Evidence-Based
Trainings
for Coaches &
Clinicians
Practical, research-backed skill development you can apply the same day you learn it.
Training professionals to be better and do better.
Dr. West offers live and on-demand training programs for coaches, clinicians, and helping professionals seeking evidence-based tools for their practice.
"With deep expertise in both therapy and coaching, Dr. West's training is a rare and valuable opportunity for professionals seeking to help clients develop a more powerful relationship with their emotions and choices."
Josh HillisHead Coach & Curriculum Design, GMB Eating Skills · Author of Lean and Strong
Most coaches know that a lot more is happening in a coaching session than an exchange of words. This is also one reason AI coaching remains different from expert human coaching: AI works primarily through language, while skilled human coaches can track embodied, behavioral, relational, and contextual information—and use that information to understand the function of what is happening and shape how they use language in response.
But that human advantage isn’t automatic. While the content of a session is an essential component of effective coaching, unless a coach can track and intervene around core psychological processes, they will only be as skillful as their intuition and experience allow.
That’s why understanding how to work with psychological processes matters. Because wherever you go, your psychology goes with you. It is always shaping how you sense, feel, think and do, for better or worse. Your level of Psychological Agility reflects your capacity to respond flexibly, creatively, and effectively to experience, language, self, and choice, especially in complex, fast-changing, emotionally charged, and uncertain contexts.
When clients struggle to achieve meaningful goals or sustain performance and wellbeing, the problem is often not a lack of knowledge, talent, motivation, or opportunity. More frequently, the struggle comes from deeper patterns of reactivity, meaning-making, identity, and behavior that operate outside their awareness and constrain what they see and do. These patterns can contribute to chronic avoidance, rigidity, languishing, and poor execution.
Coaching for Psychological Agility is a six-part, evidence-based training series blending didactic and experiential instruction to equip coaches with a clear, coherent framework for working skillfully at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, performance, wellbeing, and behavior change.
Designed and led by clinical psychologist, executive coach and trainer, Dr. Aprilia West, the course introduces a process-based approach to understanding what is happening beneath the content of a coaching session. Coaches learn to work with four recursive dimensions of Psychological Agility—Experiencing, Languaging, Selfing, and Choosing—and the patterns of flexibility and rigidity that emerge within and across them.
Experiencing: how clients regulate attention, nonreactively connect with inner experience, and identify emotions
Languaging: how verbal content organizes meaning, relationships, predictions, rules, and perceived possibilities
Selfing: how clients construct and relate to a sense of self, including how flexibly they relate to different aspects, roles, narratives, experiences, and identities
Choosing: how clients decode signal from noise in moments of choice, orient toward what matters, and execute values-based decision-making
Coaching for Psychological Agility reshapes how coaches listen, frame client experience, respond to emotion, work with language, relate to the client, intervene, and support meaningful action.
Across the course, participants will practice tracking these processes in real time and using language, metaphors, and experiential exercises to enhance learning, flexibility, retention, and recall. Participants will leave the training with a concrete model and tools they can apply immediately in sessions.
Coaches will also learn to develop their own Psychological Agility as a central mechanism of effective coaching—supporting greater presence, perspective, tracking, judgment, and responsiveness to the client, the context, and the coaching relationship.
This training is sponsored by the Institute of Coaching, a McLean affiliate at Harvard Medical School. There are 9 CEUs available (pending approval by ICF).
- Explain the science behind the Psychological Agility framework: Experiencing, Languaging, Selfing, and Choosing.
- Apply Emotional Efficacy skills to help clients regulate attention, increase nonreactive contact with experience, and develop emotional fluency.
- Apply Relational Framing skills to help clients notice and examine how language constructs meaning, rules, predictions, and biases; defuse from rigid mental content; and expand perspective and possibility.
- Apply Self-As-Context skills to help clients recognize multiple levels and layers of self and loosen attachment to rigid self-stories and perceptions of identity.
