ACT = Action Changes Things

This blog is about the book “ACT The Ultimate Personal Development Handbook” and how it can support you. Supporting you to get into action. The book also beautifully contains the solution focused hypnotherapy strategy of the 3Ps (i.e. Positive Action, Positive Interaction and Positive Thought).

Wanting to get into action but feeling stuck

Have you ever felt stuck, at the mercy of circumstances, responding to the events of your life in either an anxious (frightened), angry or depressed way? Or you may have felt frustrated or have beaten yourself up because you couldn’t get into action? Then this blog is for you!

The good news is that frustration, that desire for change, that motivation is exactly what you need to make the changes you want.

Often however, that effort and drive to change is directed to changing what we DON’T want, rather than what we DO want.

When we direct our effort away from something, e.g. anxiety, we maintain it in our minds and so create it over and over again. To illustrate this, notice what happens when I say to you “Don’t think of a purple giraffe” I’m willing to bet that you would have imagined a purple giraffe.

The same is true when we say to ourselves “I don’t want to be anxious” or “I don’t want to be up all night”. You guessed it, we create the anxiety we don’t want or “that staying awake all night” that we don’t want. Unwittingly our best efforts at changing, create the very thing we don’t want.

The reason for this is that the mind doesn’t process the negation, i.e. “don’t”. In order to understand the sentence it has to visualises the very thing that it doesn’t want!!! And since we create what we visualise, unwittingly we create the very thing that we are trying to get away from. The more we do the same thing, the more we feel stuck and often get depressed, tired and give up. It is not due to lack of effort, but more a need for a more effective strategy.

So what can we do about getting into action?

The solution to the above predicament is to decide on what you do want. In the above examples it could be:

• “I don’t want to be anxious” becomes “I want to be relaxed”.
• “I don’t want to be up all night” becomes “I want to sleep soundly through the night”

These “what we wants” become goals to work towards. Goals that we can take Positive actions towards, have Positive interactions around and have Positive thought about, i.e. the 3Ps. When we do the 3Ps we generate serotonin , the neurotransmitter which produces that wellbeing feeling within us. When we have a feeling of wellbeing we relax and think more clearly and identify the next positive step to take. You know that feeling of serotonin, there’s a feeling of control and hope associated with it, a feeling of “at last we are making progress”!

How ACT the Book supports the 3Ps

So the 3Ps, positive action, positive interaction and positive thinking put us back in control, rather than being controlled by circumstances. This is were the book “ACT the Ultimate Personal Development Workbook” comes in. Its called the Ultimate book because it is point to and makes you conscious of what you already do naturally. Its point to the “Ultimate You”.

The book gives answers to questions such as;

• Where am I at the moment? A life Audit.
• What do I want more of in my life ? A vision and direction towards the positive future.
• Useful attitudes to have for change ?
• How to make that vision compelling so that you overcome any resistance.
• What to do about negative thoughts and limiting beliefs?
• Practical steps to look for in your journey to change/
• The hero’s journey a universal metaphor for any journey of change.
• And much much more.

The ACT book fits in so well with the 3P strategy giving more detail and definition to the 3Ps.

What next ?

So if want to know more either go to the FREE Chapter 1 download (see below) or to Amazon,co.uk to purchase the book. For more about the author and his motivation for the book go to Amazon.

Alternatively, CLAIM your FREE (1hour) consultation where you will learn about how the brain works, how we created anxiety, depression , anger etc, but more importantly what we can do about it.