Mindfulness: The DBT What and How Skills. Full transcript | Episode 4 | The Skills Podcast

In Episode 4 of The Skills Podcast, we go over, in depth, the Dialectical Behavior Therapy Mindfulness, What + How skills. You'll notice that these skills build upon some of the principles we talked about in Episode 3 but don't worry, if you're new here, you'll be able to jump right in and get practical tools and tips for applying mindfulness to your life and leadership, starting today.

Below is the transcript from the full episode - modified gently for easier reading.

We hope you enjoy!

Meredith: Hello, hello everyone! Welcome back to week two of mindfulness skills. 

The way i like to think about it is that the ‘What Skills’ are ‘What’ to do, to get into the present moment. And then the 'How Skills', are the ‘How’ we can continue to being mindful in any given moment.

I'm going to be teaching off of Mindfulness handout 4 + 5, in the DBT Skills Training Manual, Second Edition, just for reference, if anyone has the skills training manual with them. 

DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets - Mindfulness Handout 4.pdf

Download PDF • 27KB

The WHAT skills

With this set of skills, we say that you do these 1) in order and 2) one at a time. Doing them in that sequence allows us to get to our goal here, which is participating fully. 

There are three skills in the ‘What Skills’: Observing, Describing, and Participating… And ultimately, we would say with mindfulness practice, our goal is to be able to participate fully in life. Participate with awareness. 

Okay, so what does that look like? How do we get ourselves to do that?

Let’s start with the Observe skill.  

OBSERVE

Observing brings us into contact with the present moment. And how we do so is by… noticing body sensations, paying attention and observing what's happening internally for us. 

So using our senses... You can ask yourself: 

What is it that I'm feeling in my body? 

What am I hearing right now? 

What can I smell, taste? 

What does it feel like to be moving? 

Alternatively, if I notice that my mind is elsewhere, I can also bring myself back to the present by noticing what's happening externally.

For example, what's happening in this room right now? Who am I talking with? What do I notice all around me? 

And… there’s a concept here called beginners mind…

which is the idea of, meeting each moment as if you were seeing it for the first time, or as if you were doing something for the first time.

And (beginners mind framing) is meant to introduce the concept of novelty and then see, how does that change how we observe things in this moment? 

A classic example that I like to give here is to think of… a set of keys.

For me, when i see these keys I think, oh! my keys. They unlock the door, right? I need those in my bag when I leave the house. But, if you were to give this set of keys to let's say a baby, what might they do with them?

Faith:

Yeah, they would just be like, what is this jingly jangly thing? And put it in their mouths and like feel the textures and notice all the different details and stuff. They would be fully in it.

Meredith:

Yeah…  maybe dropping them and watching you pick them back up… So they're really like exploring, which essentially is how I like to think about that beginner's mind… using observing as a way of exploring something. 

And I love this concept because you can do it at any moment.

For example, try it right now. As you're sitting here, listening to this, take in your environment with new eyes. Really scan, look around, look at the textures, look at the colors. Listen to the sounds. See what you notice. 

Even if your environment is exactly the same and you're not noticing anything new, what might be different is how you're feeling. So we can observe, again, internally and also externally. And even if this practice just slows us down and makes us think, well, is there something here or what haven't I noticed before? That's great! It's riveting us back into the moment and we're more present. 

The quality of our awareness increases.

Faith: It feels like what you're getting at is it's almost like:

there's an underlying sense of curiosity or what a lot of like leaders might recognize is kind of like a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset.

I love beginner's mind because, I'm a recovering know-it-all, so very practically it gets me to slow down and be curious and ask questions and two, in my relationships with people, I like to just remind myself sometimes that like, people can be different today than they were yesterday. Like I wonder what's different, you know? And it's really fun just to be like, what do I notice is different, you know?

Meredith: Yeah, this is something that we do in couples work a lot… When you meet someone new... think about the last time you just formed a new acquaintance, maybe you're starting to spend more time together, or you were dating someone or someone new joined your team. 

Like you're really curious to know more about that person. 

