ACT-informed coaching: working with the thoughts you cannot switch off

A finance director has been offered the CEO role. She wants it. Every time she imagines saying yes, a sentence arrives: you will be found out. She has tried arguing with it, ignoring it and replacing it with affirmations. It keeps coming back, and she is now delaying her answer.

Most coaching would treat that sentence as the problem and look for ways to get rid of it. Acceptance and Commitment Coaching takes a different route. It assumes the sentence may stay, and asks what she wants to do with her life while it is there.

Where it comes from

ACT (said as one word, "act") was developed by the psychologist Steven Hayes with Kirk Strosahl and Kelly Wilson, first as a therapy in the 1980s and 1990s. It grew out of behaviour analysis and a theory of language called Relational Frame Theory. The central idea is that human suffering is made worse by a very normal habit: we treat our thoughts as literal descriptions of reality, and then we organise our lives around avoiding the uncomfortable ones.

Coaches picked the model up because the habit is just as common in healthy, high-functioning people. A leader who avoids a hard conversation because of the anxiety it brings is doing the same thing as anyone else. The cost shows up in their choices, long before it shows up in their health.

Psychological flexibility

The goal in ACT is psychological flexibility: the ability to notice what you are thinking and feeling, without being run by it, and still act on what matters to you. The model breaks this into six processes. Two of them do most of the work in coaching.

The first is defusion: seeing a thought as a thought. "I will be found out" is a string of words the mind produces under pressure. It may or may not be true, and either way it does not have to make the decision.

The second is values: what the client wants to stand for, described as a direction rather than a target. Values give the client a reason to tolerate discomfort. Without them, acceptance turns into resignation.

The other four (acceptance, present-moment awareness, self-as-context and committed action) support these two. A coach does not need to name any of them in the session.

What it looks like in the room

The coach does not dispute the thought or reassure the client. The questions invite the client to step back and look at the thought, and then at what matters:

What does your mind tell you when you picture saying yes?

How long has that voice been with you?

What has it cost you to follow it?

What would you like this role to be about, if that voice were allowed to come along?

What is one thing you would do this week if you were acting on that?

The client stays in charge of the meaning. The coach's job is to slow the moment down so the client can see the gap between the thought and the action, and choose what goes into it.

What the research says

Rachael Skews tested ACT-informed coaching in her doctoral work at Goldsmiths, University of London, completed in 2018. In a randomised controlled trial with 126 senior managers from the UK Civil Service, coached participants improved on mental health, self-efficacy, goal-directed thinking and goal attainment compared with a waitlist group. Psychological flexibility mediated those changes. In a further study, the working alliance between coach and client did not.

That last result is worth reading twice. Much of the coaching literature puts the relationship at the centre. Skews' data suggest that in this approach the mechanism is the client's changed relationship with their own inner experience. The relationship makes the work possible, but it is not what produces the change.

For leaders and organizations

ACT fits organizational coaching well because leaders rarely lack information. They know what the strategy says and what the board expects. What gets in the way is usually avoidance: a meeting not called, a decision deferred, a conversation softened until it means nothing.

With a senior team, the same questions work at group level:

What are we avoiding as a team right now?

What does that avoidance protect us from?

What would we do differently if we let that discomfort be part of the work?

The finance director took the role. The sentence still visits her before board meetings. She notices it, and goes in anyway.