You can also access this podcast as a video with subtitles, and there is a transcript below.
Over the last couple of years many people have been reflecting on how closely our working lives are aligned with our values. For health professionals in particular the gap between how we want things to be, and how they are, can cause huge distress.
I talk about this and other topics with consultant clinical psychologist Dr. Joe Oliver who is an expert in acceptance and commitment therapy as well as an associate professor at UCL.
He also leads an exercise for listeners towards the end of our conversation that involves mindfully tapping into values.
You can find Joe via these links:
- Twitter: @contextconsult
- Instagram: @contextconsult
- Facebook: contextualconsulting
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeoliver-contextualconsulting/
- And check out his book The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Self-Esteem
I’d love to connect with you so come and find me on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.
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Transcript
Dr. Paula Redmond: Hi, I’m Dr. Paula Redmond, a Clinical Psychologist and you’re listening to the When Work Hurts podcast. On this show, I want to explore the stories behind the statistics of the mental health crisis facing healthcare professionals today, and to provide hope for a way out through compassion, connection, and creativity. Join me as I talk to inspiring clinicians and thought leaders in healthcare about their unique insights and learn how we can support ourselves and each other when work hurts. For many of us, the last couple of years have prompted us to think about how closely our lives are aligned with our values.
For some of us, the disruption to our normal way of life has created opportunities for pausing and reflecting on this. For those working in healthcare, there’s often a very painful confrontation between our personal values and the ways in which we’re required to do our jobs. This conflict can cause a huge amount of distress. In this episode, I explore this and other issues with Dr. Joe Oliver. He’s a consultant, clinical psychologist, and associate professor at UCL, and an expert in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Just so you’re aware, towards the end of the interview, we do a brief exercise that involves some mindfulness work. Just make sure you’re in an appropriate space if you’d like to join in. We began by discussing what Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is.
Dr. Oliver: Let me see if I can describe it in a nutshell and then we can unpack it as we go. Obviously, a type of therapy that originated in the last 20 or 30 years or so, maybe close to 40 now. I should probably update that, and has its origins in proper old-school hardcore behaviorism, which when I did my undergrad psychology was all about pigeons and rats and boxes and skinner things, and stuff I didn’t really understand and maybe didn’t find massively appealing. Nonetheless, the psychology community has come full circle and became again really interested in behaviorism. Curiously, of course, behaviorism, as perhaps uncool as it has been, it’s always been there for a long, long time. It never went away.
When you think about, I don’t know, training children, for example, and how to use the potty or star charts or Facebook, for example. Perhaps the evils they’re all of Mark Zuckerberg and his little red icons and things, nudge politics, and examples of that, and UK politics, all of these things are really good examples of behaviorism alive and thriving. Here’s a model that, essentially on the face of it, sounds acceptance, oh, that sounds cool, and nice and commitment and that sounds interesting, maybe even a little woo-woo. Underpinning it is this deep hardcore underpinnings of behaviorism.
I guess that’s the theoretical background and to I guess, psychology’s credit, I think as a discipline, and as a science, it’s ever-evolving and moving and changing. I find it personally hugely appealing. Here’s one of these evolutions that have happened in the science. There’s models of behaviorism, cognitive behavior therapy, mindfulness ACT, as it’s known as, and also, it’s talked about as a third wave of behavior therapy. There’s talks as you can hear the metaphor there, the wave talks as evolution. At its heart, it shines a light on these two really important bits, which are the acceptance bit and the commitment bit.
The commitment bit being principally about committing to things and setting out our course and direction and our life knowing what’s important to us, knowing what matters, and what our purposes and moving in that direction. Having the technologies, the tools, the approach, the stance towards ourselves, and where we find ourselves that we move with acceptance. Which is to say, someone once described to me acceptance being a little bit like a read that bends flexibly and with agility in the wind, as opposed to say, a steel rod that holds itself with rigidity. Depending on the context, it bends and moves and displays these qualities of acceptance, all in order to be able to move forward towards the things that we care about.
In a nutshell, then, acceptance, being open to experiences with a quality that allows us to be in the moment, to be mindful of our experiences, to not be disengaged and on automatic pilot. So that as we move forward, we have this accepting and mindful quality towards our internal experiences. As we take steps towards things that we deeply care about, and things that really truly in life, we probably want written on our gravestone. Rather than, “Hey, here’s Joe, he avoided anxiety all his life.” “Joe, he did the things he cared about, and the took courageous steps. He was scared sometimes, and he was anxious and doubted. He did what mattered.” There we go.
