The purpose of this exercise is to help you understand what ACT is, so our work together can progress efficiently. ACT research has uncovered exciting information about how your mind works in relation to your thinking about your goals. Since I use an ACT-based approach to my coaching, it’s important for you to understand some basic information about ACT. This will also help you understand how developing hardy emotional and intellectual health habits will help you realize your goals and live the life you dream of.
1. Read the material about ACT that I sent to you.
2. After reading the ACT material, write down your answers to these questions:
a. What are the four aspects of acceptance?
b. How does ACT view commitment?
c. What does ACT mean by the statement “Your brain is a 24/7 thinking and feeling machine”?
d. How do your past frames of reference influence your current thinking and your future plans?
e. Why are words and self-talk so important in ACT?
f. How do the common thinking and feeling traps contribute to your getting stuck?
3. Send this material to me, per our contract, by , so I can read it prior to our next session together.
4. Be prepared to discuss these things during our next session together.
5. I expect you to take this step seriously and give this activity your best effort. To help you move forward and meet your goals, you need to understand this basic information about ACT.
You can go through the information covered in this homework activity with your clients in different ways, depending on how you structure your practice. As mentioned, I have a virtual practice and have been teaching college classes online for a decade, so I am very com-fortable going through this information with the client online. I like to have clients submit their assignments to me, so that I can read them, make comments, and return them before we meet in person for the next session.
You might prefer to go through the client’s responses to the assignment with the client at the beginning of your next session. In that case you would download the client’s work, read it, and prepare written comments to discuss during the session. You can talk about your impressions of clients’ work without giving them written feedback, or you can give them written comments. If you are working face to face, you can hand clients their answers with your added comments. If you are working virtually, you can e-mail your comments once you are in session.
I think it’s important to give clients written feedback. I feel that written comments can be extremely helpful down the line, after your formal work with the client is over. Clients can refer to the work they did with you without having to rely on memory. I think this is a values-added component of your work with them you can use to help market your practice.
Regardless of how you process this information, remember, the key aspect of step 2 is to make sure clients have a clear understanding of what ACT is and how you plan to use ACT principles and practices to help them meet their goals and live the lives they dream of.
I am a firm believer in setting high expectations for students and clients and having them rise to these levels. I like to state actual expectations (see the fifth step), because it lets clients know I will follow through in reviewing their work. Using expectations has been proven empirically to increase adherence to instructions (Blonna, Loschiavo, &
Watter, 2010). When you give homework assignments and do not cite them as expectations, clients often blow them off, viewing them as optional instead of required components of their
coaching plans. When this happens, they are unprepared for the work you want to do in your next session and are unable to move forward without wasting valuable session time covering content that could have been handled virtually. This can be frustrating for coaches and clients, and it can become very expensive for clients because more session time will be devoted to learning content instead of applying it to reaching their goals.
Step 3: Assess Values
As you’ve seen from reading this book, having clients clarify their values is a key step in using an ACT approach to coaching. Everything in ACT revolves around the client’s values.
In most cases, clients get stuck because something’s going on in their lives revolving around a values conflict. For example, if Mary comes to you because she wants to change careers and is not sure how to proceed, her career shift is more than likely rooted in some value she holds about work or one of the other areas discussed in chapter 4. It might have to do with her feeling that her current job does not give her the earning potential she seeks, the creative outlet she craves, or the intellectual growth potential she requires for career satisfac-tion. All three of these issues—earning potential, creativity, and intellectual growth—are things she values.
Once again I recommend teaching this material to clients by giving them homework exercises and reading assignments. As you saw in chapter 4, there’s a lot of material to cover, so explain to your clients that since values clarification is a four-step process, you will give them exercises that are progressive and build on each other. I recommend having your clients read the material I’ve posted on the website (http://9318.nhpubs.com) related to values clarification. When they finish reading that material, have them do the three values exercises described in chapter 4: “Mindfulness Exercise: Sorting the Mail,” “Values Ranking and Defusion Exercise: Core vs. Satellite Values,” and “ACT-Based Values Clarification Exercise: Developing a Plan for Acting on Your Values.” Have them submit all three exer-cises and be ready to discuss them with you in the next live session.
After your clients have completed these three exercises, in your live sessions explain to them that you will help them examine how the values they just clarified relate to the goals they want to work on with you. Explain to them how they are much more likely to meet their goals if their goals truly reflect their values. If you remember from chapter 4, people often get stuck because they have a conflict between their goals and their values.
