How to Become Resilient with Acceptance & Commitment Therapy

It was a cool September evening in 1940 when Witold Pilecki missed curfew. Expect this wasn’t a get-a-tongue-lashing-from-your-mother-and-be-grounded-for-two-weeks type of curfew.

This was Warsaw, Poland, at the beginning of WWII.

Pilecki was already a successful, decorated officer of the Polish army in the Polish-Soviet War of 1918. After the war, he settled down, married a teacher, moved to the countryside, and bought a margarita machine, destined to spend the rest of his days tending to a garden and playing bridge (or whatever one might do in retirement).

But in 1939, he was forced back into battle. The Nazis invaded Poland from the west while the Soviets invaded the east. Poland lost its entire territory in a little more than a month.

After the defeat, Pilecki started a secret organization called the Secret Polish Army to continue to combat the Nazis and resist their control over Poland.

In 1940, the Secret Polish Army heard whispers that the Germans were building a massive prison complex called “Auschwitz.” They feared it was something similar to these mass incarceration centers that the Soviets created in the west. They believed it was the place that housed thousands of missing Polish nationals.

That’s when our dear Pilecki voluntarily missed curfew and got arrested by SS guards. He planned to go to Auschwitz. His plan was to get inside information and share it with the Allied forces. He would coordinate a mutiny and, eventually, break everyone out. His superiors thought he was crazy. He did it anyway.

The Poles knew Auschwitz wasn’t exactly a country club, but they didn’t know the extent of the horror. In the first month in Auschwitz, Pilecki saw a third of his barracks perish by exhaustion from overwork, pneumonia, and murder.

Pilecki ended up spending more than TWO YEARS at Auschwitz. While inside, he created a smuggling ring for food, medicine, and supplies, saving countless lives. He created communication channels to the outside world – his reports of what was happening inside of Auschwitz made it to the desks of Churchill and Eisenhauer (both of whom ignored the reports, thinking it was too crazy to be accurate). Witold Pilecki was the first person to alert the world to the horrors of the Holocaust.

Then, in 1943, he escaped with a plan nearly as courageous (and insane) as the one that got him into Auschwitz.

The story of Wiltold Pilecki is, admittedly, an extreme example to illustrate the point of today’s article, but as my family will gladly tell you, your boy loves hyperbole.

Pilecki is indisputably heroic, and he may be one of the most courageous humans to ever walk the planet. And we can all learn something from his story.

“If it doesn’t feel right, it isn’t right.”

Lately, I've been hot on the idea that it's relatively simple to be in the top 10% of whatever you're trying to pursue (simple, but not necessarily easy).

You just have to be slightly more willing to withstand suffering and pain than most people. To be a top 1% podcast, you merely need to publish 21 episodes (two episodes puts you in the top 10%).

And when I say suffering, I'm, thankfully, not talking about Wiltold Pilecki-like suffering in a concentration camp or experiencing capital-T Trauma. I'm talking about the suffering of everyday life:

• Being able to withstand rejection or criticism 

• Being willing to temporarily look foolish or feel embarrassed

• An ability to do the things you don't feel like doing 

• Being able to fight off the natural human tendencies to pursue the path of least resistance

There's this idea in the self-development world right now, and frankly, many of my clients hold this idea implicitly: if it doesn't feel right, it isn't right.

To me, this is asinine (SAT vocab word here). 

This belief is a corollary (SAT vocab word #2) of a cultural overcorrection towards feelings. Look, I'm not hating on emotions. Take Care was founded on the idea that if you take the time to care about the human being you're working with, you'll hit all the metrics you want. We love feelings at Take Care. I'm constantly teaching about emotional intelligence and regulation, validation and empathy, and the like.

The problem is that if you want to do anything worth anything in life, there's going to be bad feelings – failure, rejection, guilt, regret, stress, embarrassment. Shit, even if you don't do anything in life, life will still inevitably serve you suffering in some form.

And that's my point. Suffering is inevitable, and if we can get better at riding the wave of negative emotions and experiences, we'll be much more successful both internally and externally.

