Books
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The Thriving Adolescent
Positive Psychology to Help Teens Manage Emotions, Achieve Goals, and Build Connection 1st Edition (Nov 1, 2015)
Adolescents face unique pressures and worries. Will they pass high school? Should they go to college? Will they find love? And what ways do they want to act in the world? The uncertainty surrounding the future can be overwhelming. Sadly, and all too often, if things don’t go smoothly, adolescents will begin labeling themselves as losers, unpopular, unattractive, weird, or dumb. And, let’s not forget the ubiquitous ‘not good enough’ story that often begins during these formative years. These labels are often carried forward throughout life. So what can you do, now, to help lighten this lifelong burden?
The Thriving Adolescent offers teachers, counselors, and mental health professionals powerful techniques for working with adolescents. Based in proven- effective acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), the skills and tips outlined in this book will help adolescents and teens manage difficult emotions, connect with their values, achieve mindfulness and vitality, and develop positive relationships with friends and family. The evidence-based practices in this book focus on developing a strong sense of self, and will give adolescents the confidence they need to make that difficult transition into adulthood.
Whether it’s school, family, or friend related, adolescents experience a profound level of stress, and often they lack the psychological tools to deal with stress in productive ways. The skills we impart to them now will help set the stage for a happy, healthy adulthood. If you work with adolescents or teens, this is a must-have addition to your professional library.
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The Weight Escape
Stop fad dieting, start losing weight and reshape your life using cutting-edge psychology (Jan 1st 2014)
Today’s the day to start making real changes. Diet fads and fitness trends may offer the prospect of losing weight, but they rarely work out long-term. The Weight Escape is different.
Focusing on the mental barriers that can stop us setting and achieving our goals, it promotes a holistic approach to wellbeing and weight loss – one that goes beyond meal plans and calorie counting to give a deeper meaning and mindfulness to how you live and what you eat.
Using the psychological science of ACT – Acceptance and Commitment Therapy – Dr Russ Harris, medical doctor and author of The Happiness Trap, psychological practitioner Ann Bailey and scientist Joseph Ciarrochi will help you make the lasting changes you want.
Through practical exercises, quizzes and personal stories, it shows you how to:
Use your values and strengths to give your life direction
Motivate yourself in the face of ongoing challenges
Deal effectively with cravings, urges and stressful situations
Develop self-acceptance.Get the weight-loss results you want – and so much more.
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Mindfulness, Acceptance, and Positive Psychology
The Seven Foundations of Well-Being (April 1, 2013)
Many have wondered if there is a key ingredient to living a full and happy life. For decades now, scientists and psychologists alike have been studying the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. The positive psychology movement was founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play. At the same time, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)—a mindfulness-based, values-oriented behavioral therapy that has many parallels to Buddhism, yet is not religious in any way—has been focused on helping people achieve their greatest human potential.
Created only years apart, ACT and positive psychology both promote human flourishing, and they often share overlapping themes and applications, particularly when it comes to setting goals, psychological strengths, mindfulness, and the clarification of what matters most—our values and our search for meaning in life. Despite these similarities, however, the two different therapeutic models are rarely discussed in relation to one another. What if unifying these theories could lead to faster, more profound and enduring improvements to the human condition?
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Get out of your Mind and Into Your Life for Teens: A Guide to Living an Extraordinary Life
(2012)
If you could only get past feelings of embarrassment, fear, self-criticism, and self-doubt, how would your life be different? You might take more chances and make more mistakes, but you’d also be able to live more freely and confidently than ever before.
Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life for Teens is a workbook that provides you with essential skills for coping with the difficult and sometimes overwhelming emotions that stress you out and cause you pain. The emotions aren’t going anywhere, but you can find out how to deal with them. Once you do, you will become a mindful warrior—a strong person who handles tough emotions with grace and dignity—and gain many more friends and accomplishments along the way.
You will:
• Use the power of mindfulness in everyday situations
• Stop finding faults in yourself and start solving your problems
• Be kinder to yourself so you feel confident and have a greater sense of self-worth
• Identify the values that will help you create the life of your dreams -
A CBT-Practitioner's Guide to ACT
How to Bridge the Gap Between Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Dec 3, 2008)
Interest in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is expanding rapidly. Many of those who are interested in ACT are trained using a mechanistic cognitive behavioural therapy model (or ‘MCBT’). Utilizing both ACT and MCBT together can be difficult, because the approaches make different philosophical assumptions and have different theoretical models. The core purpose of this book is to help provide a bridge between ACT and MCBT. The emphasis of this book will be applied psychology, but it will also have important theoretical implications. This book will highlight where ACT and MCBT differ in their predictions, and will suggest directions for future research. It will be grounded in current research and will make clear to the reader what is known and what has yet to be tested.The authors acknowledge that practitioners often have little interest in extended discussions of philosophy and theory. Thus, their discussion of functional contextualism and RFT is grounded clearly in clinical practice. They talk about what functional contextualism means for the practitioner in the room, with a particular client. They describe how RFT can help the practitioner to understand the barriers to effective client action.