You ask lots of questions and you want to know about their weekend, you want to know about their day. You want to know things about them. And then over time, and especially for people that we're familiar with, we really lose that. Because we formulate this sense of who this person is and then just operate with that. And so you can think about any partnerships, right? We just do that.

And then we're in this mode of operating with each other, but we're not really observing each other.

So the practice is to really notice that person in front of you. Like, what do they look like? Depending on the context and maybe this isn’t appropriate for the workplace but, what do they smell like?

What are they curious about right now? What's going on in their world? And again, these questions and prompts can bring us back into observing and taking in new information, which is different than just operating on autopilot with them.

And we probably have all lived out this experience, when we've been on the receiving end of that, like someone is with us, but they're not really… with us. Or, they don't really know us and, how does that change the quality of our relationship? 

So, for practices, you know, you can practice with other people, you can practice with yourself. I really encourage this with any tasks that you do often. The next time you go to do that task, ask yourself, what is it like to really observe what I'm doing right now? 

It's simple and it's hard.

DESCRIBE

Okay, so we slow down, we observe and really take in the information around us and then we start putting descriptive words on what we're observing. Aka, describing. 

So this would be naming: the who, the what, the when, the where. 

Label what you observe. So if you're noticing a feeling, we can name that feeling. "I'm noticing feeling _________."  If you're having a thought, you can say, “I'm having the thought _________.” 

For a moment, just hang out there with this idea of describing your thoughts and see if you can spot the difference on how these would land.

Example 1) “Today is going to be terrible.” VS. Example 2) “I'm noticing the thought that today is going to be terrible.”

It lands differently, right? One is like a truth, period. And one is, I'm just noticing this thought.

So there's a lot of power there in just labeling what we're observing. And it gives us an opportunity to… create some space between our interpretations or our opinions and what the facts of the situation. Or, how I like to think about it, it brings me back into what the facts of the situation are. 

Faith: It's sort of observing as if a video camera recorded it, right? Like objectively, what happened, what unfolded on camera and then internally what happened. Like it was really, I felt really confronted by that. I was really irritated or I was really sad or something like that…

Meredith: Yeah. Exactly. For a very relatable example. Let's say you send an important email to someone off. And especially nowadays when we just expect things so rapidly to come back to us. Let's say you send an email... on Friday and you're coming back into work Monday and you still haven't gotten a response. So depending on the context here and who you send it to, we could all have a variety of different responses...

But generally speaking, we might feel frustrated. We might be annoyed that this person hasn't responded. Maybe we start to interpret that they don't find it important. Or maybe they think that what I asked was stupid or they don't respect me. All of that is interpretation. And if we come back just to the facts, the facts are I sent an email on Friday at noon. It's Monday, 8 a.m. and I haven't received a response. 

Different, right? 

You know, I wanted an answer. I need this thing to move forward. And that's valid. And, is that different (emotionally) when we come back to the facts vs. when we put all of this extra noise on it with our interpretations?

Faith: Yeah, that makes an awful lot of sense.

Meredith: Remember, if you can't observe it through your senses, you can't describe it. So if we haven't observed it, then we can't accurately describe it.

I can't observe that this person doesn't respect me.

What I can observe is that their email is later than when I had hoped for.

Faith: Yeah. Again. The facts of the situation, objectively as they happened and then like that's separate from your interpretation of what it brings up for you… Disrespected. ‘They don't respect me’ versus ‘they just haven't responded to an email’. 

Meredith: Exactly. So going back to the idea that this is simple and hard. This part right here of seeing what our automatic responses are and then creating that pause and coming back to what we observed. This is a skill that can take a lot of time to really building mastery at.... lot's of reps needed here.

Okay, putting this all together, we start with observing. We take in information, we put words on it, and then we can participate. 

PARTICIPATE

The reason these skills go in order is because, if we just jump right into participating without observing and describing then we can make a-lot of mistakes, or that’s where accidents can happen.