We all experience the same sensations, but how we manage those sensations determines our fate.

The alarm goes off in the morning, and we want to hit snooze…

We dread having the tough conversation...

We'd all prefer intimacy through a swipe right (or swipe left? Whatever.) rather than risk rejection or vulnerability... 

We don’t exactly love hearing criticism of our work...

We all crave sugar, salt, and fat...

However, only those willing to pay the "show up tax" will reap the rewards of what lies on the other side.

There's a reason Wiltold Pilecki is a legendary heroic figure in history. His willingness to do what others would not was exceptionally high. We don't have to be that, but if we can just get 5% better at withstanding the negatives of life that we all experience, we'll be better people, and the quality of our lives will reflect that.

The Formula: Acceptance & Commitment Therapy

This brings us to Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT). ACT is my favorite psychological intervention and has essentially become my life philosophy. 

ACT, developed in the 1980s, is a practical form of psychotherapy. Its goal is to help individuals lead meaningful lives by effectively managing the pain and distress that are part of the human experience. It encourages us to accept our thoughts and feelings without judgment and then act in alignment with our core values. 

In other words, it helps us show up consistently and stay in the game, which is the most important factor in success (however you define success). The practice of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy can help us build the resilience and persistence required to accomplish anything meaningful in our lives.

The goal of ACT is not to eliminate or avoid difficult feelings but, on the contrary, to engage with those emotions and move toward more positive behaviors.

You can see how pivotal this could be to the change process. So, let’s break it down…

The First Part: Acceptance

Before the whole commitment piece, we gotta talk about emotions (see, I told you we love emotions over on this side).

The first element of ACT is acceptance — the ability to fully experience difficult emotions without judgment or resistance.

I have this visualization practice for when I feel crappy emotions — like the overwhelming shame of having my wife walk in on my eating a plate full of hot dogs or the guilt of hurting my mom's feelings.

I imagine a wave washing over me. The wave crashing into me is the moment of impact (wife walks in the door).

I imagine the wave washing over me — feeling all the sensations of a bright red face and sweaty armpits. Then I imagine it slowly rolling back out to shore, taking the temporary sensations of hot dog shame with it.

This is one way to practice acceptance—a mindfulness exercise to not fight thoughts and emotions but simply let them wash over me, fully experiencing them.

And it sucks.

We naturally tend to shun these sensations or try to get rid of them, but the paradox is that the harder we fight, the more they persist.

There's an idea in psychology called ironic process theory (IPT). Psychologist Daniel Wagner discovered it through his "white bear problem." He'd have participants try their hardest to not think of a white bear. The harder they fought, the more that Coca-Cola polar bear appeared in their mind.

In another experiment, researchers had participants do the only thing we fear more than bears: public speaking.

To prepare for their presentations, they split people into three groups. The first group was told to just ignore or downplay their nerves. The second group was given distractions like video games or Tik Tok videos. The third and final group was educated on how stress works in the body and how embracing their nerves can help them present with more energy and conviction. 

When strangers reviewed their presentations, group three crushed it whereas the other two groups folded like lawn chairs.

A core piece of ACT, and for that matter Buddhism, is that psychological suffering is often caused by experiential avoidance – by avoiding the thoughts, feelings, and situations that hurt, we actually make them more painful.

But by practicing acceptance, we create a habit that lessens the intensity and duration of our pain – things like embarrassment, guilt, or regret evaporate much faster.

Practically, this means we need to just sit with the suck. Whether you imagine waves crashing over you or close your eyes and pray, the goal is to fully experience the shit that you least want to experience (easier said than done, I know)

Like most things in psychology, this takes time to develop.

Our guy Pilecki started with a healthy dose of acceptance: Auschwitz was a real, horrible place. And it was actually worse than he anticipated. He didn't downplay, deny, or rationalize the horror. In fact, his superiors were the ones who were in denial of his reports.

