Amazon: www.amazon.com/Acceptance-Field-Guide-Navigating-ebook/dp/B006W950CG/

You might start imagining what you’re going to say to the cops when they interview you about how this horrific accident unfolded, or maybe you’re imagining what you would say to that driver so they know they were wrong. Or you simply picture yourself smashing your car into their car. After all, they were asking for it.

That driver, somebody you have no control over, somebody who is oblivious to you, just took control of your mood, and you gave them that control.

How could you not get anxious after spending all of that time focusing on car crashes? Why wouldn’t you be depressed after imagining accidents and people getting hurt?

And what will you get out of all of that? Anger, depression, helplessness.

When somebody does something on the road you don’t like, accept it. Don’t make your life a reaction to what you can’t control. You want to drive safely. Great. Then do that. You can do that no matter what happens around you.

The behaviors of other people are just behaviors. When your brain throws up an intrusive thought like, “Hey! He could have hit us!” just respond with: “Maybe.”

This was an excerpt from The Acceptance Field Guide: Navigating anxiety and depression in an uncertain world, which explores how to practically apply the concepts of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy to overcome anxiety and compulsive behaviors in your daily life.

The Acceptance Field Guide is available for $2.99 on Amazon: www.amazon.com/Acceptance-Field-Guide-Navigating-ebook/dp/B006W950CG/

Sometimes you get a runny nose because it’s cold out. But get warm and that runny nose quickly disappears. Sometimes your runny nose results from a flu virus you picked up somewhere. Rest up and take care of your body for a couple of days and you’ll flush it out of your system. And then sometimes your runny nose is a symptom of a far more serious infection, like pneumonia, an infection deep in your body, and to get rid of it, you need to get yourself to the hospital and get medical attention as soon as you can.

Depression comes in all of these varieties, too, from the fleeting type, to the more serious type that requires medical attention.

There’s nothing wrong with depression. If you experience it, accept it. Don’t let snot ruin your life. But if you are experiencing depression, find the source. Taking anti-histamines can help get rid of a runny nose, but if you’ve got an infection, they’re only going to mask a more serious problem. The same goes for depression. Deal with the source.

The goal of Acceptance isn’t to get rid of depression, but a great by-product of Acceptance is that you’ll likely find it helps prevent many types of depression. We can be preventative about mental health. You don’t want to wait until you get a cold to put a coat on. Learning how to accept the world around you and the thoughts or images inside of your head is going to help reduce the amount of negativity in your life. You don’t do that by avoiding experiences you think are negative. You do that by accepting experiences as they are, without any labels.

Don’t yell at the clouds because you went outside without a coat on and now you’ve got a runny nose. You know it’s cold out. You know you can get depressed. Put your Acceptance coat on.

This is an excerpt from The Acceptance Field Guide by Mark Freeman, now available on Amazon and Smashwords.

This was an excerpt from The Acceptance Field Guide: Navigating anxiety and depression in an uncertain world, which explores how to practically apply the concepts of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy to overcome anxiety and compulsive behaviors in your daily life.

The Acceptance Field Guide is available for $2.99 on Amazon: www.amazon.com/Acceptance-Field-Guide-Navigating-ebook/dp/B006W950CG/

Step 1: I’m giving a presentation at work and I make an error during the presentation. I say an incorrect number when talking about some projections. All sorts of thoughts pop into my head about being a bad employee, a terrible presenter, that everyone else must think I’m stupid, etc. I recognize that those thoughts are a natural result of making an error, just like a runny nose is a natural result of going out in the cold. But I am not my runny nose. It’s just something that happens.

Step 2: I accept the thoughts I’m having. My colleagues might be disgusted with me, they might not be. They might think I’m an idiot, they might not. These are all uncertainties I can’t control or resolve. I could try, of course, but that would only create more anxiety. So I accept the thoughts. I don’t try to answer them, control them, or change them. I accept that the error happened and that I’m having thoughts about the error being negative, but I don’t validate those by reacting to them or trying to compensate for them. They’re only thoughts I’m having.