Dr. Redmond: It’s interesting, because I think when I’m working with people and act as my preferred way of working, I don’t think I could describe it as eloquently as you, but I think there’s a bit of a branding issue around the language in terms of acceptance and commitment that I always need to talk about. I think particularly for the people I work with health professionals, there’s something about the acceptance and accepting the working conditions that they often face, and the commitment that they have to a sense of duty that becomes, though both of those things can be really problematic for people and actually part of what really hurts about their work.
Dr. Oliver: Totally agree, yes, branding issue, I like that. It’s branding and marketing. Someone should get back in time to the originators and say, “This is all going well, think about the marketing issues and advertising.” Yes, completely acceptance is such a thorny word. It’s evocative and provocative. Most people I say, when I’m working with clients and training, people always say to me, and I say, “What does it mean to you?” I say, “It means things, it sounds like you’re asking me to resign myself. It sounds like you’re asking me to put up with stuff. It sounds like you want me to just to sit and shut up and be quiet.”
All of those things are particularly important in the workplace. People are, of course, quite sensitized to any interventions that look like that. Stress management interventions have had and still continue to have an enormous problem with that aspect. You just want me to put up with this? You want me just to learn some techniques, so I can be less stressed, so I continue to work harder?
Dr. Redmond: Be more resilient.
Dr. Oliver: Exactly. Yes, exactly. You do want me to work harder, right? They don’t want to pay me more they just want me to be “more resilient.” There’s your commitment bit, instead of commitment to what? Corporate values, Trust NHS values, some words that look like they got painted on the wall 20 years ago, and I don’t really know what they mean. They’re good issues in the workplace to be talking about. How do we grapple with these things? Certainly, we’re not inviting people just to sit quietly, put up with stuff as it’s certainly not what ACT is about are any good workplace intervention.
I would say this is a thing that corporations, big organizations should and do now wrestle with. What does corporate identity mean? What does organizational values– What are they about? How do we bring alignment between individuals who care about all sorts of things, not just work? How do we bring that alignment with it with an organization that I think for example, and then NHS principally does want to make important key differences in people’s lives? How do we bring those two things together? It’s tricky.
Dr. Redmond: I think what I say, do correct me if I’m wrong, but what I talk about with clients is that the theme of acceptance is more about accepting our inner experience and dropping the struggle with our own thoughts and feelings, so that we can have a bit more freedom in how we choose to respond to the things that come up for us and to our pain. Have I got that right?
Dr. Oliver: That’s a really nice way to put it for sure. Yes. There’s the thing, right, is helping us be more workable in the face of internal experiences, which, of course, put mildly on us to pull us in different directions and want us to fight with them, wrestle with them, squash them, shut them down. Of course, there’s no way there’s anything wrong with those approaches, per se. It’s just as you’re saying there that an ACT approach might just introduce then into the conversation, that idea of the degree to which this is working in the service of the client and where they want to move, to the direction.
Truth be told, I think from my own personal experience that I know when I’m getting into a really stuck place when I’m really locked up or feeling really rigid, and invariably to the places when I’m really struggling and fighting with my experience. Like there’s an emotion, I’m just finding really hard to make room for, or there’s a thought that pops up that’s has a real zing to it. I’m just fighting it and I just don’t want it. I can get caught in those places of wrestling with it or struggling to not have it. A lot of energy goes into that, and someone might quite rightly ask the question, “What does matter here? What is important?”
Would you be willing to make space for those experiences, even the big difficult ones in the service of doing the things that you care about? It’s not an easy question necessarily to answer, but I think most of the time when I’ve had that opportunity to have that asked of me, it’s been a really profound experience and a really meaningful one. I’ve always appreciated when that context has been layered over those experiences.
Dr. Redmond: Just thinking about your experience and reflections on the pandemic from an ACT perspective, I wonder what looking back over these last couple of years, what your ACT expertise has lent to your thinking and reflecting on this time.
Dr. Oliver: Gosh, just for any listeners who weren’t aware, there was this global pandemic, you might have heard of that’s going on. It’s just like Paula, when you bring it up, it just feels this huge thing that looms.? It’s like, how do we get our arms around this stuff and this thing and it’ll be interesting to listen to what we’re talking about and come back in 6 months, 12 months. If there’s one thing I’ve learned is, this stuff changes so much and it’ll be invariably different. I was just actually before we met, reading something I wrote at the start of the pandemic and some things that I think I shared with people that were just my own experiences.
There’s obviously some things that really have changed, but some things that actually that haven’t and while some, it’s such a huge thing to go through. I feel the shared experience of it, it’s a rare thing for humanity to go through such an experience in such a shared way, and for it to be so big and traumatic and to be this so much change, uncertainty, pain, suffering wrapped up in the shared experience. The nature of it, as we see is it continues and the uncertainty of it is going to be something that’s we will live with for, I would say years and decades. Decades probably and how it rolls on.
