ACT with Efficacy: ACT for Brief and Solution-Focused Therapists
If you just completed the October 2011 ACT with Efficacy, get your slides, notes, references and the CPD assessment questionnaire by clicking here.
Transfer your Brief and Solution-Focused Therapy skills into a comprehensive empirically-tested model
Dates: Next programs are scheduled for March 2012. To be notified of the next workshop, click here [link not live yet, so come back to this page in a week or so.] 
Venue: Northcote Town Hall, 187 High St Northcote
Fee: $325
Find out more and get your questions answered - click here.
If you need a paper registration form click here. If you need an invoice, click here.
The ACT model combines therapist creativity with a solid theoretical and philosophical foundation to provide efficacious methods for enriching and enhancing the experience and life of client and therapist. Many of its techniques will be familiar to solution-focused therapists (e.g. Miracle Question, scaling, small changes). Others will be quite different to what is usually taught in BSFT. However, ACT is not technique-dependent. You will find that you can bring many of your solution-focused (and Narrative, and Motivational Interviewing…) skills and work effectively with them inside the ACT model. This workshop will teach you how.
What you will do in the workshop
You will have the opportunity to practise ACT skills and exercises as both client and therapist,
you will learn to understand the ACT philosophy and the logic of the model so that you will know when and how to apply specific BSFT methods and you will learn how to develop further as an ACT therapist.
The activities in the workshop will be at least 40% experiential comprising:
- Experiencing ACT exercises as clients do
- Practising common ACT techniques in small groups
- Viewing live and video demonstrations of ACT processes and methods
- Getting stuck, dealing with being stuck and getting unstuck (ACT has a model for dealing with “stuck” therapy that is very different to any other therapeutic approach)
- Writing and reflecting on what matters to you in your practice
- Planning actions to ensure ongoing learning after the workshop
There will be written assessment for CPD purposes. To promote optimal learning, places in the workshop have been limited to 35.
Overview of the workshop
Morning Day 1: ACT-ing with purpose
- Understand how ACT works – the 6 core processes of ACT, including simple and brief ways to start them
- Recognise the breadth of applications for ACT – what issues and populations ACT has worked for
- Contact with the present- getting yourself and the client in the room
- Teaching mindfulness and present moment awareness as a skill
Afternoon Day 1: ACT now!
- Defusion skills – how to undermine the importance, believability and influence of troubling thoughts
- Acceptance skills – increasing compassion, dissolving problems, making room for problems and more
Morning Day 2: ACT yourself
- Self-as-context – changing the viewing of you and of your experiences, creating a self that is enough, choosing experience, consequences and assumptions for effective practice
- Using ACT on the therapist – connect more fully, remain engaged, deal with stuckness gracefully and effectively
Afternoon Day 2: ACT-ing Out – into the future
- Values – identifying a purpose, connecting with meaning
- Committed Action – taking life one step at a time, keeping going, dealing with barriers and setbacks
- Developing as an ACT therapist from here on
About your trainer
Julian McNally is a counselling psychologist in private practice. He trained in solution-oriented counselling and hypnosis in the 1990s with Rob McNeilly and used this approach extensively between 1995 and 2004. He presented sessions at the Association of Solution Oriented Counsellors and Hypnotherapists of Australia (ASOCHA) conferences in 1998 and 2003.
Julian started practising Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in 2004. He is a charter member of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science and a member of its Australia-New Zealand Chapter Committee. He ran the Melbourne ACT Peer Supervision Group between 2006-2008 and has completed ACT training with Steven Hayes, Russ Harris, Kelly Wilson, Robyn Walser, Kirk Strosahl and Kevin Polk. He presented “Developing Mastery in ACT” at the 2009 ACT Oceania Conference and the “ACT Embodied” workshop at the 2008 ACT Conference in Christchurch.
Questions about the workshop? Email act@julianmcnally.com or just ask in the Comments box below.
(Admin: See \”Settings\” in wp-admin to add questions.)
- Is there anything I need to read before the workshop?
- I need a GST invoice for my employer. OR I don’t want to use PayPal, how else can I pay?
- What about CPD (Continuing Professional Development) points?
Question: Is there anything I need to read before the workshop?
Answer:
Question: I need a GST invoice for my employer. OR I don’t want to use PayPal, how else can I pay?
Answer:
Question: What about CPD (Continuing Professional Development) points?
Answer:
For registered Medicare Better Access to Mental Health item providers, yes, this training will likely qualify as suitable training for Focussed Psychological Strategies. I can’t say that categorically, because Medicare doesn’t provide accreditation. Rather an audit system is conducted on practitioners’ training records. It is therefore up to each practitioner to ensure that they can show the PD activity is relevant to the purposes he/she is claiming it for.
The same applies to AHPRA Boards such as the Psychology Board of Australia.
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