Scroll down the page to learn about Acceptance and Commitment Training and Therapy (ACT), The ACT Matrix, The ProSocial Matrix, and much more. But first, let's start with a bit of stress relief...

Steps 1-3 are for quick stress relief.

What's going on in steps 1,2 & 3?

You are getting out of your head just a bit, and that's where your "stress" is for the most part.

You are usually not in physical danger. Your five senses tell you that you are in a safe place.

However, your mind is always thinking about possible dangers. These imagined dangers are the source of your stress.

So whenever you pick up your phone (or any other object) and experience it, you are getting out of your head a bit.

Then, when you use your imagination to experience the object, you are not focusing on stressful stuff for a few moments.

It turns out that getting really good at noticing the difference between your sensory and mental experiencing is very important for stress relief.

Repeat steps 1, 2 and 3 often.

Continue to Step 4 for Long-Term Stress Management

What's going on in Steps 4 through 10? I'm glad you asked!

In step 4 you answer the question, "Who's important to you?" Everyone who reads that question starts to imagine who's important to them. Since these people are very related to your valued living, you are now focused on part of the quest for valued living.

Step 5: In your quest to move toward who's important to you, fears are one of your major obstacles.

You could create a slideshow, poster, or whiteboard presentation. The possibilities are infinite.

The first loop is the traditional ACT Matrix, the first ten steps on this page.

Steps 1 through 10 (the ACT Matrix) target psychological flexibility.

Psychological Flexibility is defined as being able to have unwanted thoughts and feelings, like fear, while moving toward who (or what's) important.

Psychological Inflexibility is trying to "deal with" the unwanted stuff and never really getting around to moving toward who's important.

The second loop is the ProSocial Matrix (steps 11 through 14). Those steps target Psychological Safety.

Psychological Safety is defined as being able to speak your mind without fear (or at least not much fear).

You have probably been in groups where you did not feel comfortable speaking up;  you felt low Psychological Safety.

Workplaces with low psychological safety are very stressful. This stress leads to poor health, low productivity and high employee turnover.

It's sometimes called the Workability model, but the technical name is Functional Contextualism.

Note: The diagram was first drawn to help explain Functional Contextualism.

The horizontal line represents Action.

The Vertical line represents Context.

Thus, you are looking at "The action in context," which is the root metaphor of functional contextualism.

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We then at the "workability" question.

That means you always come back to the question, "Is this behavior working to move me toward the life I want to be living?"

In this model both internal and external behaviors count. So your thoughts, feelings and urges count as actions along with the usual observable behaviors. 

Thus you can ask the workability question about internal stuff:

• thoughts, e.g., "Is this thought working for the life that I want?" 
• feelings, e.g., "Is this feeling working for the life that I want?"
• urges, e.g., "Is this urge working for the life that I want?"

As well as observable stuff like walking, talking, etc.

If you carefully NOTICE the results of your internal and external behaviors, then you will quickly learn what works.

The problem is that most humans get stuck in their heads and forget to notice if stuff is working for the life that they want.

While there are lots of ways to help people get out of their heads and noticing what works...

...the ACT Matrix is easy, fast and effective.

If you've made it this far down the page, then you must be ready for some geeky stuff :-)

Above, in the Philosophy section, I mentioned people getting stuck in their heads.

Relational Frame Theory (RFT) works at explaining how people get stuck in their heads.

Basically, humans are very good at relating thoughts, feelings and urges to sounds uttered by humans.

Let's take the word D-O-G. You know it as a four-legged creature that barks, wags its tail, etc. If you have had a life of pleasant experiences with dogs, when you hear the sound "dog" you have those pleasant memories.

According to RFT, this relating is how all language works.

Think about daydreaming. You conjure up words and images and have a pleasant (or maybe unpleasant) daydream.

Why? Because it's as if the stuff were really happening in the real world. You can literally go into a daydream and forget the real world around you.

However, if you think about it, we all spend of time daydreaming. The daydream might last just a few seconds, but the emotions related to it can stick around for a long time.