Step 4: Set Clear Goals and Measurable Objectives
Now that you’ve laid the foundation for understanding ACT and how it ties into your client’s values, you can get back the goals your client originally stated in your initial session and examine how your client’s values and goals mesh. If there’s a mismatch between clients’
values and goals, they might have to reformulate their goals, which is something you need to discuss with them, since values mismatches almost always result in conflict and getting stuck.
Past relational frames play a big part in values clarification. Your clients want to cling to things they value from the past, even if they no longer work for them in the present. Clients usually do not realize they are doing this until they work on values clarification. One of your jobs as a coach is to tell clients it’s normal to want to cling to things that are familiar and comfortable, but real growth often means giving up things that no longer work and no longer represent who you are as a person. This is why ACT, a values-based approach to helping, works so well for coaches.
In addition to going over this material, you now want to tighten up clients’ goals and craft measurable objectives that will act as their stepping-stones to success. While goals can be lofty and hard to measure, objectives must be concrete and answer the question Who will do how much of what, by when? Have your clients complete the exercise from chapter 5, titled “Setting Values-Based Goals and Objectives.”
After your clients have completed this exercise, in the next live session explain to them that you will periodically review their progress in meeting the objectives they set for reach-ing their goals. If they’ve written them correctly, all of their objectives should include a time frame. Explain to them that it’s okay if they decide to change the time frames or to add or delete objectives. While goals and objectives help give people’s lives structure and help them clarify their values, they should also be flexible enough to adapt to changes. Explain to clients that as their coach, you will help keep them motivated to do the work involved in meeting their goals and objectives, and help them readjust them when necessary.
Step 5: Give Up Control and Take Committed Action
If you remember from chapter 7, in addition to getting hooked by the six factors of psychological inflexibility and the ten common thinking and feeling traps, clients often
get hooked by attempts to control things that can’t be controlled. Step 5 revolves around teaching clients what they can and cannot control. In addition, it is devoted to showing clients how their efforts to avoid, control, or eliminate things that can’t be controlled keep them stuck and unable to meet their goals and live the lives they dream about. Step 5 teaches them the nuts and bolts of acceptance and willingness, and it teaches them how to take committed action toward achieving their goals while bringing their troubling thoughts and painful emotions along for the ride.
This step involves a lot of new ideas and concepts, so it’s important to stress to your clients the significance of reading the material you give them and having you clarify any-thing they do not understand. Tell them you expect them to do the reading assignments and come prepared to discuss them at your next session together. Clients need to buy into the notion that giving up trying to control the things that are beyond their control is the key to getting unstuck and moving forward. To this end, I recommend having clients com-plete the following two exercises from chapter 7: “Willingness Exercise: The MP3 Player”
and “Acceptance and Willingness Exercise: I Am Willing to Accept .”
Taken together, these two exercises illustrate the relationships among control, acceptance, and willingness, and they teach clients valuable skills they can use to get unstuck and move toward their goals.
After your clients have completed these exercises and their readings, describe to them the relationship between giving up control and becoming more accepting and how this will help them get unstuck and move in the right direction to meet their goals. Explain to them that this will be difficult to put into practice, especially if they are like a lot of highly moti-vated and successful people who like to be in control of as many things as possible. Explain to them that as an ACT-based coach, you will help them realize when they are reverting to their old unaccepting, controlling ways, and you will help them get back on track.
Step 6: Use Defusion to Get Unstuck
The last thing you need to do as an ACT-based coach is help your clients learn how to use defusion techniques to get unstuck when their overactive minds take them places that are unhelpful in meeting their goals. This is probably entirely new territory for most of them, so be patient and make sure they understand the concepts covered in the reading assignments.
Start by assigning reading about attachment to the conceptualized self and defusion, from this book or from Stress Less, Live More (Blonna, 2010). Have clients pay particular attention to the common thinking and feeling traps, because they represent the active mind at work and how it directly contributes to getting stuck. Focusing on these traps really crys-tallizes for clients how the mind works in real situations and how it can cause psychological inflexibility. I recommend assigning the following defusion exercises as homework assign-ments: “The Whiteboard” (chapter 2), “Take Off Those Asthma-Colored Glasses” (chapter 3), “My Lineup Photo” (chapter 3), “Rethinking Permanence” (chapter 5), and “A New Me”
(chapter 5). These exercises capture the essence of how clients get hooked by unhelpful things their minds tell them about themselves.
After clients have completed all of these exercises, explain to them that in time and with practice, they can learn how to defuse from the unhelpful thoughts, personal scripts, mental images, and emotions that stand in the way of meeting their goals and living a purposeful life.