- Apply Choicefulness skills to help clients clarify intentions and execute values-based action.
- Track Psychological Agility processes in real time by identifying patterns of flexibility and rigidity across Experiencing, Languaging, Selfing, and Choosing within the coaching conversation.
- Model Psychological Agility through your own Experiencing, Languaging, Selfing, and Choosing during coaching sessions.
Empower your clients to harness their emotions, design their choices, and do what matters most.
Your clients make 35,000 choices every day, and an estimated 98% of those choices are made by fast, automatic emotional reactions. Emotion efficacy is the ability — and belief in one's ability — to harness emotional experience, decode emotions, and act on what matters most. Emotional Efficacy Therapy (EET) blends ACT, DBT, and exposure therapy into a brief, experiential protocol that helps clients learn to respond intentionally to emotion triggers and take values-aligned action. An estimated 75% of therapy clients struggle with low emotion efficacy, making this training essential for accelerating client results. A growing body of research shows EET significantly increases emotion regulation and distress tolerance while reducing anxiety, depression, trauma symptoms, and addiction relapse rates.
- 7 learning modules with video instruction and recorded demos
- 40+ NEW handouts and worksheets ready to use with clients
- Instructional decks for individual, group, or training settings
- Access to guided online emotional efficacy practice
- Optional live practice sessions to build confidence
- Reference handouts, homework prompts, and experiential scripts
- Decode emotion triggers (defaults + values)
- Observe and label emotional "STUF" (Sensations, Thoughts, Urges, Feelings)
- Help clients surf emotion waves instead of reacting
- Clarify and act on values in moments of choice
- Regulate emotions to act on what matters most
- Track the function of actions using the WTF? inquiry
- Practice skills in an activated state so learning sticks
- Recognize common presentations of low emotion efficacy
- Identify underlying psychological processes that inhibit effectiveness
A 1-day training taking you through the complete ACT model using process-based cognitive-behavioral strategies.
Getting stuck when working with psychologically inflexible clients is common. Despite powerful clinical tools, progress can feel minimal. This happens because you need to know not just WHAT to do, but HOW to create the context for transformation. Psychological flexibility is the ability to maintain an open, curious, skillful relationship with experience while adapting to situational demands and staying focused on what matters most. Research across over 1,000 trials shows psychological flexibility improves physical and mental health, workplace performance, self-efficacy, resilience, and team dynamics.
Skews, R., West, A., Archer, R. (2021). Acceptance and Commitment Coaching in the Workplace. In: Positive Psychology Coaching in the Workplace. Springer, Cham. · Archer, Rob et al. (2024). Increasing workforce psychological flexibility through organization-wide training. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 33, 100799.
- Identify core underlying processes related to mental health and wellbeing
- Distinguish between the 6 psychological flexibility processes in the ACT hexaflex model
- Apply "open" skills to address experiential avoidance
- Utilize "aware" skills to address cognitive fusion and self-as-content
- Demonstrate "engage" skills to address lack of meaning and purposeful action
- Conduct experiential exercises to enhance learning, retention, and recall
- Work with anxiety, depression, emotional dysregulation, trauma/PTSD, and compulsive behaviors
Elevate your coaching practice with a powerful process-based approach for increasing wellbeing and performance.
For too long, psychology has focused on helping people feel better by eliminating discomfort. But wellbeing and performance don't depend on feeling good. People with high psychological flexibility can face difficult emotions and do hard things that matter. This live 3-part training series teaches cutting-edge, evidence-based interventions to help your clients increase psychological flexibility. Even if you're new to psychological flexibility, this program provides the theory, application, and practice you need to use it with clients immediately. Space is limited to the first 15 participants. A limited number of scholarships are available for coaches working in developing nations.
