Dr Linda Edwards Ph.D.
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Art of Living Psychology  Dr Linda Edwards Ph.D.
 

PSYCHOLOGIST - LIFE, CAREER & EXECUTIVE COACH EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE & BUSINESS COACHING MELBOURNE

Do you want to:

  • release stress and experience peace and contentment?
  • feel better, gain clarity, make better decisions?
  • reach your full potential?
  • build confidence or creativity?
  • improve business/personal relationships?
  • overcomes significant professional challenges?
  • discover how to meet the people who are exceptionally helpful to you?
  • learn empowering skills to help you achieve your goals?
  • increase emotional intelligence?
  • develop the attitudes that make executives and professionals effective?
  • receive safe, supportive, encouraging guidance suited to your unique needs?
  • discover how to access the knowledge and passion you need from within yourself?
IF SO, TRY COACHING. COACHING CAN HELP!

What is Coaching? Why it Works & Would You Benefit?

Using ACT workability and coaching principles, Linda teaches powerful and effective self-help techniques for reaching your full potential. She has considerable experience in helping people to: gain clarity about career direction; achieve career goals; build confidence, creativity and better business relationships; and banish anxiety, conflict, indecision and feelings of inadequacy. By its nature, her style of coaching facilities an increase in emotional intelligence.

What is Coaching?

The term coaching was first used in the fields of education and sports in the 1830s. It is only since the mid-1990s that it has become widespread. Today, for example, 90% of 500 UK companies have reported using coaching.

Depending on whether the coaching is being offered to professionals, business owners, corporate executives or for personal or career matters, it may be called career coaching, business coaching, executive coaching, emotional intelligence coaching or life coaching (sometimes known as personal coaching).

Whatever kind of coaching it is called, the bottom line is that great results are being achieved and it actually works!

It is a mentoring process in which a person who has achieved their own life goals and believes in you:

  • helps you to gain the clarity you need to discover what is rewarding, fulfilling and satisfying so you can set goals that reflect your interests, skills, strengths, personal values and temperament (rather than whims, instant gratification or social/marketing pressures) and thereby joyfully commit to doing things you care passionately about
  • gives you 100% support and guidance in the use of empowering tools which enable you to take steps (such as gaining confidence and insight, finding direction, developing action plans, making significant changes and improving relationships) which unleash your unrealised potential so you can move forward to live the life you really want to live.
  • Assists you to reach your chosen goals more quickly and with less stress by reducing learning curves, creating better solutions and avoiding expensive mistakes.

Why Coaching Works

Coaching motivates you to spend time focused on and working toward your goals so you actually achieve them. It does this by making sure you've chosen the most rewarding goals for you. It also makes you accountable to someone else. This accountability dramatically increases your perseverance and perseverance usually pays off.

Through wise guidance from someone who has undergone thousands of hours of personal development work and succeeded in achieving their own goals, coaching can save you much time, money and frustration. It is easy to waste a lot of energy going off on a tangent, taking on too much too soon or criticizing ourselves. Honest and open feedback can help us to see blind-spots that it might take weeks, months or years to discover on our own. Encouragement, support, validation, inspiration and practical action-oriented guidance can stretch us to see beyond our limited view of ourselves to what is possible so that we not only achieve our goals more quickly but also reap benefits well beyond our expectations.

Would You Benefit From Coaching?

If there is any area of your personal or professional life in which you have been unable to achieve a high degree of satisfaction

AND

You are ready to make changes

AND

You are willing to step beyond your comfort zone

THEN

It is highly likely that you can benefit from coaching.

Do I Need a Coach or a Counsellor?

It is often said that coaching is for people who are basically satisfied with their lives and that others should seek counselling. However everyone benefits more from focusing on enhancing skills and strengths and achieving goals than from focusing on problems. Thus, regardless of whether you feel that your life is together or falling apart, life coaching works better than a counselling style which seeks to explore and understand the roots of problems.

