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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

2. Let Healthy Project Values Guide Your Actions

This is as true in business as it is in our personal lives. When people encounter uncertainty (and the resulting anxiety) at work, they experience a need to be certain, and if there are great systems in place, they’ll resolve that uncertainty by doing something they’ve done before, which is likely something that’s safe, unhealthy, not innovative, and likely to only push off important decisions until later. Great business teams resolve this with visual communication techniques that eliminate unnecessary uncertainties, and by sticking to articulated values. As Jim Collins points out in several of his books about what makes companies beat the competition, his research shows that consistently implementing values is one of the key factors. It doesn’t even matter what the values are, only that they’re consistently articulated and implemented.

When I work with companies to plan strategies or manage projects, I specialize in what’s known as human-centered design. I use a series of tools that visualize the customer and identify the customer’s values and needs. Then, throughout the project, the team always makes its decisions based on the customer’s values. The answer to every uncertainty is to let the customer guide your actions. It’s an amazingly effective method to spur innovation and guide collaboration to reach the team’s goals.

In your own life, when you encounter uncertainty and anxiety, I’d suggest you fall back on the values of your customer: YOU.

Figure out what your values are and implement them consistently, and fearlessly. For many of us, and I know it was definitely the case for me in the past, I didn’t have any values. I didn’t want to be disliked so I did whatever anybody else wanted me to do. I was afraid of so many things that I let my fears of those thing potentially happening guide all of my actions. My life was a long series of reactions to paranoid fears of possibilities.

SO WHAT CAN YOU DO?

1. Start simple. Pick one value. Write it down. For instance, it might be: “I value being honest”.

2. Implement that value. When you encounter an uncertainty related to that value, let the value guide you. So, for example, if you were wondering about whether you should honestly tell somebody something, you would refer back to your value, which indicates you should be honest. Your brain will think up all sorts of terrible things that could happen if you implement that value. Just agree with them, shrug, and do it anyway. Your brain’s paranoid fears don’t have to run your life.

3. After a week of implementing that first value, add a second one. Begin to implement both of them consistently. Design your values. Build them, test them, rebuild them again. You don’t have to get them “right”. The tough task here isn’t getting the “right” values, it’s consistently implementing them.

This can be a big reorientation in your life, just as it is for organizations when they quit reacting to fear and instead act according to values. We get hooked on fear because it mistakenly feels safe to constantly be managing anxiety. When you reorient yourself around values, much of what makes you anxious and depressed on a daily basis, just fades away.

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/