An example I like to share here is, one time I was at a wedding and right after the ceremony, you know, when the wedding party comes in and they do introductions. Well, they had choreographed a dance and so, imagine being in the middle of all of this... and a friend of mine, who was late to the wedding, showed up... a couple of minutes into the dance segment... and he just jumped right in, on the dance floor and starts going with it… and then slowly realized there's a set sequence going on. And you could just see the moment of awareness kick in and he then had to like slowly dance-exit the stage.

So, he just jumped right into participating and didn't really fully take in the landscape, the full picture if you will. Kids do this all of the time, I have two toddlers and they'll just pick up a cup and drink out of it with no observation of what was actually in the cup before hand.

So when it comes to participating… the skill says to: throw yourself completely into activities of the current moment. In the observe and the describe, we took in all this information, now we see it, and now we are going to participate fully in it...

And again, seemingly simple but hard to practice.

When we think about work culture, right? I see a lot of half-participating, or fragmented participating. For example, just yesterday I was on the phone with someone and I had my slack up and then started scanning an email that just came in… like, what? Where is my attention? 

All of that multitasking just takes us out of participating fully in the moment and like, really being present with it. So the idea or prompt here is to become one with whatever you’re doing…  And again, this takes concerted effort… but, I'm here. I'm going to give this person on the call my full attention. I just saw an email come in,  I really want to look at it and I'm not going to look at it. I'm going to pull my attention back and stay in it and then I'm going to get to it later. And that's huge. That's what we call urge surfing. 

When you notice an urge to do something and you're letting that urge come and go. You're urge surfing.

And that's really powerful. The more we can do that, the more sense of control we’ll have. I do want to name that sometimes, this practice can also look like, being on the phone, checking the email and with awareness, noticing that I'm doing both. Just noticing that and naming that can also be a practice and definitely a place to start building mastery around.

Faith: Yeah, that staying present part is so hard and it can be such an unlock for people to just notice. Like, I can hear out on the floor that somebody else is having a problem that they need help with, but I'm just going to stay here, in this conversation with the person right in front of me, and I’m going to get to that later. Instead of start, stopping, start stopping. 

Meredith: Exactly! The last point we try to make with this skill is where it says that participating is to “act intuitively from wise mind”. What I want to speak to here is that this is something that comes with a lot of practice and repetition. 

For example, if you've ever watched the Olympics…. A lot of professional athletes will talk about when they are doing that final race or they're showcasing their skills in that moment, that they're really just acting intuitively. 

Like they have practiced this over and over and over and over again. They know the foundation and then they just kind of let themselves be in the moment and go with it… which is really different than when they were first learning the foundations of say that set sequence.

So, doing something from intuition or being “in the flow” is something that comes over time and something that also often requires a lot of preparation. 

There's a foundation of skillfulness and practice that then allows us to act intuitively and trust that we can do that, and stick the landing. 

Faith: Yeah, I get that. It’s just like learning any new behavior, right? First, it's just becoming aware of what you've been doing historically, right? Or what is it that's occurring now? And then just kind of being intentional about how I want it to be different? 

Then, okay, how can I take steps towards that? And then practicing that and then ultimately, it will become rote. But it doesn't start out that way. It takes an awful lot of focus and consistency to really do the thing that you want to do, you know, versus just, autopiloting your way through.

Meredith: Yes. Great example. So that my friends are the What Skills. Observe, Describe, Participate.

Putting the What Skills into Practice

For practicing… maybe you might feel pretty confident in one section, say in your ability to observe… like, maybe you feel like that's a strong suit of yours. But, the describing part is really hard… It’s hard for me to get out of my interpretations. Then I would encourage that to be your practice ground. Like really focusing on building the muscle strength of describing. 

Or say, sometimes when I'm participating, it's really hard to fully be present. So like what gets in the way there? What's one thing you could do today that feels accessible, to get you into being fully present with something? Like where can you practice that? What does that look like? And ask yourself those questions. 

So we can pull out each section and really work on just strengthening each skill set one at a time or putting it all together.

Faith: I think that's a good tactic just to really honor where it 's true to you, right? Where do you feel like you need or you could benefit from some focus, right? Whether it's on observing or describing or participating.