Some people also believe that if they are bothered by strong emotions, they should seek counselling or therapy rather than coaching. They may believe that a life coach would not have the emotional depth and experience to handle their issues. While this may sometimes be true, Dr. Linda Edwards is not only a life coach but also a registered psychologist with counselling experience dating back to 1976. Her emotional intelligence training techniques can be very effective in dealing with troublesome feelings and you can learn to use these techniques yourself so you don't have to keep going to a coach or a therapist. These techniques are an important part of her coaching approach.

What Can I Expect From Coaching?

Coaching begins with establishing some inspiring goals. From then on, the focus is on achieving them. While coaching is a catalyst for amazing change, it is not magic. It does require hard work and commitment.

Ideally you have a session one hour per week in person or over the telephone for an agreed period, often three months. During each session, you agree to take actions for the following week at which time you discuss obstacles faced, insights gained, and with the help of constructive feedback which broadens your perspective, set new actions for tackling things in a different way.

Some of these new actions may require you to develop new habits.

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Benefits of Life Coaching including Health Coaching & Relationship Coaching

Life Coaching (Personal Coaching) can be applied to every area of your life - personal and professional. Linda has worked with thousands of clients over the last fifteen years. The following is a list of the kinds of personal life benefits she has seen people receive as a result of the life coaching process.

  • more free time, more fun, more money
  • more effective communication with friends, family and at work
  • personal empowerment
  • increased self-awareness
  • more peace and happiness
  • higher levels of fitness, health, and weight control
  • better concentration and mental function
  • enhanced ability to identify stress factors and release the stress they cause
  • clarity about what one is passionate about
  • love of one's life as it is
  • decision-making in alignment with one's skills, strengths and personal values
  • conflict resolution
  • increased ability to develop and maintain intimate relationships
  • improved self-confidence, clarity and focus
  • better balance between work and personal life
  • more effective implementation of change in one's personal life
  • greater ability to organize, set boundaries and eliminate clutter

When the client goals are related to the specific areas of health or relationships, the coaching is sometimes called Health Coaching or Relationship Coaching. When a couple seeks coaching for their intimate relationship, it is sometimes called couples coaching to distinguish it from the type of couples counselling or therapy that focuses on problems rather than how to enrich the relationship. See Couples Coaching

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Benefits of Career, Executive and Business Coaching

Linda has provided career, executive and business coaching to numerous lawyers, medical practitioners, dentists, nurses, corporate and public sector executives (supervisors to CEOs), actors, restaurant owners, engineers, academics, trainers, researchers, computer professionals as well as international and national sporting professionals. Coaching outcomes reported by these people include:

  • enhanced career performance
  • more free time, fun and income
  • more effective communication with colleagues and business partners
  • resolution of liquidity problems and staff difficulties
  • greater ease working with difficult clients and colleagues
  • increased emotional intelligence, awareness and better decision-making
  • significant stress reduction and prevention of burnout
  • increased calm, creativity, energy and vitality
  • improved concentration and mental function
  • identification of opportunities for success which are aligned with one's true nature
  • successful career transition
  • clarity about direction and achievement of goals
  • goal-setting in alignment with skills, strengths and personal values
  • better professional and business relationships
  • improved self-confidence, clarity, focus and balance
  • more effective implementation of business and career changes
  • improved ability to set boundaries with clients or customers

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Coaching Professional Coaches (Professional Mentoring)

Professional coaches can also benefit from coaching. However, in this case, because they are receiving guidance and support from another more experienced coach, it is usually referred to as mentoring. For a coaching psychologist it is called professional supervision, but it amounts to the same thing. Apart from the benefits of coaching for anyone including coaches themselves, psychology and especially psychophysiology research are pointing to some powerful new tools for making coaching more effective than previously. For more information on some of these tools, go to Stress Prevention, Stress Release & Stress Management and Research-based ACT coaching Principles.