Acceptance doesn't mean "liking". It means understanding. But like our guy Pilecki, that doesn't mean we don't do anything about it. This brings us to part two...

The Second Part: Commitment 

During formal ACT sessions, you're encouraged to explore your core values and identify what's important to you. In every presentation I give to companies, I talk about the importance of values.

And in all those presentations, people fall asleep during this segment. Maybe I'm weird and am the only one who loves this shit. Exploring, discussing, and chewing on our values is one of the more important things we can spend our time thinking about.

Study after study after study after study…. after study after study... shows that having a strong sense of what matters to us improves everything from our happiness to our health, our friendships and marriages, and our academic and professional success. 

This is because life is nothing more than a series of choice points – forks in the road where you can be this person or that person… 

The philosopher Ruth Chang once said, "Choices are chances for us to celebrate what is special about the human condition . . . that we have the power to create reasons for ourselves to become the distinctive people we are."

And what guides our choices is our values or the characteristics of the person we want to be. Take any area of your life – think of the role you play – leader, friend, parent, coach, business person, and ask:

• What do I want people to observe when I'm parenting my kids?

• What would I observe if I watched myself manage my team? 

• Does my behavior align with my core beliefs about what a good friend is?

Clarity of our values gives us a map of how to act no matter how we feel.

• If I value health, then I know the action I need to take when my alarm goes off, or I'm ordering lunch 

• If I value kindness, then I know what to say when an employee makes me want to rip my hair out, and I certainly never start my emails with "Per my last email…"

• If I value integrity, then I know if I say it, I have to do it.

Author Susan David discusses values in her book Emotional Agility (a must-read for emotional intelligence). She calls it "walking your why." David writes, "[Walking your why is] the art of living by your own personal set of values—the beliefs and behaviors that you hold dear and that give you meaning and satisfaction. Identifying and acting on the values that are truly your own—not those imposed on you by others; not what you think you should care about, but what you genuinely do care about."

There's a great story about the author Elizabeth Gilbert that embodies this point really well. When she was writing her mammoth of a bestseller, Eat, Pray, Love she had a ton of doubt and criticism about herself, the book, and really just writing in general. Thinking back on that time, she said, "I had a strong mantra of THIS SUCKS ringing through my head… The point I realized was this—I never promised the universe that I would write brilliantly; I only promised the universe that I would write. So I put my head down and sweated through it, as per my vows."

THAT is A.C.T. in a nutshell: Gilbert felt the suck of writing, accepted it as a part of the game and took action in alignment with the person she wanted to be. Over time, this process, from reaction to action, becomes more of an automatic habit until you eventually become the person you're trying to become. As the titan of philosophy, Aristotle, once said, "You are what you habitually do."

Thinking about, talking about, reflecting and acting on our values will always be time well spent. 

Like our guy Pilecki, guided by his own sense of meaning and purpose, he built an entire network of food and medicine inside Auschwitz that saved so many lives. He built communication channels sounding the alarm for the Allied forces. He caused an irreplaceable ripple in the world. Again, it's an extreme example, but to me, it highlights to ultimate end to any means in life. 

We’ll End With This…

Just because you live like this doesn’t guarantee you results (or at least not the results you may desire or expect).

To finish where we began, tragically, in 1948, Pilecki was captured and tortured for information.

But Pilecki, being Pilecki, gave up nothing even though he told his wife that what he experienced being tortured made Auschwitz feel like child’s play. He was sentenced to death, and his story remained largely unknown for decades, buried by the repressive post-war regime in Poland.

But this is the point: Before he died, Pilecki said he had no regrets. In fact, as he stood there on his execution day, his final words were: “I have tried to live my life in such that in the hour of my death, I would feel joy rather than fear.”

As humans trying to grow and change, that’s all we can do. 

Pilecki’s story is powerful to me because 1) it keeps “hard things” in perspective, and 2) it reminds me that the pursuit of meaningful things will be painful, but being willing to experience that pain, accepting it, and committing to actions in line with my values will, at the very least, lead to a life well lived.