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

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

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

Workshop Leaders: 
Aisling Leonard-Curtin, M.Sc., C.Psychol., Ps.S.I.
David Gillanders, DClinPsychol
**** UPDATE, 10 July, 2023, please note that due to a family emergency, Aisling Leonard-Curtin will not be co-presenting this workshop in Nicosia, Cyprus.  David Gillanders will present this workshop.****
 
Monday, 24 July 2023 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.
Tuesday, 25 July 2023 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.
(12 total contact hours) 
 
Workshop Description:
 
When learning a new approach, we bring with us everything that we have already learned. This includes all of our past experiences, all of the ideas, concepts and skills we already know. In this workshop we want to make a space where every part of you is welcomed, leave nothing at the door! We start from where you are at, and introduce you to some ideas and practices, that will get you started on your journey into Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Training, or Coaching and the broader field of Contextual Behavioral Science.
 
This workshop will help you to understand what you are already doing that is consistent with this approach, what you are doing that may be less consistent, and how you could tweak those things to become more consistent (if you want to). The workshop will be guided by the metaphor of Head, Hands and Heart: the knowledge and concepts, the skills and techniques that you will see modelled and have a chance to practice yourself, and importantly the experiential embodied felt sense of ACT. These are the practitioner’s qualities of psychological flexibility; of being present, open and committed to a valued path, even in the presence of external and internal barriers.
 
We will further explore how you can integrate ACT processes into your existing way(s) of working with your clients, helping you to identify when clients are engaging in actions that are bringing them further away from who and where they want to be; when they're closed off, disconnected, and disengaged. By learning ACT from the inside, this workshop will help you to start or continue the journey from wherever you are at and bring with you everything that you already are. Our focus will be on learning how to apply these methods and ideas in your own context, whether that is psychology, psychotherapy, behaviour change, coaching, training, occupational, healthcare or educational settings. We will also provide the space and opportunity for you to experientially contact the evidence-based ACT skills necessary to increase your own and your clients’ psychological flexibility, enabling you and them to live a rich and meaningful life of vitality.
 
About Aisling Leonard-Curtin, M.Sc., C.Psychol., Ps.S.I.: 

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.
     

Target Audience: Beginner

Components: Conceptual analysis, Experiential exercises, Didactic presentation, Case presentation, Role play

Package Includes: A general certificate of attendance

CEs Available (12 hours): CEs for Psychologists
staff_1