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Emotional Intelligence Coaching

The reason that it is possible to effectively coach people in such diverse areas of their lives without having all the knowledge and expertise of all these people is that the emotional intelligence of some coaches and the Emotional Intelligence Coaching style and tools that they use are responsible for the effectiveness of all types of coaching. Because emotional intelligence coaching is intrinsic to the way Linda guides and supports people, all the outcomes she has witnessed in all types of coaching are to varying degrees the result of emotional intelligence coaching.

For example, coaching to improved concentration and mental function is dependent on developing greater emotional intelligence. Why? Because lack of emotional intelligence is a dysregulation of the central nervous system (CNS) and recent psychophysiological research shows that CNS dysregulation is frequently associated with reduced functioning of our thinking processes. Anxiety causing the mind to go blank is a classic example.

Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to perceive and interpret our own and others' emotions in a way which enables optimal response to personal and professional situations. Emotions have traditionally not been welcome in the business world where it is usually believed that decisions are made rationally. But logic is inadequate for decision-making. Debating, in which either side is considered to have an equal opportunity to win, illustrates this well.

Emotions motivate us to do things. The word emotion derives from the Latin emovere, meaning to move out. Every emotion includes a tendency to action. There are four basic emotions: joy, fear, sadness and anger. The purpose of these emotions is to provide important information for decision-making and motivation.

There are a number of well documented cases of people who have suffered damage to the emotional (limbic) section of their brain. Such people have normal intellectual functioning but struggle with making even simple decisions such as when and how to tie their shoelaces. People with impaired emotional functioning can think and analyze perfectly but are unable to act appropriately or make effective decisions.

The result of increasing your emotional intelligence is personal empowerment. This includes:

  • increased understanding, insight and compassion;
  • increased energy level and better health;
  • greater creativity;
  • better decision-making;
  • higher motivation;
  • better personal and business relationships;
  • freedom from self-sabotaging emotional patterns; and
  • more life satisfaction both personally and professionally

Emotional Intelligence has been recognized as more important than either experience or normal intelligence (IQ) in determining career success and the profitability of business organizations depend on the Emotional Intelligence of their managers. Emotional Intelligence has also been found to be a good indicator of who will keep out of the divorce courts.

Most Emotional Intelligence training programs tell people what Emotional Intelligence is, why they need to develop it, and what the optimum responses to situations are. However, intellectual understanding of optimal responses does not lead to optimal response or increased emotional intelligence.

For example, traditional assertiveness training programs teach unassertive people which words to speak in order to be assertive. Unfortunately the words usually come out apologetically or aggressively, if at all. This is because no-one has helped these trainees to deal with the anxiety which is the real cause of the lack of assertiveness.

If instead of intellectually teaching people what the assertive response is and getting them to practice it, we help them to release their anxiety, then assertiveness naturally arises without any intellectual instruction being necessary. It seems that optimal response is our true nature when we deal with the emotions which get in the way.

These emotions which get in the way are 'old' emotions, that is, they are not relevant to the current situation, even though they feel that they are. They are actually left over emotions from the past; emotions we did not fully experience when they originally happened. They muddy the current situation and detract from our clarity. It is only the emotions which are relevant to the present situation which provide important information for our decision-making and motivation. If we make decisions based on 'old' emotions, our decisions and motivation will be less than optimal.

Linda's Version of Emotional Intelligence Coaching

For this reason, Emotional Intelligence Training offered by Dr Linda Edwards is focused on helping people to reach a state where they only experience the emotions relevant to the present situation. Such a training is necessarily experiential and the easiest way to do this is with the assistance of an Emotional Intelligence coach.

Linda's version of Emotional Intelligence Coaching involves:

  • Learning how to identify old, inappropriate emotional response patterns which prevent one from reaching one's full potential, personally and professionally.
  • Learning how to gently accept the full experience of inappropriate emotions so that their energy naturally dissipates. These gentle yet rapid emotional release methods are experiential and involve the pioneering work of the psychologists Eugene Gendlin and Fritz Perls as well as the more recent research-based acceptance and commitment training (ACT) coaching methods.
  • Developing these skills under the direction of a trained coach. Just as we need a coach for the development of practical skills such as tennis or dancing or driving a car, we also need a coach to help us develop the practical life skills which increase our emotional intelligence. These skills usually work quickly and effectively and they are easy enough for most people to eventually learn to do by themselves.

