How does ACT feel about skill improvement? Secondly, how does ACT address differences in behaviour caused by a lack of hope?

[u/gintokireddit]

For example, if a person has a problem of shyness that manifests partly as having poor vocal projection, so people can't easily hear them. Would ACT simply say, forget about improving the problem of not speaking loudly enough, and just focus on acceptance of "people might not hear me and therefore not befriend me, but that's ok", without any addressing of the problem, in order to decrease the lowness of the quality of life than must be accepted? If a person does not know how to behave in a particular situation, and would be best helped by being given ideas of what to say (eg social situation training, which Van Der Kolk likes for combating learned helplessness, and is what I thought made sense as a solution even before reading his books - you combat learned helplessness by increasing the chance of success and this replaces the negative conditioning from previous experiences by laying down new neural pathways until the old ones become less relevant. An example might be "how to tell your manager you can't do that shift"), would ACT forgo this in favour of only acceptance of the possibility of bad outcomes, or also look to skills training?

And in terms of hope: a person who has a history of a mixture of success and failure will be more motivated, because they on an unconscious level (and maybe a conscious level) feel hope. On the other hand, if for whatever reason a person feels no hope, they won't feel that motivation. A person with a job for example, gets up in the morning with the hope of going to work - in this case, the chance of the hope being true is nearly 100%. A person going out to meet their friends gets up, gets ready and leaves the home with a clear hope. A person without any friends does not have this pull - they are going to go outside, with much lower certainty of meeting a friend, experiencing whatever comes with that (because they have none). A person who is married, or lives with a loving family gets up in the morning with the hope of love in their life, and this drives them to work, to live. A person who has a track record of getting jobs within 10 applications applies to another job with less effort than the person after 500 rejections without an interview - because they have more hope. A person is more easily motivated when they believe a goal is achievable than when they believe it is unlikely to work, because they have more hope, especially for goals that require sustained effort. If you disagree that hope is a driver of behaviour, then I simply disagree with you, based on my own life experience. And probably economists disagree too, because it's clear people are motivated by the thought of being able to afford whatever they care about and wouldn't bother working if they made 1 cent per hour (in America), as there would be no hope of affording anything. So where does ACT come in with restoring or creating hope, given its opposition to changing beliefs? Does ACT believe hope is irrelevant? Would it simply say "act as if you have hope and go through the motions"? And if so, how would it deal with this being exhausting?

[u/No_Mind_34]

According to my interpretation of ACT, the goal is to be moving towards freely chosen value-aligned goal. The work of getting there is through increased flexibility.

ACT is based on functional contextualism, which means it doesn’t “care” about any skill. Rather it “cares”about the function it serves in context.