Being Agency Flourishing
By Mark R. Davis
Most psychotherapy is organised around symptom reduction. A person arrives with anxiety, or a phobia, or insomnia, and therapy succeeds when the symptom score comes down.
That matters, and Hypno-CBT® does that work directly. But a shorter list of symptoms is a strange place for a model of human beings to stop. People are not who they think they are, and their sense of what they can do is, in nearly every case, far too small. A model of change should have something to say about both.
Being Agency Flourishing (BAF) is our answer: the model of human change and growth within which Hypno-CBT® now works. It describes where therapy starts, what it builds, and what it is ultimately for.
The model in one view
The whole of it can be said in three movements:
I Am and I Can
I Value
I Act, Connect and Flourish
Two fundamentals, felt before any word: rest into being and discover you are already whole; feel your own capability. Then the reflective work: find what you actually care about, underneath what you were trained to care about. Then move into life, with other people, connect and flourish.
Spoken as a progression, the model runs: I Am, I Can, I Value, I Act, I Connect, I Flourish.
Being: I Am
The first movement is rest. Complete rest, of body and mind together.
This is not watching your thoughts. Watching is still activity, still a doer doing. This is Being: doing less, then doing nothing, and resting into the feeling of yourself when you are not doing anything at all.
You can test the doorway to it now. Relax your jaw and let your mouth drop open. The thinking slows. That is not a coincidence: inner speech is a motor act, built on the same muscles as talking, and when the machinery of talking settles, so does the chatter.
What people discover in that stillness is not emptiness. Silent fullness. A sense of being momentarily whole, complete, with nothing missing and nothing to perform.
Therapy that begins here begins differently. The worry, the self-blame, the discouragement are not argued with first; they are allowed to dissolve into stillness, so the person can feel, even momentarily, that underneath the noise they were never broken.
Agency: I Can
We cannot stay in Being. Inside the stillness something stirs: the urge to know the world, to move, to explore. And the moment the world calls us out, a question arises with it: can I handle this?
The felt sense of “I Can” has a name in psychology, self-efficacy, and it is one of the most robustly established concepts in the field. Self-efficacy beliefs shape what goals we set, how long we persist, and how we respond to setbacks, with effects documented across education, work, health and sport (Bandura, 1997; see note 1).
Two things follow for therapy.
First, agency starts closer to home than most people think. A thought is something that happens to you. Thinking is something you do. And something you are doing, you can do differently, or slow down, or stop. Recovering that ownership (of attention, of self-talk, of the tension held in the body) is the first rung of self-efficacy, which is why self-regulation of attention and emotion is the first skill we teach.
Second, self-belief is built, not talked into existence. There is a well-established series of steps for building it, rung by rung: succeed at something small, then something larger, and let the evidence accumulate until “I can” is a memory rather than a hope.
I Value
Freedom and agency to do what?
All good therapy and coaching involves a deep inquiry into values. An inquiry that goes past the social pleasing and the rules for living that have taken root in us. What do we really want to do? What do we want our life to be about?
Here the model recognises that we do not just have agency over action. We have agency over meaning. We are storytellers about our own lives, and most of us are running stories we never chose. Part of the work is asking, honestly: are these the stories I want? And then beginning, deliberately, to author better ones.
I Act, Connect and Flourish
The final movement is outward, and the obstacle to it has a name: inhibition. The holding back from our own natural, immediate responses.
Inhibition disconnects us from the world and from other people. It splits feeling from action, hides who we are and what we feel, and drains the immediacy from experience. Some of what presents as anxiety or low mood can involve this kind of holding back, practised over years.
So the later work of therapy is disinhibition: noticing the habit of hesitation, control and editing, and letting emotion flow back into expression and behaviour. Therapy is not talking about your feelings. It is learning, or rather re-learning, to talk with feeling.
What that opens into is connection: people know us, and we know ourselves. And connection is what flourishing is made of. A person on their own ground. Capability felt. Values their own. Feeling flowing into action, out loud, among other people.
Flourish can also mean living with your own style, your own flourish. That is intended too.
Imagination runs through all three movements
One idea runs beneath the whole model.
When we imagine, we are not looking at pictures on an inner screen. We are running a simulation of first-person experience: multi-sensory, three-dimensional, as-if-there. It is private rehearsal of behaviour, and the body treats it as rehearsal.
That is why the model takes self-talk so seriously. We are constantly suggesting things to ourselves and then living as if those suggestions were true. Left unattended, that running commentary works like negative self-hypnosis. So the work begins with dehypnosis (taking the power away from the self-hypnotising chatter) and proceeds by using the same faculty deliberately: rehearsing new responses in imagination until they become available in life.
The model’s central proposal, argued at length in the accompanying essays and held open to the research as it develops, is that imagination in this sense is the primary route by which people change. Hypnosis, understood properly, is that faculty used strategically: focused attention brought deliberately to the central mechanism of change.
How BAF relates to Hypno-CBT®
BAF does not replace the established foundations of Hypno-CBT®. It organises them and gives them a direction.
The toolkit maps onto the movements. Relaxation training, stillness practice and attention training serve I Am. Skills training, graded exposure and structured success serve I Can. Values inquiry and narrative work serve I Value. Assertiveness training, expression and behavioural experiments serve I Act and I Connect. The clinical base remains what it has always been: the evidence-supported integration of hypnosis, CBT and mindfulness described in What Is Hypno-CBT®, resting on the cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy tradition.
The difference BAF makes is to the measure of success. The measure is not only a shorter list of symptoms. It is an increased horizon of sensed possibilities: more rooms you can enter, more things you can say, more of life offering itself to you as possible.
What is established, and what is developmental
We want to be precise about the standing of the claims on this page.
Established, on independent evidence: the self-efficacy literature (Bandura and decades of meta-analytic support); the relaxation and inhibition tradition running from Jacobson and Salter into modern practice; the evidence for integrating hypnosis with CBT (two meta-analyses, 1995 and 2021, on our research page); values work and attention training as effective components across therapies.
Developmental, and stated as such: the BAF architecture itself (the three movements and their sequence); the horizon of sensed possibilities as an outcome measure; the model’s account of imagination as the primary route of change. These are being worked out in practice, in teaching and in writing, and this page will change as they firm up.
Applications
In therapy, BAF gives symptom work a direction beyond the symptom, and gives longer work its map. In the training of therapists, it is why personal development sits inside the curriculum rather than beside it: you cannot take a client to ground you have never stood on. In coaching and education, the same movements apply without a presenting problem: rest, capability, values, expression.
Where this is going
The model is being developed in the open, with a longer, exploratory version in our essay series on Substack. This page is the reference version: we update it when the model changes, and date each update.
Last updated: November 2026.
Note 1. Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. W. H. Freeman. Foundational paper: Bandura (1977), Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. Cross-domain meta-analytic support: Multon et al. (1991, education); Stajkovic & Luthans (1998, work); Sheeran et al. (2016, health).