Your Metaphorical Toolkit Helps You Lead With Values!

Hello there CBT School Family!

I am excited to share another episode of Your Anxiety Toolkit Podcast with you, in which I focus on your metaphorical toolkit – the box or belt in which you hold tools and ideas to help you live your best life.  Each week, I try my hardest to bring you at least one new tool for you to add to your toolkit, in hope that these skills will help you better manage anxiety, panic, and other difficult thoughts, feelings, and sensations. 

Don’t miss the most recent podcast episode! 

You can listen to the episode for FREE on iTunes HERE

You can listen to the episode for FREE on Stitcher HERE

You can listen to the episode for FREE streaming HERE

I love to picture myself slowing handing you one tool after another that you grab onto and carefully pack into your toolkit or tool belt, so that you feel prepared to tackle each day, with or without anxiety.

What I really want you to take from this podcast, the most important thing to understand is that carrying a tool belt/toolkit/toolbox is a choice.  You will join me for a weekly discussion about recovery and living your best life while having anxiety and add these new skills to your toolkit by choice.  You do not have to add to your toolkit, let alone carry the toolkit around.  A lot of people choose not to.  However, you do.  Choosing to better your life is pretty cool if you ask me.

These tools that I speak of and pass along to you are mindfulness skills.  The place that you hold these tools, your metaphorical toolkit, is your values.  If you are making an effort to better yourself every day, you clearly value your wellbeing.  This is a value that you stand by and hold dear to your heart.  You value your quality of life.  You value your recovery.  You value yourself.  By using these tools, you are contributing to your value-based living.

Values are incredibly important to our recovery. However, sometimes fear can overwhelm us, make decisions for us, and stomp all over our values.  Sometimes fear can lead us away from our values and our toolkit, and towards problematic behavior—such as compulsions—that are harmful to our recovery.  Compulsions—such as checking, counting, avoidance, reassurance seeking, and mental rumination—feed this fear and make it worse.  Fear can also get in the way of the love we have for ourselves by leading us towards anger and saying mean things to ourselves.

In this podcast, we discuss identifying our values and leading with them by using the tools in your metaphorical toolkit. I focus heavily on concepts from Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT), which is a very effective treatment modality that beautifully compliments Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP).

I hope you find it helpful and that your toolkit grows even larger!

If you want to learn more about mindfulness for OCD, click here for information about our online course.

Forward we go,

Kimberley