Learn Acceptance and
Commitment Therapy

Hi, I'm Ric and thanks for checking out the Navigating ACT online couse. I work as a Clinical Psychologist and Supervisor in Australia and have journeyed with ACT since about 2010. This project has been about 3 years in the making but the foundations were laid long before back when I started work as a psychologist. In the early days, I quickly felt that the tools I was taught were, at best, helping with symptom reduction, but weren't effective to produce lasting and meaningful change in the lives of my clients. I found that the lense I had aquired from my training to see my clients through seemed distorted and missed the 'human experience' of pain. I would often come home to my wife and express a sense of confusion and disatisfaction about the effectiveness about what i was doing....Enter ACT. My first ACT training opened up my perspectives on human pain and suffering and gave me a new lens to look through. It gave me a refined set of tools and direction to work with clients that just made intuitive sense. I didn't need to keep racking my brain trying to work out which DSM category my clients fit best into. Instead, I could understand their experience indivudally and functionally. ACT was like something I always knew, on some level, but didn't have the words or the model for. It gave me a framework to consider any of my clients...and not just to understand their presentation, but to discern a pathway to actually make meaningful changes in their life. I worked using ACT intensively in private practices throughout Sydney for many years and completed various trainings under Russ Harris, Steven Hayes and others. I later developed an ACT-based retreat program in the sunshine coast which I ran for 3 years which continues to run today; helping people within a more intensive and focussed format rather than the usual 'hourly sessions on a weekly or fortnightly basis'. At this point I became a board approved supervisor and started to find that my supervisees were having a similarly refreshing experience to what I had when they started learning ACT. Nevertheless I felt that the current of 'protocols for syndromes' approach echoed strongly in psychology today (fundamentally relying on diagnostic labels to 'prescribe' interventions) was strongly influencing the minds of developing psychologists who weren't aware of other perspectives. I really wanted to contribute and do my part to share what I have learned about ACT in a condensed program on this intuitive, human, and relevant approach to understanding human pain and suffering...Out of this was born the Navigating ACT project. In starting out on this project, I reached out to some of the pioneers and key trainers in ACT such as Steven Hayes, Kelly Wilson and Robyn Walser, whom I had learned ACT from, and was truly humbled by the willingness of not just one of them, but ALL of them that I invited to support this project by adding some rich content to this program. It's this character of the pioneers, who I believe are outstanding intellectuals holding prestigious positions or having made significant achievements in their careers, yet none of them above doing this work on themselves, and being willing to support this project. This is the quality I saw in the ACT community from the outset and a quality I hope to now reflect in this training and my ongoing work. So whether you are new to ACT or have a bit of experience with it, I hope this course can offer you new insights and angles as well as practical tools to continue your journey personally and professionally in all you do. As Steve Hayes describes, the 6 processes or ACT are best understood as 6 faces of a cube; each side needs to be strong for it to stand, and when you apply weight to one side, it naturally leans on the other sides. In this course my hope is to share ACT in this way, to help you see it not as 6 separate processes, but to show how each process is intimately related to the others - I hope it comes accross! Thank you for the opportunity to share my journey thus far with you in this course - NAVIGATING ACT.