Have you ever seen a parade of dancers, like the kind of parade Brazilians have during Carnival? Samba troops, Frevo dancers, Capoeira performers, and dancers of every variety twist and twirl their way down a complex route of city streets in a chaotic but somehow synchronized fashion.
Think of your life as it’s one long dance parade.
I’ve spent my life studying “processes of change”: the small things we do that make a difference in lifting up or pushing down our lives over time. The word “process” sounds kind of geeky but the metaphor of a dance parade makes it a lot more understandable—especially once you know that the word “process” is drawn from the same Latin root as a “parade” or a “procession.”
You need to know how and when to deploy the right “dance moves” in your parade of life. If you keep stumbling and falling, you can’t keep up. If you insist on marching only in one straight line, you’ll miss the route turns. If you have only one speed, you run into others. You need a variety of moves, and you must combine them skillfully and fit them to the moment.
That’s how the moves become synchronized with others, allowing the creativity of the dancer to create an overall pattern. And that’s when changing your life becomes a dance parade.
After more than four decades of work, and thousands of studies by my colleagues and more than a few by yours truly, we know a lot about the moves you need to learn in this dance of life. Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad ideas out there even from well-meaning psychologists or other professionals. I want to tell you how to recognize them.
Bad Idea #1: You can sort all moves into “good” and “bad.”
This is the most widespread bad idea—and I’m guilty of accidentally promoting it, at least implicitly.
For example, we know that being more emotionally open is a far better life move on average than being emotionally suppressive. It’s so important that acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT (which I originated), starts with that idea in its very first word: “acceptance.” I remember how shocked I was a couple of decades ago when we then learned that ambulance drivers, firefighters, and other first responders did better in life if they were relatively emotionally closed during work crises. What? Oh no! How can that be?!
It soon made perfect sense when we found out that first responders also needed to learn how to be emotionally open when the situation allowed it. Ahhhh—it’s contextual control!
Metaphorically, a graceful twirl is a wonderful dance move, and generally, it is far better than just crudely stomping your feet one after another. But what if the parade route takes you up a long flight of stairs?! Which move do you think would be best in that moment if you wanted to keep the dance going? Twirling up the stairs might just mean a face plant into concrete. Stomping your feet one after the other will take you up the stairs.
Bad Idea #2: We should focus on just a few types of moves for everyone.
The dance of life is complex. It asks you to have many types of moves. Yes, good dancers use their legs and feet, but they also use their arms, hands, torso, and neck. When they twirl, they learn to use their eyes in ways that prevent dizziness but also allow them to track what is coming next.
Great dancers train, lift weights, stretch, and do squats. They eat right and get enough sleep. They develop their balance, endurance, and flexibility. And they practice with partners over and over and over. Some of this does not look like a dance move—but in the end, all of these are essential to being able to display elegant dance moves reliably.
In the same way, some models of change processes only deal with affect and cognition, forgetting attention and sense of self. Some never get around to motivation or behavioral habits, or they forget about the body or social, cultural, and relational processes. Worst of all, they may only prescribe moves of a single type, claiming that only the therapeutic relationship matters; or only emotion matters; or only overt behavior matters, and so on.
Bad idea. Just one or two types of moves are too few to be good in the dance of life. It’s OK to try these different methods, but only if you keep moving on and learning more things.
Bad Idea #3: Everyone needs only to work on a few moves within each type.
Are you old enough to remember “flossing,” the Macarena, how to make your arms and hands spell YMCA, or the Moonwalk? They were fun for a while, but we soon quickly tired of them.
Similarly, have you ever found yourself out on the dance floor with someone who has some cool moves of whatever kind, but you quickly learn they are the only moves this person has, so no matter the song these moves will be repeated over and over?
Yuck. Can you say “boring”?
Some forms of process-based change are like that. A successful life is being a one-trick pony, over and over? Yuck.
One of the cool things about what has happened to ACT as it has become a full-blown process-based approach is that we learned that, say, emotional flexibility was not just about acceptance; it was also about non-clinging. Cognitive flexibility was not just about defusion; it was also about the generation of new and more useful thoughts. Yeah, that was always there—but it wasn’t emphasized.