When I think about ACT and what ACT might shine a light on there’s a few things, I guess have stood out to me and both in my personal experience and have lived my experience through these past 18 months, two years and talking to lots of people and talking to people I’m working with, talking my colleagues and people I train and so on and so forth. That uncertainty, I feel is such a big part of this coupled with the need for us to continue living life with a sense of uncertainty and not knowing. For some of us, not all, some of us carrying some incredibly heavy burdens that have either an anticipation of things to come or things that have happened, traumas and losses and deaths.
For people at work being faced with huge amounts of all of this is uncertainty and pain. That question, how do we wrap our arms around this whole experience? I think, of course we can’t. There’s a part of this that is at the moment, not beyond this, but here’s a really, really big experience. Rewinding to where we started with and your point about that word acceptance, that’s two things I think spring to mind about that. One of was, I’d say it feels incredibly important, but I think it needs to be done and brought up in such a respectful and careful way and a cautious way. The reason for that being, of course, that we wouldn’t want to move into this space and have a word or a thing that was too much about, “Oh, just accept this, make room for this.”
That to me personally brings up a lot of the possibility just does not at all sit right with me. I remember in the first few weeks of the pandemic of course everything was flying around with internet memes and whatnot. Someone sent this really meaning video around that got posted on a list server, a professional server I’m part of. I don’t know if it was or not, but I remember pan pipes in the background and very– it was what can we now learn from coronavirus? What can we learn from this pandemic? Everyone who saw it was just toe curl and we cringe about that because this is not the place to be.
Yes, of course, we learn and we grow but there’s a lot of other things that need to come first which is that facilitating us together as a large community, moving through this, understanding it, allowing for the range of feelings, the grief and anger and loss, anxiety to be there. I think that’s an important part of this process. That acknowledgement this is going to be here. Whilst at the same time that an acceptance piece is helping us to just remember to be conscious of how we are in these particular places. If I speak for myself when I find myself under pressure or when I find myself going through a global pandemic, I get anxious, my mind gets very catastrophic, it can get very negative.
It can get very just wanting just to protect myself and my actions get very narrow or very protective. Which I can appreciate and can understand why I might do those things. The consciousness I might want to bring to those proceedings would be just to slow down and to check with myself, and ask myself how workable those actions are. In the service of, as I do that, as I slow, as I’m more mindful of my experiences, having some space to ask myself, what is important? What does matter? What do I care about in a gentle and respectful way, not rushing things and needing to get to an answer.
It turns out for me, I found things that are important is my family and being able to spend time with my wife, my two kids. Another thing that’s been really important for me is having fun. There’s a lot of time throughout these last 18 months, I didn’t have a lot of fun, and I felt myself experiencing boredom for the first time for a long time and spontaneity was gone. Creativity was stripped out a bit. Another thing I found was really important was taking care of myself. All the ways that I might do that, but one thing I found particularly hard, and it turned out it was as important to myself, was being easy and gentle with myself. In a way that experiencing how I might not do that and the consequences of that remind me just actually how important that is.
One of the things there’s a little article I wrote with a colleague of mine and a good friend and one of the things we said was good enough is okay. I think we’re both speaking to ourselves and we wrote that and just reminding ourselves just slow down doesn’t have to be perfect, good enough. Just get through this time. I find that really soothing to remind myself of that.
Dr. Redmond: That takes me back to homeschooling days and just that sense of constantly needing to go back to that sense of, we just need to survive this intact and with our relationships intact, and the three of us six times table will be there, on the other side. If we don’t slow down and we don’t look after ourselves, there was some scary times for me during that huge pressure and the sense of failing everything. I found particularly or very much personally, but also in my work, a sense of just constantly having to step back and remind ourselves of what we are carrying and just how difficult and unprecedented and uncertain these times are. I think we very quickly can lose sight of that. Those reminders can just be really helpful to ground ourselves in reality that just everyday things have got a different quality, and are much harder than they have been before and for such a long time. It is exhausting.
Dr. Oliver: Yes, it’s funny, isn’t it? There’s that human capacity to adapt to unprecedented situations. Of course, in a lot of respects that’s really lauded and people say, “Oh, isn’t that amazing? We can do this and look how resilient we are.” I think that’s sometimes that ability strips away our other ability to appreciate and remember global pandemic. Things have got thrown, tipped upside down and things are completely different. We just adapt and carry on because we have to, and it can be easy to forget those things and therefore that reminder, hey, good enough is okay, doesn’t have to be perfect, just survive and come through, this will change and things will be different, just get through this particular part.