Step 3: I act by my values. I want to give a presentation that effectively delivers my points clearly so that my colleagues leave with a better understanding of the information I want to convey. So with that value in mind, I correct my error in a way that will ensure I’ve delivered my point clearly. I don’t correct my error to try and get people to like me or to make them forget my error. That would just be reacting to fear in an attempt to control uncertainty. Fear doesn’t decide how I act. My values determine how I act.

Step 4: After the meeting, I don’t try to do things to make up for the error or go on a disastrous judgement streak. I don’t try to check with people to see if they’re annoyed or think I’m not good at my job because of the error. I don’t try to do things to control or check on what people think about what just happened.

Even with something that might seem like a good idea, like trying to make sure people know I’m sorry about the mistake, I’ll only be confirming to my brain that the mistake actually is something for people to be annoyed or upset about. Why else would I need to check?

NO MATTER HOW STRANGE, NO MATTER HOW UNCOMFORTABLE, NO MATTER HOW FRIGHTENING, ACCEPT THE POSSIBILITY.

IT MIGHT HAPPEN, IT MIGHT NOT.

IT MIGHT BE TRUE, IT MIGHT NOT BE TRUE.

ACCEPT IT.

This was an excerpt from The Acceptance Field Guide: Navigating anxiety and depression in an uncertain world, which explores how to practically apply the concepts of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy to overcome anxiety and compulsive behaviors in your daily life.

The Acceptance Field Guide is available for $2.99 on Amazon: www.amazon.com/Acceptance-Field-Guide-Navigating-ebook/dp/B006W950CG/

1. We’ll figure out where you are and what you have with you.

Before you go on a journey, before you even decide where you want to go, you have to know where you are right now. Knowing where you’re starting from makes a big difference in how you travel. If you’re in Seattle, for instance, and you want to drive to Chicago, but you ask for directions from Houston to Chicago, you’re going to have a very tough drive ahead of you. We’ll start with a series of exercises to dip deep into where you are in life.

2. Your values will show you the direction to go in.

Learning to act according to your values instead of reacting to the world around you, is so important to not only being mentally well, but also professionally successful. Values can show you where you want to go, and also where you don’t want to go. They give you direction on your journey. You probably already know which directions you want to be going on, and it’s the frustration over consistently not going in that direction that’s brought you here.

3. You’ll take action to move along your path to change.

Next is taking the steps on your journey. This is about acting to create change. You don’t overcome anxiety or depression by thinking. In fact, that’ll only make things worse. Great mental health is made up of healthy actions. So we carefully plan out the actions you can take each day, applying techniques from two forms of behavioral therapy:

1. Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP) - ERP involves doing the things you’re anxious about and not responding with compulsive behaviors to cope with, check on or control the anxiety. This trains your brain to no longer throw the urges and anxieties at you. ERP is like weight-lifting for your brain.

2. Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) - ACT recognizes that it’s our attempts to control anxiety that actually causes more anxiety. I’ll show you how to accept whatever thoughts pop into your head, no matter how anxiety-inducing they are, and then how to act according to your values. Leraning how to practice Acceptance is one of the most valuable things you will ever learn to navigate anxiety and depression in your life.

4. You’ll holistically support change throughout your life.

You’re going to need to eat food and stretch and rest on your journey. Holistically supporting your body is so important to great mental health because your mind is in your brain and your brain is an organ. You need to fuel mental health. We’ll take a very evidence-based, research-backed approach to using healthy eating, exercise, meditation and visual communication techniques to support the changes going on in your brain.

5. Sustaining great mental health in a world you don’t control.

You don’t change in a vacuum. You’re surrounded by numerous, constantly changing external forces that you don’t control and can’t be certain about. So we’ll look at how to accept the uncertainty around you at home, work, or school, and to act according to your values instead of reacting to what’s happening. We’ll also look at how you can make changes in your environment, particularly in how you communicate with yourself and others. This will help you create an environment that sustains great mental health instead of constantly throwing new triggers and anxieties at you.

If you’d be interested in doing a free 30-min video chat call to see how this process would work specifically for you, get in-touch using the contact form below: