How to Structure a Great ACT Training
From the Email Bag
The first ACT training I ever presented—outside of work sponsored staff trainings—attracted exactly four participants. It was a 6-hour introduction to ACT, and it was BAD. Just awful.
I got good feedback on it from the participants, but trust me. It was no good. Everyone has to start somewhere, though, right?
I’ve always been interested in providing training to other clinicians, and prior to starting my own workshops I was obsessive when it came to attending other ACT trainings, from the most introductory workshops to the most advanced training. I wanted to learn from everybody. The content wasn’t what I was too interested in, it was the presentation style, the exercises chosen, and the time structure of the events that I was taking notes on.
I wanted to learn what made a good training good.
Over the years since I have been providing more regular ACT workshops I often get emails from people asking for tips and other information for setting up presentations. I enjoy helping people structure a workshop and come up with ideas that differentiate their trainings from everyone else.
The number one trick that I’ve discovered to help structure an ACT training is to think about your allotted time in minutes rather than hours.
By the Minute
Let’s say you are presenting a 1.5 hour training to a group of people with absolutely no exposure to ACT.
What elements of the ACT model would be the most important to get across?
The six-core processes?
RFT?
Creative hopelessness?
And what about experiential exercises?
Let’s say that you want to go over the six-core processes of the Hexaflex. How many minutes would you like to spend on each one? 10-15?
But wait! The entire training is only 1.5-hours. 90-minutes. So if you want to cover all of the six-core processes in ACT and spend equal time with each one, you’d have to divide 90 minutes by 6, which comes to 15-minutes per process.
And that’s IF you spend EVERY SINGLE SECOND of your training on the processes. That means if you want to spend 15 minutes on every process on the hexaflex, you must have:
No introduction at all.
No waiting a few minutes for people to get settled.
No Q&A session at the end.
Does 15 minutes for each process seem like enough time? Could you build experiential exercises that filled that time and still allowed you to process?
Okay, so what if you want to spend a little time explaining creative hopelessness, RFT, or other related to ACT concepts?
RFT + Creative Hopelessness + Six Core Processes + ACT Stance = 9 Topics
90-minutes / 9 Topics = 10 minutes for each topic.
What this means is that anything less than a 2-hour training on ACT is extremely TIGHT. You have to be ON THE BALL if you want to cover these topics.
If you are doing a 2-hour training or less, my recommendation is to build the entire training around one big experiential exercise that you can use to demonstrate all of the processes. You could do this with the ACT Matrix, or the Choice Point, or with any classic ACT experiential exercise.
Okay but what about longer presentations?
A friend of mine recently had to put together a 16-hour ACT training across two days.
Even with a presentation this long, I recommend breaking things down to the minute.
I shared my By The Minute approach:
A general rule of thumb is that question & answer periods are often highly valued and enjoyed by participants, so you’ll want to think about how and when you will take questions from the audience. Taking questions as you go along will always make you end up running out of time at the end if you have a tight schedule.
I do recommend breaking down the 16 hours into minutes which will help you plan, so that would be 960 minutes total. From there you can just subtract by section. For example, think about how many minutes total you want to reserve for Q&A for each leg of the training, subtract that time from 960.
Think of how long each of the experiential exercises you plan on doing will take, subtract that. How many minutes long will the video observations be, etc. Subtract all of these “known quantities” first. For any group activity, add way more time than you think is necessary, in every training I’ve ever been in where we break out into groups there has never been enough time for each person to do whatever they need to do.
Then your course outline contains 7 main parts. So lets say for example you start out with 960 minutes, with 45 minutes allotted for Q&A, 90 minutes total allotted for guest speakers (30 min each), 105 minutes for all experiential exercise and observation, that would leave you with 720 minutes. Which would mean you’d have 102 minutes to devote to each of the main parts of the training.
Could you realistically talk about RFT for 102 minutes? Evolution? Functional Contextualism?
If that seems daunting, then you’d have to extend the outline out to include more points or adjust time elsewhere.
Play around with the times until you have allocated amounts that you feel comfortable with for each section. This will help you in any future training you conduct, as you’ll have easy to handle segments that you know take X amount of time, which you can assemble modularly for whatever the needs are.
So if you are doing a workshop any time soon, try out this By The Minute approach, and if you need help, reach out to me and we can work it out together.
Submitted for your approval,
Jacob Martinez // Falling Through the ACT Matrix
P.S.
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