Yes, such a crucial piece of wisdom to hold onto. I was looking at all the– I think that’s interesting looking at all the stats and the data and I remember tracking people’s mental health and seems like, well that varies. That’s one thing I took from it depending on who you are and what your circumstances were massively impacted on your wellbeing. Surprise, surprise. One thing that came out was I read that hit people hard at the start and then people’s mental health bounced back and everyone was like, “Wow, this is, aren’t we resilient?”
I felt like I read so many articles saying that. My experience is personally and just watching people and talking to people that that has changed, that now that as time has gone on and we’re in this weird position now waiting to see what happens, that actually that second period of bouncing back has changed a lot. This other impact is slowly wearing away people again. Of course. Again, it’s that reminder of this is a big thing we’re going through.
Dr. Redmond: There’s something I think that feels very relevant for the health professionals that I work with in terms of just the sense of exhaustion, and no space to recover from particularly the really intense period last year. Then things did start to feel a bit easier in the summer and then we had the winter again. I think over this year what’s been really tricky is people managing the backlog and trying to look after and maintain the quality of care for everyone aside from the COVID situation. Just this sense of total overwhelm at this huge task, and feeling so depleted coming into that. It’s really hard to see a way out for people so that I think just feels like a long hard slog and a lot of pain associated with that.
Dr. Oliver: Yes, I know what you’re saying. Yes. I’m laughing because there’s so much truth to what you’re saying and there’s the grinds to it, isn’t there? I think that really reflects the situation which is ongoing and evolving of course. That it’s who knows where if you and I sit down and do this again in 12 months, who knows? I’ve given up trying to predict this, it’ll be different and that’s for sure. As things stand now, that backlog that people are experiencing, I think I would say that it’s two parts of backlog of all the things out there or the tasks they’ve got left and now everyone coming forward and saying, “I want to help.”
I also think that the emotional backlog too, just stuff that we’ve just thought, park, get on, soldier on, deal with home homeschooling, dealing with working from home, setting up a home office, dealing with, I don’t know, finding new hobbies to entertain myself during the lockdown. Then suddenly it’s okay then the space now to deal with all that other backlog of stuff, like trauma and grief and emotional anxiety and I think anger as well. I know anger is a huge part of that. It’s clearly well connected to a whole lot of things probably going on at the moment that people feel very angry about. A lot of processing of that stuff.
Dr. Redmond: There’s something as well, I know one of the concepts that I find helpful in ACT, which I think– I don’t know if it originates, but he certainly talks about it a lot, Russ Harris, in terms of the reality gap, the gap between how we want our lives to be and who we want to be as people, and what we see playing out in our everyday lives. That certainly feels really relevant for healthcare staff in terms of the values that have brought them into this work, and their commitment to delivering high quality person centered, compassionate care for every single patient. Not being able to deliver that because of policies and procedures because of the huge demand, because of shortages, lack of resources, and maybe their own capacity at times, and that being a very, very painful experience to be sitting in that gap.
Dr. Oliver: Absolutely. Yes. It is an incredibly difficult place. I think it’s a very reasonable expectation to come in to healthcare with and both reasonable and it’s incredibly appreciable too. It’s a valued thing. Nonetheless, people of course, find themselves working in organizations, large organizations. Organizations while made up of people sometimes don’t have the capacity to be organizationally compassionate, organizationally caring. Organizations that are themselves stretched. They have limited resources, budgets and are under huge amounts of pressure, staffing issues, turnover, all the kind of things that strip out an organization’s capacity to treat their staff in a caring, compassionate kind way.
That gap, I think is huge for people when they just are confronted with the reality of wanting to deliver care within an organizational context that either has the inability to support them in doing that, or sometimes actively prevents them from doing that. Yes, that reality gap can be incredibly painful and difficult. Here’s a really nice place I think ACT comes in, which is certainly that for all of us when confronted with that gap, inevitable automatic pilot responses will be something like wishing, wanting for things to be as they should be, and then of course getting very stuck in lots of worry or rumination for when they’re not.
I think probably possibly one of the really toxic things that gets in the way of that ability just to head on acknowledge the situation and see it for what it is, is when it starts to confront our own identity about who we are as people who we are as healthcare workers. Of course, when we find ourselves working in a non-caring organization, it’s very easy to start taking that on ourselves as we’re forced to do things perhaps that sit outside our own professional values or own core values as people. Sometimes we’re left with dilemmas that there’s no good way to operate. It’s causing difficulties for people using services Corp for us.
It’s just, there’s no easy way through that. Then when our identity gets that sense of who we are or who we perceive ourselves to be gets pushed up against, there’s huge amounts of pain that come with that. An ACT approach into these instances certainly wouldn’t be saying anything about acceptance. It’s about we could say perhaps a fierce willingness to see the situation for what it is, and see, observe our own internal processes and our own thoughts, and certainly our own emotions without engaging in those futile efforts to change those or not have them.
