The Choice Point: Acceptance & Commitment Therapy.

A pre-cursor to creating a life worth living.

These are some of the skills I've learnt from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

They are ones I use to guide my clients to a meaningful life too.

ACT teaches us a better way of handling difficult thoughts and emotions.

Because, whether you know it or not, we tend to want to avoid or make "away" moves to get rid of our scary thoughts and feelings.

It's not surprising of course, since fear, failure, rejection and other such experiences are all really, really scary things.

Plus, it's not your fault you might act this way.

It's something we've all evolutionarily been ingrained to do, as well as what we've unwittingly learned from others around us.

For example, what do you do when you see a scary creature coming towards you? You run away of course.

What about when you were young and you were afraid of going to a party or some school event? Mom and dad would probably tell you:

"You don't have to go if you don't want to".

But that just leads us to a life of avoiding our fears.

All of us are pretty much guilty of this.

Here's the thing though - yes, running away does grant us temporary relief, but it also takes us away from the things that matter.

Deep inside of us, we know by running away we are missing out on something that we really desire and wish for.

We bear the burden of guilt and shame. Leave it long enough, and it might turn into hopelessness that things will ever get better.

So, how about this then?

Let's do ourselves a favour and stop making choices that take us away from a life that is worth living.

Learn the skills that help you change the way you live.

To go from "just coping" to "truly living".

To move forward despite our fear.

Because in always moving forward to what matters to us, we will inevitably create for ourselves a life worth living.

You've got this now,

Hernping