'FEEL THE FEAR AND DO IT ANYWAY'
Susan Jeffers
Take ACTion
Acceptance and Commitment
My approach is based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy / Training/Coaching (ACT). The aim of ACT is to develop more resilience, making it easier to deal with challenges and problems in your life. We all suffer with all kinds of feelings like anger, anxiety, gloom or not helping thoughts, like I'm nog good enough and find it difficult to adapt to changes we encounter in our lives. The challenge is to see the feelings and thoughts as they are: as a thought or a feeling and nothing more. From this accepting and down-to-earth attitude, you then work on dealing with the difficulties and the goals you want to achieve guided by your core values. ACT helps people doing this through attention to acceptance, values, mindfulness, and committed action.
ACT in a nutshell
ACT is an experiential therapy / coaching form / training that offers tools to accept what you cannot change and do what is possible and important to you. ACT assumes that worrying, working too hard, withdrawing, being too busy with your health, for example, is not problematic. It can cause you to get stuck and have little space left for things that matter to you. ACT teaches you how to deal (personal resilience) with all the inconveniences you encounter on your life path and ensures that you gain insight into what is really important and meaningful to you (your values). You use the skills you develop to lead yourself (personal leadership), to inspire and motivate and to take ACTions that enrich your life. International research shows that ACT makes people mentally more flexible and vital. ACT can be used for a multitude of complaints (including depression, stress / burnout, anxiety, ocd, addiction, smoking, chronic pain, eating problems, psychosis). This underlines ACT as a transdiagnostic therapy/coach form.
The 6 building blocks
The six building blocks of ACT are:
Acceptance: opening up and making room for unwanted private experiences: thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations.... instead of running from them.
Defusion: To 'step back' and separate or detaching from your thoughts, images, and memories so that they affect you less quickly.
Contact with present moment: consciously feeling what is in the present moment.
Self as context: Creating a different, more flexible relationship with yourself.
Values: Discovering what really matters to you in life; how you want to behave on an ongoing basis.
Committed Action: taking effective actions guided by your core values.