Compassionate Living Psychology

There is a saying that “everything will come to you at the right time.” However, waiting for our efforts to be rewarded could be an emotionally draining journey. In face of unknown and uncertainty, we all ask the question “am I doing the right thing?” Setting clear goals is particularly important at these moments because our goals could guide our actions and choices.

Instead of right or wrong, psychotherapy often looks at how helpful our actions are. In fact, evaluating our behaviours by grouping them into “towards” and “away” moves is a frequently used exercise in acceptance and commitment therapy. “Towards move” means any actions that bring us closer to our goal while “away moves” refer to actions that pull us further away from our goal.

For example, with respect to the goal “losing weight for health purpose”, exercising is an example of towards move while excessive snacking is obviously an away move. Nevertheless, one does not slim down drastically or see major health benefit after a week of exercise. Therefore, we should remember that taking towards move does not guarantee immediate reward but the analysis could offer us some reassurance that we are on the right track.

On top of paying attention to towards and away move, there are two basic principles that we should pay attention to as we set our goal”

1. Sometimes we could further break down towards move into smaller steps.
   • If we rarely exercise in the past, aiming at working out for 30 minutes every day from the beginning would leave just about everyone demotivated.
   • Breaking it down into stages like exercising once a week for 15 minutes before gradually increasing the length of time (e.g. adding five minutes each week) or frequency (e.g. exercising twice a week) is a more manageable approach instead.
2. It is also important that we define our goals in specific and measurable words.
   • For example, a vague statement like to “stop pushing myself too much at work” makes it hard to evaluate if our actions are towards move or away move.
   • It is because we can all hold different interpretations of the vague statement. Even if we disregard interpersonal difference, at an intrapersonal level, we could still look at the statement differently in day 1 when we set the goal compared to day 20 when we try to evaluate our progress.
   • On the contrary, when we say “I would like to stop working during weekends”, we can easily form objective and clear assessment of how well we have been doing in terms of accomplishing the goal.

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