A founder explores his journey with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
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When I started a company in my early 20s, I didn't have a great way of dealing with uncertainty and stress. Even though we bootstrapped the company to an exit, I was miserable a lot of the time, and when I finally moved on, I wasn't sure I'd ever want to start another business.
Entrepreneurship felt like a calling, yet my lived experience of it had often been quite painful. I spent years in traditional talk therapy and reading self-help books to try and make sense of my experience, but I still felt stuck. I couldn't see myself doing anything else, yet I couldn't see myself being happy starting another company.
I'd always been a bit of a psychology nerd (I originally got into meditation after reading a meta-analysis of its positive effects), and one day I stumbled upon a book, Values in Therapy, that explored a little-known framework from behavioral psychology that was a lightbulb moment for me. It finally helped me understand why I was so unhappy running my last company, and I finally began to see how I might be able to approach the stress and uncertainty of entrepreneurship in a new way: one that was life-giving instead of soul-sucking.
The framework is called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and even though it's backed by 800+ randomized controlled studies, it is relatively unknown outside of therapy circles. This post explains the basics of ACT, how it impacted my life, and how you can begin to apply it too.
At a high-level, ACT (pronounced "act" not "A-C-T") looks at how our thoughts influence our behavior, and offers tools for debugging when our minds get us stuck. In my case, it helped me recognize where my mind was adding to the stress inherent in running a company, and how that additional stress had gotten in the way of finding meaning and enjoyment in my work.
In talking with friends—both founders and non-founders—I realized that a lot of people go through what I went through, and that what helped me could also help others. I started devouring books and research on ACT, and eventually trained in how to use it with others in a coaching context (when it's not therapy, we call it Acceptance and Commitment Training and still abbreviate it as "ACT").