I know for me, I feel like I'm in the participating bucket lately where I've just been asking myself like, what's what's most important to me right now?

You know, in terms of like how I show up or whatever's in front of me, you know, it's like coaching, I really want my person to feel like my full presence and attention with them and that I'm not pulled away from whatever is most critical for them… Or, participating with family. I really want to be present and to not be distracted when we have these moments of where we're all together, like just really soak that in.

Meredith: I love that framing. Like here's my intention, I want to be present and really soak things in, here's what I'm coming in with. And then if you have that experience of then being in the moment and maybe it's different than how you wanted it to be. Or maybe the moment is chaotic and scattered… and maybe, that's creating discomfort or judgment. So, how do we hold that and be with that, like in a mindful way? 

And that's a great segue into...

The How Skills

DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets - Mindfulness Handout 5.pdf

Download PDF • 28KB

Faith: I love it.

Meredith: Because where we start with the How Skills is talking about being nonjudgmental or holding ‘a nonjudgmental stance’. So I might've just said those words and people may already be eye rolling or having internal responses to the idea of non-judgment. 

So I just want to say, to start with, that the goal here is not to rid ourselves of judgments. I've yet to meet a person that can do that.

Judgments are everywhere. They're a part of our language. They're not inherently good nor bad. 

The little reframe on thinking about judgments is, what I like to say, is that they're placeholders or think, shorthand for describing... 

For example, say you went to a concert, pick a concert, any concert, and we were talking about it afterwards, and I said, oh my gosh, like how was the concert? And you said, oh, it was the worst, it was bad, it was terrible. 

Okay, all judgments, right? What could that mean?...

Faith:

Maybe it was the performance itself, or maybe it was awful because of the seat that you were in. You couldn't see the stage or there is somebody near you that smelled really bad or like people who are singing at the top of their lungs the entire time when all you wanted to do is to hear the musician sing, not them, you know, maybe you had a headache, you know.

Meredith:

Yeah. Maybe it rained. Maybe the bathrooms were far away… I'm not naming any names. Maybe the artist came on an hour and a half later than they're supposed to and I couldn't see the whole thing. Maybe that's why it was bad.

So bad is a judgment word, but it's shorthand for a much longer description. 

So sometimes we can use judgments really effectively and it just saves us time and we don't have to go in the description. And where we can get stuck, the trap of judgments, is where you may assume that we're on the same page about something but really we were talking about totally different things. 

Does that make sense? And hopefully that's relating to everyone because we've all been there. And it can work in both directions where the same trap can happen with positive judgments. Like that was the best thing ever. Like I love this thing. 

Well, why did you love that thing? What about it makes it the best thing?

…So, judgments again, are shorthand for more description. If we find we're falling into that trap of really, we actually don't know what we're talking about. Then the antidote is to describe or to ask for more information. 

Well, what about it made it the worst concert ever? Or what about that thing do you really like? So when a judgment shows up, then imagine a little decision tree here... and the questions ask: is this a judgment? and then, is this judgment effective? or is this judgment ineffective?

An effective judgment, maybe it saved us time. Like, I have enough information I need, and then we're kind of off and running with it. 

An ineffective judgment… a typical cue for me is that it has a negative impact on my mood. Or it didn't relay enough information.

For example, If you've ever been around someone that has lots of judgments, well, maybe yourself, you've been in a moment of having lots of judgments… a very human experience, right? In a moment of really judging the thing or experiencing judgment… You can feel that. 

That's what I'm talking about, like where it impacts our mood. Maybe I'm getting really angry. Or, I'm getting really frustrated or like, really working myself up because there's lots of judgments going on in this moment. 

Those would be the ones that I would look at and say, can I work with this? So I'm getting really worked up. I'm thinking this is the worst person ever. They're not respecting me. They don't care about my time, blah, blah, they're bad, they're awful, you know… all those judgments. You’re gonna feel that. And that's my cue to then unpack it, try to describe it more. 

So, if we're not on the same page or if it's negatively impacting our mood, I say those are usually times to go back into describing, try to unpack the judgment.

