Starting from where you are at: how to integrate ACT and other Contextual Behavioural Principles into your work.

Aisling is a chartered counselling psychologist and Peer Reviewed ACT Trainer. She is co-director of ACT Now Purposeful Living and Senior Psychologist at ADHD Ireland. Aisling teaches about ACT and working with gender, sexual and neuro minorities on a number of Masters and Doctorate programmes across the fields of psychology, psychotherapy and coaching. She has led trainings on these topics internationally for over a decade. Aisling co-authored The Power of Small, an ACT self-help book, a number one best-seller in non-fiction in Ireland, that has been translated into four languages. She co-edited Mindfulness and Acceptance for Gender and Sexual Minorities. Aisling has provided clinical input and supervision for research in the areas of ACT for addictions, practitioners competencies in working with sexual minorities, ACT for adolescents, online ACT for anxiety, ACT for those with Parkinson’s Disease and their loved ones, ACT-based psychoeducation for adult ADHD. Aisling is herself a sexual and neuro minority and is passionate about making ACT accessible to all, particularly those who are members of marginalized or frequently stigmatized groups. Aisling lives with her wife and cats in rural Wexford, Ireland surrounded by trees, a river and close to the sea. She loves to improvise, sing, write, spend quality time with her nearest and dearest and be in nature.

About David Gillanders, DClinPsychol:

David is Head of Clinical Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, where he provides subject leadership, department management, teaching and research. His primary teaching focus is training others to deliver Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. His research investigates psychological flexibility as an influential factor across a broad range of areas, including ACT interventions for IBS, diverse chronic health problems, cancer, transition to palliative care, and staff wellbeing in palliative care services. He has extensive experience in applying ACT with people with long term health conditions, supervising therapists and providing ACT based coaching for health professionals. He is a Fellow of ACBS and a Peer Reviewed ACT Trainer. David is also a husband, and a father of three, practices karate and loves to sing. Like all human beings, his mind can get in his way, he is not a model of perfect behaviour AND we are all works in progress, right ?

Following this workshop participants will be able to:

1. Describe the functional contextual perspective that underlies ACT (i.e., ACT's philosophy recognizes that the purpose of any behavior varies for individual clients across contexts).
2. Apply functional behavioural principles to themselves and others.
3. Provide an overview of the ACT model and its core components.
4. Explain the ACT model of Open, Aware and Engaged from the inside.
5. Demonstrate mindfulness-based skills that enable clients to make more informed and empowered choices towards what matters most to them.
6. Apply values work personally and professionally to create meaningful, sustainable change.
7. Describe how to integrate ACT and functional contextual principles and methods within existing ways of working, making these principles accessible and relevant to your work and your diverse client groups.
8. Demonstrate some of the skills needed to cultivate acceptance of unwanted internal experiences.
9. Demonstrate the skill of delivering experiential exercises and ways of talking that model, evoke and reinforce Psychological Flexibility in others.
10. Utilise a range of experiential ways of working that will allow you and your clients to identify moves that bring you closer toward and further away from who and where you want to be, recognizing the costs and benefits of both, to find a sustainable path forward for positive change.