In The Willingness Muscle, the second book in a series of creative stress management workbooks, you learn how to practice proven mindfulness skills, which you can use to live a more rich, full, meaningful life. As a mindfulness-based program for stress reduction based on more than 20 years of research and practice at some of the best hospitals in the United States, such as the Hospitals of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan Medical Center, and the US Department of Veteran's Affairs, you will learn to cope with stress using proven mindfulness, acceptance, and behavior change strategies. These mindfulness-based techniques will allow you to change your behavior - without first changing or eliminating your thoughts and feelings. This is an important difference between our book and many other self-help books. Unfortunately, this belief (e.g., you must change your thoughts before you change your behavior) is a common error many make, which obstructs and obscures your ability to recognize positive results. In contrast, our focus here is on learning and practicing only the most useful, helpful, effective coping strategies, which work for you in the long-term.

To do so, we recommend that you build nine core skills, your starting repertoire, which help you build a special awareness - that you have a choice when you are under stress: you can come back to the present moment, here, or stay in the past or future, there. Practice exercises are provided to help you learn and apply a broad range of different mindful-creative exercises and meditations:

• Concentrative meditations
• Creative meditations
• Grounding and centering meditations
• Heart-centered meditations
• Mantras
• Mindfulness meditations
• Movement meditations
• Reflective meditations, and
• Visual meditations

The exercises, many written as poems by author and poet, Audrey Hall, MSW, LCSW, provide a rich tapestry of metaphors images and stories to highlight this topic in a fun and accessible fashion. The poems are followed by reflective questions to challenge you, inspire you, and outline concrete steps you can take to bring these insights into your everyday life. A self-survey is included, which you can use to help assess, monitor, and systematically measure your progress. The survey provides a professional, statistical reliable and valid measure of your skills. Each question on the survey was certified by a renowned statistics institute and determined to have significant impact. Using the survey, you are encouraged to chart your progress and recognize the gains you have made from beginning to end.