Faith: Yeah, that makes sense. Through the lens of the workplace, I think this is a really common pickle we can get into as a manager. Like say you are having your one-on-one with one of your direct reports and you know that there's something really critical to talk through, right? And so you just start off the one-on-one, like, how are you? Like, how's your week been so far? 

And they say, "jesus, it's been exhausting" or whatever… You have this moment in front of you where the decision tree is, do I go and honor this moment of where it feels like some heaviness kind of set in, right? Or there's some sort of like mood impact and like going down that path for a bit? Or do I not touch it and just stick with this thing? 

Like that's a very common push pool that comes up a lot. 

I know I used to default into like, well, I'll go down this pathway. And sometimes I would lose track of the other thing that I needed to talk about that was actually really critical. I was so invested in making sure my person was okay, you know, or like figuring out what else was more critical in that moment, you know? 

So, I think that that cue is super helpful… I definitely have experienced that for myself too. And I'll catch myself in a thought spiral or I'll feel the spiral happening downward. And it’s like, wait, hold on... noticing… the spiral. What’s causing that? And usually it is some sort of judgment that either I'm making or that I feel I'm on the receiving end of. Can i notice that? And then, are those judgments objectively true? I dunno… so maybe, they can carry less weight.

Meredith: What you just said is such nice segue back to this content today. For the last two points here, it says: acknowledge your values, your wishes, your emotional reactions, but don't judge them. 

So what just came up for me when you're sharing that example, right, is that when we notice we're having that reaction and we're going down like this little spiral..  You're judging yourself or you're judging that person.

And if you unpack it, like in your example:

I came into this situation with an idea and we've gotten diverted because other things showed up. So, underneath that is a value or a wish for things to be different... And that's not wrong. That's not bad. It's valid to want those things or to have that wish or that desire.

Maybe it's more effective to just go with that content. Maybe it's effective to name that in the moment. Like, "I want to give this time and we have to come back to this other thing because it's critical". 

So it all can become workable, but where we can get really stuck or where we can get very emotionally reactive is when all those judgments… start piling up. Now I'm judging myself for getting off topic or judging them for what they shared… And like now we're just, you know, judging, judging, judging, judging, judging. 

And what we know, is that internally, judgments make us really cognitively inflexible. 

The more judgments present, the less cognitively flexible we are because judgments are activating. For example, if I'm having lots of judgments in this moment. I’ll get that tunnel vision… hyper-focused on the thing… and that can create cognitive inflexibility. So, that tunnel, anytime you find yourself in a tunnel… that's your cue to try to span out before moving forward.

Faith: I love that so much. Because what you just said, I see this all the time in myself and in the leaders that I work with. 

When someone feels like they've been backed into a corner… or in some way they have a lot of judgment happening, they get into this binary thinking of it's either this or it's that. Right? And they can’t see out of it. They’re in that tunnel. 

And so a lot of the times like I find that's a powerful cue to just to be like, what's going on? Just noticing, right? Are there any other… options that have not yet been explored, you know? And, what would that look like? 

Meredith: Right. Now, I can imagine someone listening to this and being like, doesn't that take a lot of time? Or, “I don't have time to do that”. And... there’s some truth in that, in the sense that in the beginning, this skill will require slowing things down in order to do things differently and to really build mastery at this skill. And then over time, it's going to become the new familiar.

And in the beginning… [t]his is a great one to write out. The practice of writing out your judgments and then trying to break them down into the describe or, trying to break down the facts. Really slows it down…

This is also where I think values work is so important. Like if I really value how I show up for people or how I want to lead or… how I wanna engage in situations… Like, naming your why can be really motivating. 

Ask yourself, ‘what is my why for doing something different?’ 

For example, I know that judgments shut me down or I know I get really frustrated with my team… Or, I just get angry and that's what people are left with and then nothing gets done or things get stuck in the way… Is it effective or ineffective to keep repeating those patterns… 

We can ask ourselves, is it in line with my values? Or, in line with my goals to keep getting derailed like this? 

And then, the answers, might move us back into describing or back into focusing on being effective.

