1. Anxiety Coaching With Acceptance
We try to control everything. There isn’t anything wrong with that, it’s just one of those things that is a natural tendency to do as human beings. We want to be able to clearly see every outcome and to get there exactly how we imagined it in our mind. This is where anxiety coaching can be really helpful.
And we also want to prevent outcomes we don’t want and try to control life in this way too. AUnfortunately, life does not work like this. It would be nice if we had the ability to control everything. To get exactly what we want in the way that we want it. But we can’t.
Sure we can control some things and that is good – having a sense of agency is mega important. What’s also important is learning how to accept things when they are not controllable and this is what an anxiety coach can help you do.
Wanting to control everything, more often than not, leads to an abundance of anxiety. It leads to worrying constantly over every small thing. It can make you feel shamed and upset when you feel as if you made a mistake because something didn’t happen in the way that you thought it would.
If you are wanting to stop this cycle of (over) control, it’s time to start accepting that control is almost impossible to achieve. One type of approach to therapy and used in life coaching as well, is known as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or ACT. Act is a great anti-control pro accepting anxiety coaching and anxiety therapy method. .
2. What Is Acceptance And Commitment Therapy (ACT)?
Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is a type of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) which also happens to be great for anxiety coaching. This newer approach to helping clients with a variety of mental health and just living life issues. Even though it is relatively new, it does not mean that it is any less effective. ACT is considered a Third Wave Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
In 1980, a psychologist and professor by the name of Steven C. Hayes developed ACT. Hayes thought of his own struggles with panic attacks and wanted to find a better way to help himself and others free themselves from anxiety. He made a promise that he would accept himself for who he was and the experiences that brought him to his present moment.
How Does ACT (Acceptance And Commitment Therapy / Anxiety Coaching Work?
ACT is a type of therapy that focuses on developing and expanding flexibility with the psyche. Psychological flexibility is the idea that by keeping yourself emotionally open, you can change your thoughts and behaviors. This will allow you to better align both of these things with the values and goals that you have for yourself.
With the help of your therapist, you are taught to listen how you talk to yourself. How do you speak to yourself about your past trauma, troubled relationships, or your limitations that you face? What are the repetitive and unhelpful (anxiety driven) thoughts? How can you learn to be your own anxiety coach and work with these thoughts by learning to accept them and take actions to feel good in spite of these thoughts?
From there, the focus is on each of these specific situations. Can you change anything about them? Will a specific action, on your part, change what is happening there? If the answer is no, then you are in the beginning steps of accepting what you can’t change.
It really can be that simple. This is why I love helping clients learn how to implement anxiety coaching into their lives.
3. How Does ACT Help With Anxiety And Worry?
When you have anxiety, you are equally stuck in the past as much as you are in the future. You are worrying and remembering every past mistake you made. Every instance where something went wrong. When these things happen, you naturally try to counteract that by wanting to control as much as possible. To prevent yourself from feeling the way you did before.
But it never quite works like that. Because while we can learn from our mistakes and what went wrong, it doesn’t really mean we have the ability to control the future. Instead, what happens, is we become so fixated on the control that we become easily overwhelmed.
Making this even worse is when we know how anxious we are about everything. And so we become anxious about being anxious and then we just repeat this cycle of doom. It’s time to learn anxiety coaching and stop this (accept this) once and for all. Your life awaits.
ACT can teach you to let go of the control. To accept anxiety for what it is – a natural part of the human experience, which every single human being on the planet has at some point. We all wish we didn’t have to deal with anxiety. But it’s programmed into our DNA as a response to stress.
Anxiety is actually good for us, but not when it becomes habituated as the auto-pilot response to life. Anxiety is meant to help us handle emergencies, but when every single thing in life gets treated like an emergency, anxiety is out of control and our lives (and relationships, including the one we have with ourself) suffers.
4. How Anxiety Coaching With ACT Works
- Accepting your anxious thoughts without trying to avoid them or change them.
- Creating a mental distance from the stressful thoughts and feelings you have by trying to change how you react to them. This is done by paying attention to the thought you have and then seeing how your body responds to it.
- Staying present in the moment
- Accepting your identity beyond what your thoughts, emotions, and experiences are
- Setting values for yourself based on what you want. Not the expectations of others or as a way to not repeat the past.
- Setting things in motion, by creating changes that you want that align directly the values and goals you have set.
ACT is a simple type of mindfulness therapy / anxiety coaching method that can have fantastic results, in a relatively short period of time.
I am a Board Certified Coach (BCC Coach), a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in Hawaii and an Accredited CBT Therapist and Psychotherapist in the UK with over 16 years of experience. I have received advanced specialist training in Coaching, Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Compassion Focused Therapy.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Life coaching for anxiety can help you tame the anxiety monster and start living the life you have always wanted, please reach out to me at my Honolulu or London office to set up an Online Coaching Test Drive or click to learn more about my life coaching services.