Which is to say, I would say a lot of those experiences are very real and they’re very desirable even for an individual caught in a system that’s unable to be caring and compassionate. That those are, in fact, the very signs for that individual that they do care that the values are alive and kicking. What remains then is in that space when we’re inviting people to slow down and notice and observe and be less entangled in painful thoughts, and an automatic desire to get rid of or suppress. We can slow down and ask those really pertinent questions, which would be to say like, in the face of all this, if you could choose if that were possible, what would you want to stand for? What kind of health professional do you want to be? What kind of person do you want to be?
That doesn’t certainly mean, I don’t think that at all pulls for a certain type of answer. I think that of course, it doesn’t. I think that it’ll invite people to think and take action in all sorts of directions. Some might be a healthy withdrawal. Some might be a really strong act of self-care move. Some might be fighting and pushing forward against the system and complaining, pushing, trying to make the changes that need to be made. The ACT approaches, well, the values question, therefore, is a very versatile one that invites us to go into all sorts of places.
Dr. Redmond: I think one of the other things that is not necessarily unique, but very particular about health professionals, and I include myself in that group, is that so often those values around work and our identity as professionals are so closely fused with our sense of self-worth and our self-esteem. I know that is working with self-worth and self-esteem is an area of particular interest for you. Can you tell me a bit about that and what ACT can bring to these topics?
Dr. Oliver: I’ll tell you why it’s interesting. Having written a book on self-esteem, self-esteem is obviously not actually what I’m interested in. It’s connected to that though. It’s funny because self-esteem, I don’t know, it’s such a big topic, right? It’s like one of those things you ask anyone. “What do you know about psychology?” “Self-esteem is good.” Then what actually is self-esteem? It’s a little bit murky and I’d always thought, the trick is to raise self-esteem. That’s good. Low is bad, high is good, and all the research evidence turns out to not support that. Curiously, there’s an amazing study that went through about something like, I don’t know, 10,000 to 20,000 thousand studies on self-esteem. Conclusions were there’s many, many conclusions.
One certainly was that raising self-esteem is not a good thing. In fact, raising self-esteem leads to all sorts of bad things like violence, high rates of narcissism, social disconnection, eroding, prosocial activities. When I thought about it, I thought, well, I could actually, I could perhaps see that. In fact, they’ve suggested it’s, rather than raising self-esteem, it’s helping people to relate better to their experiences like low self-esteem, or things connected to their low self-worth. Helping people in fact or ACT approach would highlight and emphasize a notion of self-acceptance.
Rather than journey where we have to transform ourselves and be better people it’s in fact coming around full circle and acknowledging who we are, and appreciating who we are, warts and all. Not in a Pollyanna way, but in a way that we get to see all the aspects of ourselves that have been crafted or molded or shaped from our journeys. Of course, some traumatic and painful and the rocky roads that we’ve all been through to where we arrive with ourselves. Helping people to have ways to appreciate themselves more to this idea of self-acceptance. Again, oh, it’s a tricky one because everyone wants to improve themselves and get better and you’re saying, “What do you want me to just put up with these bad qualities of myself?”
Well, yes and no. Yes, that we suggest then from a platform to say that as a human being I’m enough. As a human being that’s enough to hold onto that ticket to allow myself into the human race as a whole. Then from that platform we build on all the other things of course, self-improvement or changing and growing and developing rather than from a platform to say, I am not enough fundamentally, there’s something missing and wrong and if truth be told or that got out, I don’t really belong in the human race. You can see those two are very different platforms and how they might go about.
For healthcare workers are so important it’s so easy for our sense of who we are to get really bound up with that worth of giving and caring and being in a particular way, which is in a lot of respects is a fantastic quality for the job that we need to be able to do because it allows us to be able to connect with people, allows us to be able to empathize, put ourselves in other people’s shoes. When we’re managing and working with people who are in acute, chronic, physical, or emotional pain, we also want some abilities to be agile and flexible for when we need to do that. When perhaps we don’t always want to be the giver or the carer.
Perhaps we need to be the disciplinarian, or we need to be sometimes the person who’s firm. Sometimes we need to be the person who’s perhaps cold or distant when those situations require it. Helping healthcare workers to adapt, to be flexible. I love the phrase agile. I like that. Not in a compromising way, I’m just going to be a chameleon, but that I can adjust myself and my actions to as the situation allows and affords.
Dr. Redmond: As you’re talking, I’m thinking about myself and colleagues and people that I work with, clients who have found ourselves in situations where we have been mistreated by the organization, or by people within the organization. Part of what’s so difficult is, I think being really stuck in patterns of relating that contribute to a stuckness in those dynamics. Being really fused with ideas of being nice and helpful and responsive, and always really thinking about the other person’s perspective. Really trying to understand why someone might be doing something, or behaving in a certain way. Being very quick to compromise on our own needs.
