DBT in Practice - Accumulating Positive Emotions in the Long Term

I hope everyone is enjoying this lovely opening to Spring!

As we transition to warmer weather and the end of the year, my mind often turns to goals, and I thought it would be great to talk in this blog a little more about the ABC Please Skill, specifically the A, or Accumulate Positive Emotions.

When people think about this skill, they often think about the short term, with things like taking a bath or talking to a friend leading to positive emotions, but I want to talk today about the long-term, how can we make changes in life to build a life worth living.

This is really all about is making the difficult changes in your life so that positive events will happen more often in the future. Specifically, DBT recommends the following steps:

1.     Avoid avoiding

Start now to build the life you want! Often we find ourselves avoiding making changes as we feel it’s going to take too much effort or time, but remember it starts with a single step in the right direction.

2.     Identify values that are important to you

Ask yourself - what are the values that are important to me in my life? Do we want to be productive, improve our relationships, be physically fit? Don’t hold onto these values too tightly, remember they can change based on the different seasons we are going through in life.

3.     Identify one value to work on now

Choose on of the above values, for example being productive.

4.     Identify a few goals related to this value

What are the specific goals I can work on that will make this value a part of my life? If we’re identifying being productive as the goal, there are heaps of options - e.g. get a job where I do something useful, do that closet clean out I’ve been neglecting, volunteer for an organisation which represents by values.

5.     Choose one goal to work on now

Do a pros and cons if need be to identify the goal to work towards. Let’s choose getting a job as our example.

6.     Identify small action steps toward your goal

Break it down into small steps. Example - join Seek and put an alert out for jobs, write a resume, drop my resume off at local businesses

7.     Take one action step now

Join Seek.

As you can see, it all starts with a single step, and I wish you all all the best in making these meaningful changes to build a life worth living! Thank you all so much for reading, and I hope this post had some helpful skills for you to implement ongoing!