Real quick, I don't think I said this beginning, but the how skills, you don't have to do these in order. Like they don't build off of each other. You can plug these in at any time. And we can do them in conjunction with the ‘what skills’ and they can be their own practice. 

One Mindfully

Okay, next is “being one mindful”... So, becoming one with whatever you're doing… the skill of being ‘one mindful’...

I love the question here of what feels accessible today or in this moment to be one mindful with? What's something that you can do in this moment that helps you bring more presence or helps increase the quality of your awareness in this moment?  How can you really rivet yourself to the here and now? 

As we talked about… looking in the future or looking in the past… both of those things don't exist in this moment. All that we have is right here. All of life is happening, right now, in this moment. So coming into contact with this moment by letting go of distractions or concentrating our mind is the practice of being ‘one mindful’.

As you can imagine, there's a gajillion ways of practicing this, everything from being one one mindful when you're washing a dish. I think John Kabat Zinn is famous for saying this example of, the next time you're in the shower, ask yourself if you're really in the shower?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5r2sBQM31k

Because where else could we be? Oh, if you ever planned a meeting in the shower, or, if you ever thought about the argument that you got in last night, or what you're going to have for breakfast, or what you're doing later that day, or what needs to get done… 

There's so many things that can take us out of the present moment. So again, using our senses, using that observing, the describe, can be things that pull us back into the moment. And then there are two concepts here for just helping us kind of get into being one mindful… One is called ‘opened mind’, or the other is, ‘focused mind’. 

For example, yesterday I was at the aquarium with my kids. (See if you can just go there visually for a moment... Let's all go to the Monterey aquarium together). Beautiful, right? 

So, we're at this aquarium and we're looking at a really big, live observation window. An ‘opened mind’ would be the practice of standing in front of that window, standing in front of that tank and taking it all in, like noticing the kelp and the fishes moving and the bubbles and the different colors and the way the light's coming in and just seeing your attention kind of flow.. .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1XcdxjVGos

‘Focused mind’ would be, you find one fish in the tank and you follow that fish and you don't lose sight of it. Where is that fish going? Like, okay, it's going over here, it's going over there. 

So now, let’s come out of that aquarium, come back into your life. We can do these practices anytime. Say for example you’re really dialed in on something. Right now, I'm really in ‘focused mind’. My focused mind is on this moment, on this task in front of me. 

Opened mind would look like, zooming out, taking in more of my environment, like looking around me, taking in information, noticing all of the different components of the here and now. Or noticing, I'm in the shower and my mind is thinking lots of things.

These can be really useful tools. So sometimes, when we get really into focused mind, we can start getting overwhelmed… like, it's almost ineffective to be in such focused mind. Something's happening there that's not working or us and we're becoming distressed. 

The answer is to zoom out and try to activate ‘opened mind’. 

Can I take in more information? Can I notice the things around me, zoom out? That practice can pull us out of that hyper-focus… or, vice versa. I'm really taking everything in and that's freaking me out. I'm getting really overwhelmed or it's too much sensory information… okay, I'm just gonna focus on this one thing. Keep your eye on the prize. Just focusing on this one thing. And that can help to reorient us to the here and now.

Faith: Yeah, I love that. I've never heard it described that way before, but it definitely resonates for sure.

Meredith: Yeah. And we're constantly oscillating between those two things.

For example, the last night I was at a dinner party and there was a lot going on around us. So at any given moment, you're kind of taking in the entirety of the situation and then you're just talking to one person, you have your full attention on them or what you’re eating and then your attention gets pulled and then you're taking in something else, right? Like it's just, we're just kind of constantly ebbing and flowing.

I say that to say, I think it's important to name that if you find yourself in more of that ‘opened mind’ state that's not, not being mindful….

The other prompt we’ll give here for a pracitce is to, "When you are worrying, just worry". This is a common one that people ask questions about. Like, huh? What does this mean? 

So this is an intervention that we use in behavioral therapies. Okay, so, when worries are on your mind or you're feeling anxious about something. What's a common thing that people will tell you to do? 