Those behaviors are often really rewarded as well by our culture and society but can cause a lot of pain and distress. I really like that idea as you said, of being agile, which isn’t about not being the person you are, or compromising your values, but how that can be really fundamental to being able to live your values.
Dr. Oliver: Yes, precisely. There’s a really nice book by Susan David and called Emotional Agility, which talks a lot about that. It was written for extensively for within organizations and people employees but a general book and that’s where that term comes from. I don’t know, I can’t remember exactly where it came from, but they’re her or some other, some of these metaphors just float around. It’s a really nice one which talks about the notion of our values rather than being say a static or concrete thing these are my values and that’s it, that our values perhaps are like being positioned on a globe. I quite like this coming from New Zealand and living here in London, I am from the antipathies, antipathy which means that the polar opposites have I learned not too long ago.
New Zealand is that exact opposite on the globe to where London is. It’s interesting for me. The metaphor here is that if I imagine my valley’s being on a globe and here’s my position in London. I’m embodying and acting on certain values that are important to me, and values that perhaps are captured by New Zealand at the moment in my life are less prominent. That’s not to say though, when I jump on a plane with my family and we go there that they’ve gone. Of course not, they’re still there. Just that they might not be front and center at this moment in my life.
I could say the same thing. I can imagine those times in my life when I’ve been confronted by organizations that have not treated me well, that to successfully navigate those scenarios, it’s a bit like I’ve had to move my values around, from being caring and understanding, and wanting to understand another person’s perspective, to move it around to be thinking about myself, thinking about what’s good for me, what’s good for my family. Those values then need to become much more prominent and help me to navigate if I’m encountering a toxic organization who doesn’t really need to be understood. I need to set some firm boundaries.
It is a nice reminder to myself. Those values are still there, though. Even though I’m acting on a different set of values, they still remain there. They’re still, of course, important to me and available and I can bring them back around. They haven’t disappeared. It’s a nice way, I think, of describing that agility that you’re talking about there.
Dr. Redmond: Also, that’s not necessarily comfortable, that discomfort isn’t a sign that you’re not acting in line with your values. It might be quite the opposite.
Dr. Oliver: Precisely. Absolutely. I think that’s such a key point. I think Western culture easily inducts us into this idea that discomfort, bad, comfort, good. You can quite quickly see the logical problems with that and where we might go if our lives are solely guided by– If we had a metric or a read out of comfort, there’d be a whole lot of things we weren’t able to do very soon. Oh, gosh, I think about my relationship, the discomforting times that I’ve needed to go to to improve that, or difficult conversations, or difficult things I’ve had to hear, or being a good parent, or I don’t know, stepping into those spaces of being a less than good parent or being at work when things haven’t gone well and stepping into that space of learning from those experiences. If I was all about comfort, I would be a pretty shallow human being, perhaps. That’s a nice point.
It’s just about, sometimes discomfort means something else, means we’re actually heading in the right direction doing the things we care about. Someone much wiser than me, I can’t remember who it is, I wish I could attribute the quote in the proper place, said something like, “In your pain, you find your values, and conversely, in your values, you find your pain.” I feel there’s few truer words that have been spoken. Perhaps we can just do a little exercise that speaks to that as we’re talking about work, we’re talking about the pandemic, and we’re talking about a place where there is potential for pain and hurt, and also potential for values to be front and center as well.
Hey, I’m going to do a guided exercise. I’m going to ask to go through it with you and listeners can do the same. It’ll be ever so slightly– I was going to use the word meditative. That’s probably not quite right, but just by me guiding you through this, I’m going to evoke some certain thoughts and feelings and some responses to those. In order to do that, should we just spend a moment then stepping out of our automatic pilot? I don’t know, for me, that’s when I’m busy, and mindy, and heady up in my head.
If we can make an invitation for ourselves to drop back down into our body and just connect for a moment into aspects for experience, like our feet on the ground, wiggle our toes around in our socks, shoes, or fluffy bunny slippers, or wherever we find them. Sitting upright and just rolling our shoulders back and letting them drop down and bring our attention to our breath and just notice our breathing for what it is and using all of this to remind ourselves that we can connect into our bodies in this moment as a different place to rest rather than located in our minds.
As we do this, from this position of being in the moment, anchored and grounded in this place, I’m going to ask, if we could take some time to bring together all the things that we’ve spoken about. We’ve talked about work and the places at work where we hurt. See if you can allow yourself to let those bubble up a little bit. Those thoughts and feelings, and perhaps even memories that are connected to when work hurts. It might be easy to connect into a whole range of feelings, or you might find yourself going to a specific instance that represents a time where work hurts. It could include stress, or anxiety, or anger, or sadness, grief.