For Example:

"I'm not good enough" is a brief (and unpleasant) daydream we all have from time to time. All kinds of mental images related to "I'm not good enough" show up in an instant, and then stick around for hours.

For much of that time you will be living in your head and not in your five senses.

The problem is that while in your head, your not learning what works for living the life you want. Instead, you're mucking around with the yucky stuff related to the words, "I'm not good enough."

ACT (and the ACT Matrix) work to get you out of your head and noticing what works.

The basic "unsticking" process is called Defusion. That's not a misspelling. RFT shows how we can get too Fused with some words. Those are the words that are most likely to get you stuck in your head.

The ACT Matrix almost instantly works at getting you less fused, or Defused, from those sticky words.

Go back up and look at Step 2... You will notice that it asked you about stuff, like Stress, that can show up and get in the way. 

The simple process of identifying that stress and other emotions can get in the way of moving toward who's important is defusing. In other words, you thinking of stress in a new way.

Also, if you write the stuff down in the lower, left of the Matrix, that's even more defusing. You are literally having STRESS and writing it down.

The ACT Matrix Works whether you know this technical stuff or not.

She showed that workgroups could self-manage without bosses, executives, etc.

As a matter of fact, lots of research shows that things in organizations go much better when there are no "bosses." 

Owners, executives, and supervisors don't want to hear that, but Ostrom showed that it's true. She really set the economic world on its head. The old boys club was angry that she won the prize.

With all of that said, even traditional organizations with executives and supervisors can benefit from Ostrom's work; they can let teams within the hierarchical organization operate as if they had no bosses.

The most important finding from Ostrom (and many others) is that a workgroup needs to be clear on shared purposes. Sadly, this is the number one problem that most organization have.

Most don't have a clear set of purposes written down. If they do, then most people in the organization don't know about them.

Without clear purposes people go into their head and make them up. (See the RFT section above.) The problem is that everyone makes up slightly (or very) different purposes and things become a mess.

The organization may succeed, but it's a clunky success with an unhappy workforce.

Most organization run this way, and it's much of the reason why 60 to 80% of the people in the western world dislike or hate where they work.

Why don't organizations clearly communicate shared purposes? That's a big question, but most of it boils down to the fact that humans tend to live in their heads and not in the real world.

Executives and managers can "see" the shared purposes in their heads, and they assume that others "see" the same ones. This works well enough for a lot of companies to make it, but many don't.

The other problem is that coming up with and then communicating shared purposes seems hard. (Yes, that "seems hard" comes from inside the head.) When somethings seems hard to do, then humans tend to avoid doing it. It seems easier just to assume and keep muddling along.

The ProSocial Matrix makes sharing purposes relatively easy, as you can see in Step 11 above.

While all of Ostrom's 8 design principles for successful groups are important, the main ones that show up in our consulting are:

• Monitoring
• Conflict Resolution
• Equal Distribution of Costs and Benefits
• Collaborative Decision Making

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Below you will see the Spoke Diagram. I thought up this diagram when it occurred to me that the Matrix had four lines, so doubling the lines would give one each for Ostrom's 8.

Then I made each of the lines into a Likert (0 to 10) scale to teams could rate how they are doing on each dimension.

Groups of people are outstanding at coming up with great and wise ideas and implementing them.

However, groups of people can also become bogged down in a bunch of mindy stuff that gets in the way of wise decisions.

ProSocial Matrix Trainers work with organizations to get them psychologically flexible and feeling psychologically safe.

In a flexible and safe context people are now primed up for making wise decisions.

Of course wise decisions need a direction, and that's where Shared Purposes shine. They align the teams problem solving and efforts.

The team also needs to be carefully monitoring the results of their efforts. Behaviors that don't work need to be modified or stopped. New behaviors may need to be created and monitored.

That basically, "coming up with purpose-directed behaviors and then monitoring how they work" is the essence of the ProSocial Matrix...

...The Workability Model (see above) applied to workgroups.