Psychophysiology research and the work of researchers Stephen Porges, Robert Scaer, Peter Levine and David Berceli have provided us with some exciting new ways for rapidly and relatively painlessly release stress and thereby increase emotional intelligence. Linda has incorporated these and otehr relatively new methods into her coaching work with clients who want to improve their careers, relationships, emotional intelligence or lives in general. Her approach is both practical and challenging.

Remember! Emotional intelligence is highly correlated with success in both the business and professional world and family and personal relationships.

Linda's Version of Life, Career, Business & Executive Coaching

To develop new habits, you will need to be willing to step beyond your comfort zone as you are guided in the use of a wide range of recently developed empowering techniques based on the latest psychophysiology research so that you can reach your goals more quickly.

One of the reasons that Linda is able to offer these relatively new tools is that she is a coaching psychologist and all Australian coaching psychologists are required by federal law to undertake regular and substantial professional supervision (mentoring or coaching) as well as workshops and/or research to continuously improve their skills and knowledge so they can offer better services to their clients.

Do I Need to Commit to a Three Month Program?

Not necessarily. That depends on you.

Some of Linda's clients have experienced profound changes in two to four sessions. In fact, her emotional intelligence training techniques can, in many cases, facilitate very significant changes in much less than three months. It is quite common for people to want a lot of benefit from a small investment. If you are ready to step well beyond your comfort zone, you may be one of the people who can actually do that.

However many people are quite resistant to putting themselves in uncomfortable situations. If this is true for you, it may well be realistic to plan for a longer period of coaching in order to see the results you are looking for. However the latest research and Linda's experience so far suggests that our newest method may prove to enable people to increase emotional intelligence without having to experience much uncomfortable emotion or slow progress in breaking habits.

If you would like to clarify what you want to achieve and how fast you are comfortable to work toward your goals, call 9836 5721 and book an initial session. It is not uncommon for individuals to achieve one or two small goals as a consequence of this first session. But most importantly, you will be able to make a more informed decision about the optimal length of time for which you should engage in Coaching to get the benefits you are looking for.

Linda's Credentials

Linda has a doctorate from Monash University in psychology and has coached numerous senior executives and professionals who are international leaders in their field. She has thousands of hours experience using her emotional intelligence training techniques and is convinced that her methods are at the forefront of rapid development of emotional intelligence. She has also enjoyed an honorary research associate position in psychology at Monash University with publications in professional journals and popular magazines.

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New Stress Management, Stress Release & Stress Prevention Option for Handling Career, Executive & Busines Stress

The latest findings in psychophysiology have led Linda to provide an option of a new self-help stress prevention and release (stress management) tool in career, executive and business coaching because she believes it makes the coaching more effective.

The following paragraphs provide a brief overview of the recent scientific findings that led to the creation of this new tool and a short explanation of what is involved and how it is expected to improve coaching outcomes as well as prevent, release and manage stress. Please note that this approach is very new and there is insufficient evidence-based research for it to be considered as part of professional psychology practice at this time.

The Potential for Optimal Functioning According to Neuroscience

The latest psychophysiology theory backed up by considerable research (Porges, 1995; 2001) is now telling us that we all have the potential to be optimally functioning human beings, thus confirming what people like Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Nelsen Mandela, Mother Teresa and others have told us, that is, we all have the innate capacity to be loving compassionate human beings even under conditions of adversity. But how can this be so when we look around us and see unending war, crime and divorce?

