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H ave you ever done a willingness workout?

What comes to your mind when reading the word “willingness?”

Some of my clients have heard words like “open up, sit with, make room for it… ” and so on.

The challenge is that without a context, all those words don’t have any meaning unless you make a decision, a choice, a commitment with yourself to experience “x and all the stuff” ​that comes when facing uncomfortable situations.

So, just to clarify when referring to willingness, I’m not referring to a feeling or something abstract, but to a choice that you can make towards a particular uncomfortable experience you have been struggling with in the name of your values.

Blindly playing-it-safe can be exhausting and draining.

You don’t have to love, approve of, or even like all the content your mind comes up with. I’m asking you to learn to make room for these thoughts as they are and look at the thoughts as stuff your mind comes up with rather than as stuff that you always have to listen to.

Call to action

• What would make what you are going through here honorable and purposeful?
• You don’t have to do this perfectly—just get from point A to point B.
• What do you want to stand for here?
• Is there anything standing in the way of you and what you want to be about here?

What is your mind avoiding?

One of the clever things our mind does is push away, replace, or stop our thinking when we are having uncomfortable thoughts, images or memories. This process is called cognitive avoidance or thought avoidance. Here is how cognitive avoidance plays out in some hypothetical scenarios:

• You had a terrible fight with your friends, and memories from this fight pop up every day. Naturally, you try to replace these upsetting memories with positive ones, such as the last day trip you took with your friend.
• When thinking about your partner traveling to South Africa, you have a thought about her dying in a car accident. The next thing you know, you’re telling yourself to stop thinking that horrible thought.

  Here is our invitation for a way to move forward: What about learning to have all those thoughts—the sweet, old, and ugly ones—without pushing, forcing, or pushing them down?

   

  How to shift from cognitive avoidance to  

Do you want to get unstuck from wrestling with worries, fears, anxieties, obsessions, and ineffective playing-it-safe actions?

Related posts

It was a true pleasure to discover the work and passion of Sonya Looney, a professional athlete, mountain bike champion, podcast host, health and mental performance coach. Her enthusiasm, laughter, and insights are contagious!

There are many golden nuggets in this conversation: how to skillfully manage comparison thoughts, rumination, self-doubt, shame, values-based strategies, and much more.

Key Takeaways

• The mindset of an athlete
• The upsides and downsides of over-preparing and over-working
• How to skillfully manage unpredictability
• Acceptance of emotions
• How to deal with a strong attachment to goals or winning
• Defusion: thought – labeling
• Goodhart’s law
• How to manage physical fatigue using acceptance & defusion skills
• How to go back to your values when your mind gets noisy
• How to manage comparison thoughts
• ABC of resilience

About Sonya Looney

Sonya Looney is a professional athlete, podcast host, health and mental performance coach. As a professional mountain biker, she’s raced in over 25 countries, been World Champion, 4x USA National Champion, and amassed 20+ career wins in endurance mountain biking.

Her work encompasses the intersection of performance, health, and well-being. Her dynamic experience racing around the world, paired with a graduate education in Electrical/Biomedical Engineering, her Health Coaching Certification, and extended personal studies in Neuroscience, Positive Psychology, and Plant-Based Nutrition, have been a powerful way to connect and understand herself and others.

Sonya is passionate about the integration of high performance and well-being through psychology, contemplative practices, and sport.

In her work, she explores topics like grit, mindset, self-worth, purpose, success, happiness, and healthy striving.

Key Takeaways

This is part 2 of my conversation with Dr. Matthew McKay, Ph.D. In part 1, we discussed the foundations of how Dr. McKay thinks of process-based therapy. Today, we discuss, in particular, different mechanisms of actions:

• What is attentional training
• How to look at your values when getting stressed
• How to practice acceptance 
• How to handle uncertainty
• How reassurance seeking shows up in our day-to-day life

About Matthew

Dr. Matthew McKay, Ph.D., cofounder of New Harbinger Publications, joins us to talk about evidence-based resources and the ever-changing landscape of therapy. Matthew is a professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, CA. He has authored and co-authored numerous books, including The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook, The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook, Self-Esteem, and Couple Skills, which have sold more than four million copies combined. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology and specializes in the cognitive behavioral treatment of anxiety and depression.