Coaching practices for Metacognitive Therapy at Work

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Metacognitive Therapy at Work, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• Some part of me secretly believes that if I keep turning the problem over I’m being responsible, that the worrying is somehow protecting me
• My anxiety feels like this random fog that descends and proof that something’s just wrong with me
• I keep working on the things I worry about and it never helps, and I think I’m aiming at the wrong target
• When I try to untangle one of these convictions in my head it just spins
• My attention feels welded to the inside of my own head

Practices that may help

1. Metacognitive Therapy, Made Practical
   Metacognitive therapy (MCT), developed by Adrian Wells, targets not the content of negative thoughts but the beliefs people hold about thinking itself — particularly the beliefs that worry and rumination are useful or uncontrollable. By changing these meta-level beliefs, MCT aims to stop the prolonged self-focused thinking styles that maintain anxiety and depression. A growing body of randomized controlled trials supports MCT as effective for GAD, PTSD, depression, and social anxiety, with some studies showing superiority to CBT.
2. Use improved attention to observe metacognitive beliefs
   Apply attentional control to notice — without engaging — the beliefs that drive overthinking.
   Attention Training Technique (ATT), Made Practical
3. Metacognition: Knowing What You Actually Know
   Metacognition is thinking about your own thinking — monitoring what you understand, judging how well you know it, and adjusting your approach in response. Research links accurate metacognition to better learning and decisions, but it also shows people are systematically overconfident, so the practical work is calibration: closing the gap between what you feel you know and what you can actually do.
4. Build a personal MCT case conceptualization
   Map your own vicious-cycle: trigger → positive meta-belief activates CAS → negative meta-belief sustains it → distress.
   Metacognitive Therapy, Made Practical
5. Identify your meta-beliefs about worry and rumination
   Surface the beliefs that keep you worrying or ruminating — "worry helps," "I can’t stop," "thinking it through will fix it."
   Metacognitive Therapy, Made Practical
6. Use a challenging beliefs worksheet to work a stuck point completely
   The CPT challenging beliefs worksheet is a structured, written process for examining one stuck point at a time.
   Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT): Unsticking the Meanings That Maintain PTSD
7. Attention training technique (ATT)
   Practice deliberately shifting attention across sounds — a drill that builds attention flexibility and reduces self-focus.
   Metacognitive Therapy, Made Practical
8. Situational attentional refocusing: shift from self to situation
   In anxiety-provoking situations, actively redirect attention outward — to the task, the other person, the environment.
   Metacognitive Therapy, Made Practical
9. Action plans for low mood: if-then plans for the early warning signs
   Build a specific "if mood dips to X, I will do Y" plan before mood declines so it is ready when needed.
   Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Made Practical
10. Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Made Practical
    MBCT is an 8-week group program developed by Segal, Williams, and Teasdale that combines mindfulness meditation with cognitive therapy techniques to prevent depressive relapse. Multiple independent meta-analyses find it significantly reduces relapse risk in people with three or more prior depressive episodes — the evidence base is among the strongest for any mindfulness-based intervention.

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.