- New handouts and worksheets with diagrams, reflections, and experiential exercises
- Instructional decks for individual, group, or training settings
- Live coaching demos to observe skills in action
- Experiential partner practice in breakout rooms
- Define psychological flexibility and its core components
- Design goals using the principle of "workability"
- Apply mindfulness skills to increase emotion awareness and acceptance
- Apply mental agility skills to increase defusion and flexible selfing
- Apply "meaningful move" skills to increase values-based action
- Track psychological flexibility processes with clients in-session
- Design behavioral experiments to increase psychological flexibility
- Model psychological flexibility as a co-created context
Registration is currently closed. Register your interest and you'll be first to know when the next cohort opens.
A novel parts work approach integrating ACT and IFS to increase psychological flexibility.
Workshop
Working with different parts of ourselves is an effective way to improve how we relate to our Self. When parts are more clearly differentiated, we can integrate sometimes conflicting — and sometimes harmonious — interests and desires to become more psychologically flexible. Flexible Selfing is a non-pathologizing approach that takes a "no bad parts" stance. By exploring the functional nature of parts in context, clients learn to integrate aspects of themselves with awareness and compassion — leading to increased choicefulness. This 2-session workshop integrates a contextual behavioral view of the self (ACT) with parts work (IFS). Includes didactic instruction, experiential practice, live demos, and Q&A.
- Define psychological flexibility and the 3 levels of selfing
- Describe the relationship between selfing and psychological flexibility
- Identify the values-based function of parts and behavior in context
- Identify and name parts using method acting techniques
- Use experiential exercises to integrate experience and mobilize values-based action
- Help clients see their self as multi-leveled, multi-perspective, and integrated
Registration is currently closed. Register your interest for the next opening.
A 4-hour introductory training teaching how to help clients develop more powerful relationships with their emotions and choices.
Cohort
Helping clients be skillful with their emotions is fundamental to coaching. Yet there's a lack of training in the coaching field about the role of emotion and how to work with it responsibly. Many coaches avoid emotion work because they lack skills or worry about overstepping ethical bounds. An estimated 38% of coaching clients struggle with low emotion efficacy. Unless you've learned the fundamentals of emotion psychology and concrete skills, you're unlikely to help clients tap their full potential. This course is grounded in contextual behavioral science and positive psychology, designed to help you develop an ethical, trauma-informed, evidence-based approach to emotion work in coaching.
- Certificate of completion
- PDF download of client-ready materials
- Access to on-demand experiential practice
- Distinguish working with emotion in coaching versus therapy
- Describe the role of emotions in the psychology of wellbeing and performance
- Distinguish emotional signals from emotional defaults
- Describe the 4 core skills for expanding emotional efficacy
- Develop increased confidence in evoking and processing emotion with clients
- Execute ethical, trauma-informed emotion work
- Screen clients for emotion work requiring clinical expertise
This course will be available again in 2026. Sign up and you'll be first to know when the cohort opens.
What practitioners are saying
Dr. West is an exceptionally skilled and effective trainer, engaging participants in a warm, curious, and playful way. She teaches clear, powerful approaches for helping clients navigate difficult emotional states. Her combination of didactic instruction and experiential practice meant I could quickly integrate the interventions into my practice.
This was the best ACT training I've taken. Dr. West offered an accessible, engaging introduction to psychological flexibility and its distinction from traditional CBT, making ACT easy to understand and apply. I highly recommend this training for anyone interested in becoming an ACT therapist or sharpening their ACT skills.
Dr. West is an engaging, skillful and dynamic trainer. Her balance of didactic-style teaching and experiential exercises helped me stay present, consolidate what I was learning, and apply new skills immediately. I've successfully used her EET skills with clients in my private practice, and found her EET book to be an essential reference.
With deep experience in both therapy and coaching, Dr. West's EET training is a rare and valuable opportunity. The structure is clear and immediately useful for clients, while the session flow and experiential process provide a powerful toolbox for coaches. Dr. West is adept at teaching the protocol and demonstrating its flexible application in real-time practice.
Questions about
which training is right for you?
Let's talk. Reach out to schedule a conversation.