According to psychophysiology research, animal and human behaviour is controlled by unconscious physiological processes when under life-threat. In the case of humans, these processes override our thinking and social engagement (loving relationship) capability. Further, if the life-threat is prolonged or a number of threatening events happen in quick succession before the individual's physiological processes have had a chance to return to normal, the central nervous system (CNS) becomes permanently dysregulated and responds to any stress as a life threat creating the "I'm bad at handling stress" syndrome in which the person's response to a challenging situation might be irritation, anger, anxiety, fear, panic, distancing, low energy, insomnia or various physical illnesses or diseases. These responses then often lead to poor personal or work relationships or difficulty developing or maintaining a rewarding career. None of this is under human conscious control. In fact, psychophysiological research has shown that the unconscious mind that we blame for much of our difficulties is in fact the CNS and the difficulties are caused by its dysregulation.

How many of us are seriously affected by this? Unfortunately most of us. Even if we have been fortunate enough not to be a victim of war, crime, natural disaster, or childhood neglect, abuse or abandonment, most of us have experienced, or been close to someone who experienced, a common life trauma, for example: accidents, medical procedures, job loss, life-threatening illness, intense pain, unexpected loss or near-loss of a loved-one or sudden financial disaster. While some threats are brief and animals have mechanisms to return their CNS to normal, this frequently does not occur in humans.

The Benefit of Neurogenic Tremors

Have you ever seen a bird flee from a cat, or two ducks fight over territory? When the bird escapes or the territorial difference is resolved, these birds briefly shake uncontrollably and then go about their business totally peacefully as if nothing happened. The shaking has used up the excess biochemicals (adrenaline or opiods) and deep muscle tension from the aborted fight-flight-freeze response (Levine, 1997).

People sometimes shake or tremor . For example, after a car accident a person might say, "I shook like a leaf". However tremoring is seen as a symptom of fear and therefore a sign of weakness. If it occurs without any obvious threat, it is seen as a sign of something wrong such as Parkinson's Disease, Epilepsy or a mental illness. Tremoring is fairly common in children but adults tend to suppress it so as not to feel out of control, vulnerable, embarrassed or frighten their children.

As a result of the prevalence of the belief that tremors indicate something is wrong with us, the purpose and value of shaking has not been well researched. However, deeper exploration of involuntary tremoring commenced in 1997 with the work of stress expert Dr Peter Levine. The theory behind his Somatic Experiencing technique says that the body evokes 'neurogenic tremors' to complete the discharge of our flight-flight-freeze response.

Suppression of Involuntary Tremoring Causes Impaired Emotional Functioning, Health and Work Performance

According to Dr David Berceli (2008), Dr Robert Scaer (2001) and others, there is now evidence that this suppression of tremoring causes the CNS to remain on alert so that minor stresses set up a cycle of unending anxiety and tension build-up which eventually leads to physical and psychological difficulties. These problems are wide-ranging and include: difficulty handling stress, unexplained chronic pain, frequent colds and infections due to a poor immune system, anxiety disorder, depression, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal troubles, migraine headaches, asthma, poor circulation, muscle spasms, chronic fatigue, whiplash after minor accidents, short-term memory loss, and lack of concentration. Likewise, animals in captivity (especially those in zoos or laboratories) lose their resilience because they cannot discharge their freeze response and they also suffer a variety of physical and psychological complaints. In addition, Dr Stephen Porges and others have shown that when the CNS is prepared for threat, the social engagment system (the vagal nerve) is suppressed interfering with the person's ability to engage in workable and compassionate relationships.

The Stress Prevention, Release and Management Process

While working with trauma recovery in war-torn countries and natural disaster zones, clinical social worker and somatic therapist, Dr David Berceli (2008), developed a self-directed body-based method of stress and trauma prevention and release, which allows individuals to process their own stress and trauma, in many cases, without needing to seek guidance from professionals. This method consists of a set of gentle physical exercises which fatigue certain muscle groups in order to activate the body's innate tremoring response. These exercises can be practised by young and old alike.

While there is insufficient research evidence as yet for this very new procedure to be an accepted strategy for use by psychologists, these exercises have been shown to reduce stress and anxiety and some people have reported that the exercises enable them to handle stressful situations more effectively.