I usually find, with my experience, there’s a constellation of things. There’s thoughts that bubble up and there’s body sensations, there’s my memories, might even be things that are connected to, what does this mean about me as a person? As we’re doing this, I’m going to see if you can observe and notice what might be an automatic pilot reaction to these experiences. The kind of thing that you find yourself just routinely, habitually, automatically doing when these things appear. Without getting into whether they’re good, or bad, or helpful, or unhelpful, just allow that to rest.
Just notice the more the quality I’m looking for, or just the automaticness, the habitual things that you find yourself doing when these things show up. I’ll perhaps be willing to bet that there’s a connection there between this stuff and our actions, and maybe even a bit of a cycle that sometimes happens as these things connect together and play out. If you’re a little bit like me, however, you might find that some of these experiences are not always easy to be with, and sometimes that they invite judgment or criticism on just their very presence or not wanting them to be there. Sometimes it might be the case that I certainly don’t find myself particularly listening to these experiences.
Having said that, I’m now going to ask you to do that, which is to say, if you were just to sit back and allow these painful experiences that are connected to work to have a voice. It’s a voice, just in this instance, that speaks to things you care about, counterintuitive perhaps, and maybe that sometimes we don’t often hear this perspective. Just say in this moment that they did, what are the things that that would speak to in terms of the things that really matter to you, the things you care about, where purpose and meaning comes into your life? They might not be big, grand things. It might just be a small, little, quiet thing that this point of pain says, “Hey, don’t forget that,” or, “Hey, remember this.”
Remembering that notion where you hurt you care, and where you care you hurt. Just as we move to the end of this exercise, perhaps something has bubbled up, and okay if it hasn’t, if there were something that bubbled up, maybe an image, or a picture, or a word that’s about the thing you care about, or things, my last question just to add in there would be, if you were to imagine that you were enacting upon that and taking a step in a certain direction, what would be that step that you would take that would take you closer to that thing being more prominent in your life or more present and available to you? If there’s one concrete action that took you in that direction.
Just as we end this exercise, I’ll just invite you to allow whatever mindy stuff was there, images, just thoughts, to ease and settle into the background as we reconnect back into our body. Just luxuriate in this moment just to take some time to be in our body, connecting into our breath, connecting to our shoulders and rolling them back again, and sitting up and connecting back into our feet. As we end the exercise, step back into reality. [chuckles] Okay. Thanks for doing that with me. I’d of course be curious to your experience and any comments and thoughts you had on that.
Dr. Redmond: It was really interesting, actually, because I think when you started trying to connect with experiences related to when work hurts, I think you said that it might bring up a whole range of things. Lots of things came up for me, and it was hard to settle on something and when you asked about going on autopilot, what is your automatic reaction? I was aware that my automatic reaction was a filter about what will other people think about what’s coming up for me, kind of aware of maybe having this conversation with you now, but that is my filter anyway, in real life, finding it hard to just be with my own experience without a filter of how will this be perceived by other people, is this going to cause someone else discomfort?
Always filtering my experience through that lens. That was really helpful to become aware of in that moment. Then moving on to the bit about what can that pain tell us about what our values are? For me, the experience that stuck around was thinking back to the beginning of the pandemic and a huge sense of anxiety I felt for the first time feeling like my job could put my family at risk. I think having worked in the NHS, in mental health services, which is a different experience to being in acute hospital care, but there are risky times. I’ve had dangerous times.
I’ve been in situations with people who’ve been very distressed, who’ve had knives and threatened to kill themselves in front of me, and scary things have happened, but I had never, ever felt before that my job might put my family at risk. That was really, really terrifying to be in that space and to connect with that now. For me, at the start of the pandemic, the other part that was really painful was the experience of, I think, colleagues across the country and closer to home being put at risk, people not having access to the right kinds of protection, and being expected to be in situations that were dangerous for them and dangerous for their families, and I found that really, really difficult.
For me, I guess that’s part of my motivation for the work I’m doing now. The sense of holding on to our humanity. Yes, we have a job, we have a vocational calling, but at the end of the day, we are people with vulnerabilities and families. I can’t bear when that gets lost, and fighting to hold on to that is really important to me. I think since then, now, the work I’ve been doing over the last year, which has been outside of the NHS, but working into supporting health professionals through different avenues, has been so fulfilling and so energizing, but at times threatens to take me away from my family in other ways, just in terms of being really excited and consumed by it.
That was really helpful just to have that pause and think, “What are the concrete things I can do right now? Just to be really present with what does matter?” That’s not to say work isn’t important, but just your globe, there’s times when that needs to shift to foreground other things.