Faith: They’ll say, Oh, just don't worry about it. Just don't think about it. 

Meredith: Exactly, and how does that work out? 

Here’s the thing, if I tell you right now to not think about a pink elephant, you’re probably going to think about a pink elephant, right? 

There's this paradoxical trap here that when we tell ourselves not to think of something, we think of it, it's going to keep coming up and so worrying is one of those things that we're constantly just trying to push away, but then we end up just getting more of it. 

So the practice here would be, okay, this thing's on my mind... I'm gonna set a timer for the next five minutes and I'm just gonna worry. I’m gonna write it all out. I'm gonna say it out loud. I’m gonna spend this time really devoted to this worry. And then when that timer's up, okay… that's a wrap! 

And when we carry on with the day and the worries pop back up we can say to ourselves… hey, I got to that already. Remember I wrote everything out. Or, I'm going to come back to this later. I'll get to that when I go into my next worry time. 

So it kind of gives your brain a little place to put it. And in that practice, we're going to give it our full attention versus just letting it wander. 

Faith: And it feels like you're also saying, this is another place where the practice is to not judge it. Like… I’m noticing that worrying is present. Like how can you honor that and just allow yourself to really just go with it for five minutes or so. 

I used to think that this was moping. If I was really sad about something, I'd always try not to mope, you know? And then I was like, you know what? What if I just like let myself have a spectacular mope? Not indefinitely but for like five minutes, 10 minutes… and then, just move on. 

Meredith: I love that. And then you learn, that you can see it, feel it and move with it. Same is true for planning or remembering… like, if we let ourselves do that intentionally, it feels different than getting lost in it. Like I'm going to purposely just let my mind wander. I'm just going to see where it goes or, I'm purposely recalling this event because I want to learn something or I want to revisit it because it was lovely. Like I'm purposely choosing to do that versus my mind is just going there and I have no control over it. 

So it's a seemingly small shit, but really powerful one. It feels different.

EFFECTIVELY

Okay, last but not least is the skill of effectively, or being effective… So in order to be effective, we have to know what our goal is. And the idea is:

doing what works to achieve those goals, using skillful means. 

That focusing on ‘what works’ part is different than just trying to white-knuckle through something or just doing something out of like root behavior or like automatic behavior. 

The example i like to give here is the example of playing a game of cards. So let’s say that you and I were going to play a game of poker, a multi-hand game. And I dealt out some cards. If your goal is to win the game and you look at your cards, you're like, wow, the cards are awful. And fold. Well, you just determined that you're not gonna win the hand. 

So the skill of being effective and if you ask any card players, like really good card players, they say it's not the cards that you get dealt, it's how you play them. So… how do I best play the cards that I have, the cards that I've been dealt? And what does it look like to play them effectively? 

Instead of folding, could I have placed a bet? Could I have checked? What are my options for responding and how do I work with that? 

This one, I would say is like one of those skills where it sounds straightforward and people are like, "yeah, I've got that". And then we go to put it into practice and there's so many things that take us out of being effective. The need to be right is a common one. The wanting to prove a point. Righteous anger, like there's all sorts of things that can pull us out of being effective. And oftentimes, a lot of times it's that emotion mind hook…

Even though I know that way is not going to work or it's not going to work for my team or like people aren't going to respond to this when I'm going to do it anyways. 

So it requires willingness, willingness to act skillfully, to do something different.

And then, having that goal in mind is so important because it keeps us tethered to the skill. Without that goal in mind, it's kind of like, what's the point? Like just do whatever, blow it up, figure it out later.

Faith: I love that. 

Meredith: Okay, well that my friends was the what and how skills! I know there’s a lot of content here. Check out our website. We put links to the handouts and there’s lots of practices for you to try in those. And there’s more skills to come over time that will really make these skills seem so much more doable and applicable, if they’re not feeling that way… just know, it will come with time. We’ll learn how to stack all of the skills to feel more resourced and prepared. 

Til next time!

For handouts referenced throughout this post, visit:

https://www.theonpointpractice.com/theskillspodcast