Better Living Through Psychology

Developing Mastery In ACT

At the 3rd Australia-New Zealand Conference for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, I presented a talk on Developing Mastery in ACT. I’m using this page so you can find all the resources I either provided to people at the talk or or used in writing it, as well as articles and books I referred to. If any of the links below are ‘unclickable’ it means I have not yet uploaded the material. If they do click, but send you to the wrong place or don’t open the file you expected, please email me so I can fix the problem.

Here is an audio recording of the presentation: part 1 (32Mb) and part 2 (33 Mb).

And here are the slides.

And here’s the written text of the presentation (hopefully including all references – I’m writing this blog page BEFORE I complete the presentation, so you may see this before I have had a chance to finish writing it!). Please excuse the ‘conversational’ tone, but I didn’t write this as a journal article.

Books

Firstly, Learning ACT by Luoma, Hayes and Walser is a book I would regard as essential for anybody who is serious about, well, learning ACT. If you join or form supervision group as I suggested in the presentation, you can use this book to guide the content and format of your sessions.

Anders Ericsson’s masterful Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance assembles research and authoritative writings on the theories, research methods, domains and mechanisms of expertise development and maintenance. But be warned – it’s comprehensive and big – you’ll be an expert on expertise by the time you finish this!

If the Cambridge Handbook doesn’t fit your bookshelf, or reading it doesn’t fit your schedule, try Geoff Colvin’s Talent Is Overrated. It’s probably a bonus for some of you that he is coming at this from a business point of view, because it means he has included a couple of chapters on innovation and developing expertise in organisations.

Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat explains the impact of globalization and technology that have facilitated outsourcing and offshoring on both product and service-based industries – not including psychotherapy, yet!

Keep Calm and Carry On is a book that developed from a World War II era poster. I think that little phrase both encapsulates the essence of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and captures the most admirable traits of Englishness – stoicism, cheerfulness and determination. Some of the quotations in the book appeared during the presentation. The story of the poster by the way is that it was never actually issued to the public during World War II, but the Ministry of Information commissioned it in 1939 for use in the case of invasion. I like that you can also get a paradoxical version of the same message.

Articles

Due to copyright restrictions, I can’t post copies of the articles I referenced here, but if you recall any that I haven’t mentioned in the text of the presentation (see link to it above), email me and I will find and send you my copy.

Videos

Some of these are from YouTube, some are commercial movies, and the clips we practised with are from Kelly Wilson’s Mindfulness For Two or from the series ACT In Action.

Here’s the NFL Fantasy Team advertisment including the clip of Mason Crosby. And for Australian Football League aficionados, the amazing Daniel Motlop’s “bananas”.

The movies I mentioned in the presentation were Freaky Friday, Wall.E and Blade Runner.

Handouts

You can get my 56-item version of the ACT Core Competency Session Rating Form here as a Word document. Other versions are available in the Learning ACT book, and at www.contextualpsychology.org.

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