Dr. Oliver: Thank you for sharing that. Yes, there’s a lot of heart in what you’re saying there, Paula. It’s just reflecting there. It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Just the degree to which we have those times to pause and listen a little bit to those parts that hurt and how they can speak to things that actually truly matter. Personally, I find that’s not an easy thing to do. It takes a certain particular context or a scenario for me to slow down and do that. Otherwise, it’s incredibly easy just to keep rushing on and continuing and being busy and fixing and solving and blah, blah, and not having the opportunity to reflect and pause.
Dr. Redmond: What, Joe, would you say are the things that keep you going? What are your go-to things, spaces, places, ideas for when work hurts for you?
Dr. Oliver: I run. I’m not a particularly proficient runner, but I run, and I absolutely love it. It gives me that space of connecting to my physicality and creating a different place of getting too heady. I’m very good at doing that. I enjoy being up in my head, and it’s an easy place to go to, but not always the most productive. Having spaces when I don’t do that is really important for me. Gosh. Back in the day, I used to ride to work.
I used to work around St. Paul’s, around Tottenham Court Road in London every day on my bike and then coming home would be dodging London buses and decompressing from the day. Yes, I miss that. I miss some aspects of it. When it’s pouring with rain, [chuckles] it’s pitch black, sure, okay, I don’t miss that, but those things are important. There’s a huge bit for me which is about, as I said at the start, the good enough. Reminding myself good enough is plenty okay.
It’s important for me personally, because there’s a bit of me that isn’t happy with good enough and wants to be, I don’t know, really, really good, sometimes wants to be perfect in all the things that I do, and that’s not coming from a place that’s good for me, that comes from old stuff that says you’re not enough or should be more and when I get caught with that, I can get pushed hard by that, and it really strips out the enjoyment of life, work, and the things I do.
I can easily, if that catches me, I just end up walking out of my office late and frazzled and just having done too much, and I really don’t enjoy that experience. Good enough is so important, and it does allow me to remember the other things that are important to me and do those things. If you come across that famous research by Bronnie Ware, do you remember her? She’s a palliative care nurse, Australian, and she did this research. She was working with people and they’re dying, and I don’t know quite how she did it or what she did, but she asked them, what do you regret most?
Dr. Redmond: Oh, yes.
Dr. Oliver: A really punching question to ask [unintelligible 00:58:57] An important one nonetheless. One of the things, number two was, I regret working so much. One of the interesting things, she said that every man she spoke to, and it’s probably a demographic in terms of who she was talking to, but they all said that. I think that speaks to all of us. I can resonate with that. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be on my deathbed going, “I wish I’d done more reports, or just replied to a few more emails.”
Dr. Redmond: Yes.
Dr. Oliver: It’s funny because that is the space that perfect, doing everything to super high standard is rigid and narrow for me, it’s not agile. Good enough is room, and there’s a room for things that are creative, there’s room for spontaneity, room for fun. That’s the thing I said at the start, it’s a bit that I found out was really important for me. Well, yes, sometimes frivolous fun, but just, I don’t know, fun where I can enjoy things and just allow things to roll and unfold and unpack.
For example, this is one of the things I love about working at home. I could trundle out and I had my lunch and was chatting to my wife and our eleven month old soon to be one year [unintelligible 01:00:22] Words are coming online very soon and giggling a lot. My wife was just lying on the ground and she was crawling up and giggling and giggling about, and then my wife would be giggling and she’d be giggling. She’s getting out of those silly cycles. Not particularly high comedy standards, but she was [crosstalk]
Dr. Redmond: Yes.
Dr. Oliver: [unintelligible 01:00:49] Just like, those are cool. When I’m caught, I would be rushing back to my office, got to get more emails done. Those are some of the things that make a difference.
Dr. Redmond: Joe, if people want to connect with you and find out more about your work, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Dr. Oliver: They can write me a letter. No, I’m joking. Old school. Actually, I’d quite like a letter. I haven’t had a letter for a long time apart from [unintelligible 01:01:22] and from the HMRC. At our website is probably a hub for all sorts of things that we do, contextualconsulting.co.uk. You can catch me on Twitter, context consult, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, but yes, those are the places. If people want to reach out, there’s a few places and you can Google me and find me, and I’d love to hear your reflections on today, or if people want to hear more about ACT in the workplace and ACT with the kind of things we’ve been talking about, for sure, reach out. Get a hold of me.
Dr. Redmond: Thanks so much, Joe.
Dr. Oliver: Thank you for having me.
Dr. Redmond: Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and you’d like to help support the podcast, please do share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. I’d love to connect with you, so do come and find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. You can also sign up to my mailing list to keep up to date with future episodes and get useful psychology advice and tips straight to your inbox. All the links are in the show notes. Thanks again, and until next time, take good care.
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