Steven C. Hayes

The first is Reimagining ACT in Rhode Island, December 12th and 13th, 2026 at Bryant University.

This is a two-a-day event with Stephen Hayes, who's going to be focused on the future of ACT, process-based therapy, and the extended evolutionary metamodel, or EEMM.

Try saying that three times fast.

This training is especially exciting because it's going to look at ACT not simply through a traditional hexaflex, but through a broader process-based frame.

After that, the next event is the ACT Integrated Process-Based Act Across Schools and Methods in Los Angeles in February of 2027.

Sounds like a pretty cool event.

This training is also Stephen Hayes and focuses on the use of the extended psychological flexibility model to integrate across the schools and their methods.

So we're going to figure out how to apply this to a school system.

And here's the third piece.

A psychologist called Steven Hayes developed something called the acceptance and commitment theory, and the research behind it shows there is a difference between having a thought and being a thought.

When you say, "I am the woman with the abandonment wound," the wound becomes you.

When you say, "I notice I am having a thought that I am the woman with the abandonment wound," suddenly there's space, and that's how we can then become the CEO that actually runs the intelligence system rather than it becoming part of the system, that our abandonment wound take over us.

It's interesting, we've had conversations with psychologists.

One is, uh, Steven C. Hayes, the originator of ACT-

Yeah

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And the commercial cost shows up as people who quietly stop bringing you the decisions you claim you want them to bring.

So let's just talk a little bit about acceptance and commitment theory, which was designed by Steven Hayes, a psychologist, and he describes values as directions and goals as destinations, and you can arrive at a goal and tick it off, but you can never complete a value because the value is the direction that you keep choosing to travel in.

And this is a distinction that really helped me get some clarity around this, and it also helped me explore what freedom actually means to me as a directive rather than a phrase.

And I realized that I had welded my values to one particular arrangement.

Sure.

So I guess as a start with Steve Hayes, he's considered the originator of ACT, and he developed it along with colleagues in the 1980s.

Originally, it was called comprehensive distancing because it was focused on one primary process, which is cognitive diffusion, which we can get into later.

And then later and then gradually he developed the model and integrated different processes into the model throughout the 80s and early 90s.

I've had a few opportunities to go to, you know, some of, some of the more efficiency focused companies of our time and talk to people who are just absolutely in love with the idea of, uh- Optimization ... optimization and how can I, you know, get the most out of or be the most efficient, effective in my life.

But what I share with them, and, and I mentioned this to you earlier, is I talk about s- some of the work, um, from Dr. Steven Hayes around acceptance and commitment therapy.

And Dr. Steven Hayes is one of, uh, sort of like a living legend forefather when you talk about, um, psychology.

And he's someone that when I first learned about ACT, is what they call it, um, I, I thought, "Wow, this is as close as it gets to, like, cognitive behavior therapy that also allows me to have a purpose in life and can be mindful." And one of the activities that we do with some of these high-level executives to get them to- Reflect ...

reflect and maybe even, and I think it could come across boring at first, is to choose from a list of values that they would wanna hear, things that they would wanna hear said about them at their eulogy, which some of them, uh, just won't do it.

That was her heroic vow, and she has honored that through the creation of DBT, dialectical behavior therapy.

In our last episode, we talked about Steven Hayes' acceptance and commitment therapy.

Well, dialectical behavior therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy are both third wave cognitive behavioral therapy modalities, and they're very, very similar.

They were created for different purposes.

Marsha for suicidal ideation, et cetera.

And for Steven Hayes, he had panic attacks.

Same thing.

The hero struggles.

It's not saying, "Oh, I'm accepting this, so I'm not seeking to change it." From our conversation that we had ages ago with Dr.

Steve Hayes, who's the creator of acceptance and commitment therapy, uh, he had this great quote in it.

"What we're talking about here is not tolerance or resignation.

Acceptance is to receive as if a gift." And I think that that's probably the simplest way to put it, to receive something as if a gift.

Um, and then other...

So there was EFT and then, um, Steven Hayes' Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

So none of these are the same as Gestalt therapy.

Mm-hmm.