Beware of models that teach a small set of skills and then stop. What if they don’t fit your needs? What if you need more moves than that? It’s fine to try narrower “one size fits all” methods—but only if you keep moving on.
Bad Idea #4: You can assess a person’s moves with a few snapshots.
A dance unfolds. Dances are not static things. You can’t just take a snapshot (or two or three) and understand a dance—you need to see it flow over time and in different combinations or situations. And even if you took many snapshots, you cannot use them to tell you if the moves are smooth or jerky; if they were sensitive to the partner’s moves or not; or if they took advantage of the surface of the street in our dance parade or fought against it.
In psychology, we have these things called “questionnaires” that are built on the false belief that if they are good enough you can give them once (IQ tests or personality tests, for example), or just a few times (pre-, post-, and follow-up measures of anxiety, for example) and they will tell you the moves of this particular person.
“Just ask my one set of questions once or a couple of times and you know all you need to know,” they say. I come from that psychometric tradition, but I believe it is based on a fundamental and irreparable statistical error that is over a century old but only a tiny portion of psychologists even know what it is.
I’ve written about it before so I will not do it now, but if Dr. Magic is selling you this awesome “just take it once” questionnaire to determine the moves you need to learn, or to allow a therapist to deliver to you, just walk away. It will not work. Moves unfold over time and circumstances and they need to be assessed that way. And they need to fit you. One size fits none.
Bad Idea #5: The best way to know your best moves is to compare yourself to others.
What if you met someone who wanted to evaluate your ability to dance? Their idea was to take a single snapshot as you danced and then run around doing the same thing to 100 other random people on the street, trying to be sure they ended up with a balanced group of people of different ages, sexes, backgrounds, sizes, and shapes. Then they’d carefully measure, say, the angle of the arms, hands, neck, and torso in every snapshot and tell you if your moves were average or otherwise. Would you believe that this strange person now understood your moves and could appreciate your skill as a dancer?
Of course you wouldn’t! It’s idiotic.
Incredibly, I’d guess that more than 90 percent of psychological research is based on this sort of dumb idea. It began with Francis Galton and continues to the present day. OK, maybe the researcher might take two to three snapshots (but usually not), or even two or three 30-second movie clips (even rarer). But the basic model is the same: We will know you by treating you as an error term varying around what is usual in an arbitrary collective (think means and standard deviations). Sigh. No, you won’t.
A far, far better idea is to look at one dancer over many times, places, and circumstances. Learn to evaluate their moves and how they all work together. Then do another dancer, Then another.
When you’ve done that 100 times, only then see if you can catch anything you missed by comparing the dancers instead of just looking one at a time. If you think you do see something, add it in, but keep it only if you now understand most of the dancers a little better, each one considered at a time. Otherwise, throw it out. We call this approach “idionomics” and it is what modern process-based approaches are gradually becoming based on.
Learning How to Learn
If you as a consumer apply these five bad ideas to people who are trying to be your dance instructor (that is, your therapists, podcasters, self-help book writers, bloggers, YouTube influencers, and the like) you can avoid some pretty bad training.
By now, you might want to know what the good ideas for change are. The generic answer is to be clear on your needs and yearnings, and then try different things, keeping those moves that work, and getting better at fitting them to the situation you are in. (Need more? This paper looks at everything we know about how change happens based on four decades of work and examining the entire world’s literature of processes of change.)
The dance of life is empowered by learning how to be, and when not to be, more emotional and cognitively open; more attentive to what is present in a flexible way, guided by a deeper more “spiritual” sense of self; and more actively engaged in what brings meaning and purpose into your life and building healthy habits around that. It’s also about extending those moves to your relationships and culture, and your own body, so as to more effectively meet your needs and yearnings in a way that fits your opportunities.
And how do you do that? That too is my life’s work, but it is for another day. Meanwhile, recognizing and avoiding these five bad ideas is the first move to learn.