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Applying Emotional Intelligence
A Practitioner's Guide (Jan 16, 2007)
The explosion of research on emotional intelligence (EI) in the past decade has provided increasing evidence that EI can be measured reliably and can be useful in predicting important outcomes, such as managerial effectiveness and relationship quality.
Naturally, people are now asking, “So, how does one improve EI?”. Applying Emotional Intelligence collects the most important programs focused on that idea, and enquires of their originators, “What do you do?”, “Why do you do it?”, and, “What is the evidence for your approach?”.
The emphasis of the book is applied, in that it provides and contrasts concrete examples of what we do in our interventions in a wide variety of situations. The chapters present descriptions of programs, including specific activities and exercises that influence emotional knowledge and social effectiveness more generally. While practical in its focus, this book also discusses the theoretical bases for these approaches.
These are new programs with outcomes that are now beginning to be studied. The book presents the most important and recent research findings that examine the efficacy of these programs.Applying Emotional Intelligence is a “must-read” for anyone interested in EI and its application. This book will be of interest to researchers conducting EI intervention research, as well as a wide variety of practitioners, including those interested in developing EI in organizations, health areas, clinical populations, and school-age settings. Finally, the book is designed to be relevant to the reader’s own life, encouraging the reader to consider how the programs and the exercises might impact his or her personality and outlook, as well as contribute to the development of those who have themselves participated in the programs.
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Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Contemporary Theory, Research and Practice (Feb 1, 2009)
Showcasing the very latest in the theory, research and practice of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) across a range of clinical applications, including eating disorders, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, PTSD and substance abuse, with contributions from leading ACT practitioners including co-founders Kirk Strosahl, Kelly Wilson and Rob Zettle. Chapters range from detailed treatments of the scientific and theoretical aspects of the ACT model and research program, to detailed discussions of how to apply ACT to a variety of human problems. Divided into two parts, the first section features theoretical treatments of ACT, with the second (and larger) section presenting extended descriptions of how to apply ACT in different contexts. This rich content mix reflects the strengths of the contextual behavioral science (CBS) research program espoused by Michael Levin and Steven Hayes from the University of Nevada. In the end, ACT is an applied treatment model, and as such, it lives and dies by its ability to effectively benefit a wide variety of clients. In order to make the treatment increasingly effective and to maximize understanding about precisely how the treatment works, its tenets must be theoretically coherent, firmly based on empirically tried and true principles, and must have its active psychological processes clearly identified and sufficiently assessed. This book clearly demonstrates such a mix of full application, an appreciation of basic-applied research linkage, clear and behaviorally-consistent conceptualization of specific problem areas, and coherent explication of the ACT model. This book will not only tell you what to do with clients struggling with various problems, it will also tell you how those things work.
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Emotional Intelligence in Everyday Life
Second Edition (Jan 15, 2006)
Since the release of the very successful first edition in 2001, the field of emotional intelligence has grown in sophistication and importance. Many new and talented researchers have come into the field and techniques in EI measurement have dramatically increased so that we now know much more about the distinctiveness and utility of the different EI measures. There has also been a dramatic upswing in research that looks at how to teach EI in schools, organizations, and families.
In this second edition, leaders in the field present the most up-to-date research on the assessment and use of the emotional intelligence construct. Importantly, this edition expands on the previous by providing greater coverage of emotional intelligence interventions.
As with the first edition, this second edition is both scientifically rigorous, yet highly readable and accessible to a non-specialist audience. It will therefore be of value to researchers and practitioners in many disciplines beyond social psychology, including areas of basic research, cognition and emotion, organizational selection, organizational training, education, clinical psychology, and development psychology.
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Emotional Intelligence in Everyday Life
(Jul 2001)
What role do emotions play in human affairs? How do feelings influence our personal relationships, and our working lives? Emotional Intelligence (EI) is the ability to perceive, understand and manage emotions, a skill that is enormously important to all of us. Despite extensive recent interest in EI, we still don’t know enough about the psychology of emotional experience. This is the first book to provide an informative, comprehensive review of scientific research in the field and the ways in which EI is important in everyday life. After an introduction, the first part of the book considers fundamental issues related to EI. It discusses the development of the EI construct, its definitions and how it can be measured, as well as reviewing research concerned with the role that emotion plays in rational, intelligent thinking and behavior. The second section of the book focuses on the important applications of EI to everyday life, addressing such key questions as: * how can emotional intelligence be used to improve health, financial decisions, friendships, marriages and career success? * how can training programs in emotional intelligence be implemented in schools and in the work force? Written in an engaging and accessible style, Emotional Intelligence in Everyday Life provides a much-needed review of this important and growing field and should be of interest to laypersons, students, researchers, and practitioners alike.