Linda believes we can use this stress release tool on a regular basis to deal with all the normal challenges of our lives, for example, to improve our career prospects or enhance our business and intimate relationships.

It is recommended that people receive instruction in doing the exercises at least once so they can learn how to do them at the right speed to release stress and tension with little or no physical or psychological discomfort. A very good way to practise these exercises initially is as an adjunct to life coaching, career coaching or business coaching because regular contact with a coach ensures that people keep doing the exercises for the 21 days required to form a new habit.

Linda suggests that people might like to practise these exercises throughout the coaching process because stress reduction is expected to facilitate achieving goals. Then afterwards, they can be done as a stress prevention strategy. If you think you might be interested in including these exercises in your coaching process, give Linda a call on 9836 5721 and book an initial session.

Berceli, D. (2008). The revolutionary trauma release process. Vancouver, Canada: Namaste Publishing

Levine, P. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books

Porges, S. (1995). Orienting in a defensive world: Mammalian modifications of our evolutionary heritage: A polyvagal theory. Psychophysiology, 32, 301-318

Porges, S.W. (2001). The polyvagal theory: phylogenetic substrates of a social nervous system. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 42, 123-146

Scaer, R. (2001). The body bears the burden: Trauma, dissociation and disease. Binghamton, New York: Hawthorn Press

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Research-based ACT Coaching & Workability Principles for Career, Executive & Business Performance & Success

Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) is a brilliant basis for coaching. As explained earlier, the coaching process involves clarifying what is rewarding to you and setting goals based on your values. ACT facilitates this process through the workability principle and provides tools to recognize whether your actions are workable. This is important because you will get better results if you focus on what is workable.

ACT Coaching Workability Principle: For Better Results Ensure Goals are Within Your Control

One very important way that ACT says you should do this is to focus your actions on things that you can control because if your actions are directed to change what you can't control, you are unlikely to have much long term success.

You have little control over thoughts, feelings, urges, memories and sensations.

You have no control over other people.

You have no control over the world around you.

You can control your actions and your attention no matter what your thoughts and feelings are telling you.

You can do what you value, engage fully in what you are doing, and pay attention to the effect your actions are having.

ACT provides us with exercises to help us recognize our unworkable behaviours. The following exercise is one such example.

ACT Exercise: Notice Whether Trying to Get Rid of Unwanted Thoughts and Feelings Works

  • The thoughts and feelings I'd most like to get rid of are … (complete this)
  • Write a list of everything you've tried in order to avoid, change or get rid of these unpleasant thoughts and feelings e.g. avoiding situations, addictions, denial, blaming, therapies, affirmations, procrastination, talking, keeping busy, indecision
  • For each strategy you tried, ask yourself if it worked in the long term
  • What did it cost you in time, energy, money, health and vitality?
  • Did it bring you closer to a rich, full and meaningful life?

Recognizing the behaviours that don't work motivates us to discover what does work. ACT say that what works to produce a meaningful life is to behave in ways that are consistent with our values . Here is an ACT exercise to help you determine your values.

ACT Values Exercise: Clarifying What is Most Important and Significant to You in Your Heart

How would you act differently if painful thoughts and feelings were not an issue?

In other words, how would you act differently if you focused on moving toward what you value rather than avoiding unpleasant thoughts and feelings?

Imagine you are 80 years old and looking back on your life. Finish the following sentences:

  • I spent too much time worrying about….
  • I spent too little time doing things such as….
  • If I could go back in time, I would ….

Having determined your values, the next step is to use traditional coaching principles to set goals based on your values and set them in small achievable steps. This should entail behaving in ways consistent with your values regardless of how you think or feel. That's the bit where traditional coaching, in my opinion, is somewhat limited and coaching psychology can help with ACT.

The task at this point is to do what the letters of ACT stand for - Acceptance and Commitment Training:

Committed Action (Taking Action in Line with Values to Create a Meaningful Life

A Accept your internal experience (use diffusion and expansion - see below)

C Choose a valued direction from the list you have made above.

