ACT for Beginners
Join Dr Russ Harris in this absorbing six-week course, and learn how to help your clients reduce suffering and build meaningful lives with Acceptance & Commitment Therapy.
About the course
Start date
Starts 10 March 2026Time
16hrs | 6 weeksWho this course is for
For Mental Health Professionals, Health Professionals & CoachesAccreditation
16 CE/CMEDo you ever feel frustrated, stuck, or overwhelmed, trying to support your clients in the face of their problems and suffering? Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) offers a creative, compassionate, mindfulness-based approach, to help your clients break free from their struggles, be kinder to themselves, and move forwards with their lives, guided by core values.
Join world-renowned ACT trainer Russ Harris as he brings Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to life in this interactive, online course. Russ will guide you step-by-step through the ACT model with humour and clarity, turning complex ideas into practical skills you can use in session.
$440
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ACT for Beginners
Learn ACT with Dr Russ Harris
Dr Russ Harris, the world’s most popular ACT trainer, makes ACT simple: easy to understand, straightforward to apply, in a format that's fun, engaging and inspiring.
Russ is the author of ACT Made Simple, the world’s best-selling textbook on the ACT model. A physician, psychotherapist, and world-leading authority on ACT, Russ is also a consultant to the World Health Organization. Although he’s written numerous books on ACT, the best known is The Happiness Trap, which has sold over 1.5 million copies. Find out more about Russ here.
Feel Supported as You Build Practical ACT Skills
Russ’s intensely practical program gives you complete flexibility to learn the art of ACT, whenever it suits you. You can zip through the whole training in just six weeks - or go more slowly, learn in depth, and let it sink in over months.
The course also includes a whole warehouse of powerful resources you simply won’t find anywhere else:
beautifully crafted video lessons,
humorous animations,
dynamic therapy sessions,
inspiring audio recordings,
uplifting eBooks,
and a stack of useful client handouts.
And you can ask questions, share experiences, and obtain feedback and support directly from Russ Harris, via our interactive forum.
Learn Simple, Effective ACT Approaches
This entire course has been carefully designed with our professional learners in mind, to ensure that you gain a comprehensive and practical grounding in the theory of ACT, which you can immediately put into practice with your clients or patients. You’ll learn how to:
Build authentic, compassionate, supportive therapeutic relationships
Interrupt and undermine rumination, worrying and obsessing
Foster a deep, genuine connection with values, for motivation, inspiration, and fulfilment
Shift from self-judgment to self-compassion (even when clients claim they ‘don’t deserve it’)
Take the power out of difficult thoughts, beliefs, rules, and judgments - without ever needing to challenge or dispute them
Take the power out of difficult feelings, emotions, urges and memories – without any attempt to escape, avoid, distract, or suppress.
Set clients free from inertia, indecision and hopelessness
Teach the art of ‘mindfulness on the go’: easy-to-do practices to focus and engage without meditation
Enable clients to access a transcendent sense of self
Dissolve procrastination and overcome barriers to change
Apply ACT effectively with a wide variety of clinical problems
‘Dance’ flexibly between core ACT processes in session, creatively adapting them as you go
Apply ACT to yourself, on your own stresses and struggles, to prevent burnout and make your work fulfilling. This not only gives you confidence in the model, but also authenticity with your clients!
Course Format & Suitability
For the first six weeks of course access, you’ll get 2-3 hours of new content each week (sixteen hours in total). And for the first twelve weeks, you can directly interact with Russ, via the forum - asking questions, sharing breakthroughs, getting feedback and support.
This course is suitable for therapists, counsellors, doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers, coaches, and any other health professional. You can do it at any point in your career, whether you’re just starting out or highly experienced. You’ll learn the basics of ACT, in a fluid and flexible way, so you can use it as a stand-alone model, or combine it with other models you’ve trained in.
There are 16 CE/CME credits available for this course (see Learner Notification).
Enrollments
We're happy to help if you can't attend the current intake. Please contact our customer service once your purchase is finalized, and we can enroll you in the intake of your choice. If you need an invoice, please fill out the form here.
What You'll Learn
Course Goals
- Get versatile with values and dance around with defusion
- Discover five powerful tools to develop and strengthen psychological acceptance
- Create focus, flexibility and fulfilment through contacting the present moment
- Empower through acceptance and liberate through self-as-context
- Ten powerful ways to rapidly reduce the believability of negative thoughts (without ever challenging them)
- Seven surefire techniques to get to values
- Learn the art of mindfulness without meditation and how to innovate your own mindfulness techniques
Course modules
Course excerpts
How Your Course Works
Frequently asked questions