T Take action, giving it full attention while letting thoughts & feelings come & go.

Here are the other ACT tools that help you do this:

ACT Diffusion Exercise: Allowing Thoughts, Images, Memories to Come and Go Without Giving Them More Attention Than They Deserve

Instead of believing thoughts are true, wise or important, see them as words or stories. "I'm having the thought that…" Name the story. Take 10 breaths & focus on the breath.

Pay attention to thoughts only when they are helpful in creating a rich and meaningful life.

TIP: Any time you are having trouble doing this, there will be an unpleasant sensation in your body, so do the second expansion exercise below. If you can't find it, look in your head. Or is it a mild tension all over your body?

Focus on the feelings in your body rather than the story in your mind.

ACT Acceptance Exercise: Being Willing to Notice & Fully Feel Unpleasant Feelings, Sensations, Urges

Turn the 'struggle switch' off so you don't have to have bad feelings about your bad feelings. Breath in a deep and relaxed way while scanning the body and noticing the worst feeling. Observe it with curiosity. Notice what shape, size, location and intensity it is. Notice any special feature such as whether it is pulsating. Notice any changes in its position or characteristics. Persevere. If you like, you can actively embrace the feeling by trying to intensify it with the Somatic Experiencing exercise that Linda teaches. Just remember that even though the feeling is likely to dissipate (quickly or slowly) when you do either technique, the motivation must be to embrace and accept the full intensity of the feeling rather than to get rid of it. That is why this exercise is called Acceptance, although some ACT books (e.g. Dr Russ Harris's books) refer to it as Expansion.

ACT Connection Exercise: Bringing Full Awareness to Present Experience with Openness & Interest

Take 10 deep breaths and focus on the sensations of breathing. Focus on five things you can see, hear, and feel. Notice what you can smell or taste too. Notice all the details of what you can see, feel, hear, smell, and taste in carrying out a simple routine such as combing your hair or brushing your teeth or doing the washing up. Practise this as many times a day as you can remember. The more you are fully present in each moment, the more you will enjoy life, and the more you will be able to do the other techniques aimed at helping you create the kind of life you value.

ACT Observing Self Exercise: Recognizing You are NOT Your Thoughts, Feelings, Memories, Urges or Body

Focus on something you can see, feel, hear, smell or taste. Now focus on something else. Notice who was observing and who changed from observing one thing to observing something else. Notice that while your thoughts, feelings and body constantly change, the observer does not.

Obstacles to Change

As a final comment, when the going gets tough, look to see what obstacles to change might be operating:

F Fusion with unhelpful thoughts.

E Expectations that are unrealistic

A Avoidance of uncomfortable feelings

R Remoteness from your values

Your Next Step

If you would like some encouragement and support in applying these exercises to your career, business or personal life, engage the services of an ACT coach. Many coaching psychologists will be familiar with ACT. Linda is an ACT coaching psychologist in Melbourne inner Eastern Suburbs (Camberwell - Box Hill area). You may contact her on 9836 5721 to book an initial coaching session.

In addition, you might like to purchase a copy of: The Happiness Trap: Stop Struggling, Start Living Russ Harris M.D. Exile Publishing (NSW & NZ, 2007). This book is useful for improving the quality of life in general and takes a life coaching/career coaching approach to mindfulness and values driven action in place of experiential avoidance driven action. It contains many exercises including some of those listed above. It is one of the most useful books Linda has come across and she has found that those who have read it progress more quickly in their coaching sessions.

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Copyright Dr Linda Edwards 2002-2011, Psychologist & Business, Executive, Career & Life Coach Melbourne Victoria Australia. Art of Living Psychology Consulting Rooms are in theCanterbury - Camberwell - Burwood end of Surrey Hills in the Melbourne Inner Eastern Suburbs, Camberwell, close to the business districts of Hartwell, Box Hill and Hawthorn.