Before I begin I want to give a shout out to Jordan Harris, who is a counsellor in the United states. He’s big on Deliberate Practice (DP), so of course I already think he’s a cool cat. He’s a really nice guy, generous with his time and a clever duck who is clearly passionate about helping others, but also about improving his own effectiveness in therapy. He has a smooth writing style that presents his ideas in a refreshingly simple way, as he laser’s in on how to do therapy better. If you’re into this kind of thing then I highly recommend his blog, which I came across a couple of weeks ago (he has a YouTube channel too).

Up until now my blog posts have focused on sharing the outcome of my DP process and system, not the system itself. This is because I have been figuring out the system along the way, it was not until recently that my DP system became fully operational. I’m now a proud admiral Tarkin with a fully operational Death Star (yeah I’m a Star Wars fan). I’m not going to use my DP system to destroy Alderaan though, I’m not that kind of guy. Instead I decided to start sharing my DP system and the lessons I have learnt over the last year and a half; in the hopes it would help you in your own DP journey. I’ll hunt for the Rebels on Hoth later…

Before I continue it’s important for you to know that my coach, Nathan Castle, helped me realise that DP is indeed helping me become a more effective therapist, which is exactly what I want! I already figured this to be true based on the qualitative feedback I was getting from clients. I know DP can be a bugger sometimes, so there’s no way I would have kept it up if it was not working!

I have tracked my outcome statistics using the FIT outcomes software for over a year now and in reviewing my outcome stats Nathan observed that my average number of sessions has increased over time. At the end of October 2021 my average number of sessions with clients was 6.71, month over month since then it has increased to 11.54! This suggests that client engagement has noticeably increased since I started DP.

So why did I choose DP in the first place? Well as you may know I didn’t start taking DP practice seriously until I read this book. In it the author’s outline the research over the decades demonstrating that therapists are definitely effective, but the kicker is that we’re not good at becoming more effective, despite the common belief to the contrary.

It’s natural to think that in doing so much professional development training, supervision, reading, having our own therapy and becoming more experienced would lead us to better outcomes. Nope – the research is telling us that these common ways of professional development don’t help us get better outcomes. Which is kind of a bummer, because we spend so much time and effort doing these things. If this has peaked your interest and you want to learn more about the proposed ‘whys’ that we’re not getting better outcomes, then definitely check out the above mentioned book. It’s not to say that these forms of development are not important or helpful, but if you’re looking to improve as a therapist, these won’t get you there.

So what about Deliberate Practice then? Surprise, surprise; Scott Miller and co have been unearthing research findings to suggest that DP can help us achieve better outcomes over time, but it’s a marathon, not a quick-fix. The effect size I believe for DP on client outcomes is approximately 0.3 on average, which is obviously small, but hey it’s better than not at all.

I look at it this way – I have been a Psychologist for years now and went through the 5+1 program. Just like all of you I’ve done oodles of reading, supervision and attended training. I even did a beginner’s course in ACT therapy last year. I enjoyed these things but do you think my outcomes increased? All these lead to a big fat change of 0% when it came to client outcomes. I know this because my average number of sessions has sat around 6 on average since I became a fully registered Psych, it wasn’t until my DP journey started last year that the number has dramatically increased!

So what the heck is Deliberate Practice anyway? Basically it’s the argument that a pathway to better outcomes, is to practice our therapy craft just like athletes practice their sport or musicians practice their music. The late and great godfather of DP, K. Anders Ericsson, was the first to discover that DP sets great musicians and athletes apart from the rest of the pack. Essentially the greats have a system of practice and development, they don’t just wing it and they don’t just focus on their performances.

You might be thinking – “wait hold up, I have numerous sessions a day, wouldn’t that count as practice?”. Unfortunately the research suggests it doesn’t work that way. Basically the argument is that giving someone a therapy session is more like playing a match in sports, as opposed being in a training session. Therapy sessions are more performance than development.

Ok – so what’s involved in DP? You need 4 overall ingredients for a system of DP:

1. Feedback
2. Individualised learning objectives
3. A coach
4. Successive refinement

I’ll elaborate on the 4 parts of the system in later blog posts, but seriously if you’re still reading this post, I would pause right now, buy the better results book and come back. I’ll wait. You’ll get a far deeper run down on DP in therapy, there’s no point in me just rewriting the book.

This all might be sounding pretty good so far! If you’re like me chances are learning about DP will get you pretty motivated to give it a whirl and that’s great!

Whether you’re a regular reader of my blog or not, chances are you already know that that the most significant barrier to DP is that it’s pretty damn tricky to initiate and even harder to sustain. My #1 all time lesson in DP is that the biggest challenge you’ll face in attempting DP will be your brains near constant desire to take the path of least resistance – which is to not do DP.

Already we can start to appreciate the cognitive dissonance that occurs in considering taking up DP. On one hand we want to consider ourselves as evidence lead practitioners, with said evidence pointing to DP being the only current way we know to improve our outcomes as therapists, but on the other hand it’s super easy to put DP into the infamous too hard box.

DP has the tendency to make us feel vulnerable and weak because it gets us looking at our blind-spots and weaknesses. Doing that is never pleasant and it’s completely natural to want to stop and give up so that we feel confident again, doing so after all is a survival instinct that we all have.

What I want to help you learn is that when the going gets tough in DP, there are ways to make it easier and that you’ll never have to walk alone. Why? Because you deserve it, I know you would put so much effort into being a good therapist, so lets help each other do the things that actually us become better and more effective therapists. There are so many established DP communities out there to join and ask an endless number of questions. All you have to do is check out my resources page to find them. The single best thing you can do to sustain your DP efforts is intertwine yourself with a communal and supportive DP environment, so do yourself a favour, join those Facebook groups and start asking questions.

There is more than one winnie-the pooh out there to offer you a balloon when the going gets tough.

This brings me again to why I am shifting my blog to share my DP process and lessons. I want to see if I can help you break DP down to the point where you can take it out of the too hard box. I can be impossibly stubborn – I know that we can make DP work for you, we just have to find the right buttons to push. I believe and hope that I can share ways of making accessing DP easier, as one of the best ways to counteract the path of least resistance is to make something simpler. I’ve had to do this to make my own DP journey possible, I wouldn’t still be here writing these posts otherwise.

I’ve already mapped out where my next few posts are going to go. In my next post I’m going to have some fun and take a crack at telling the story of DP’s origin, by looking at DP as a new martial art with many different schools and styles. I’ll talk about the main players in DP and how they have forged the path to where we are now. In the post after that I’ll talk about the most common brick wall people tend to hit when they start out in DP, which is trying to find a coach for guidance. I’ll include strategies on how to hang in there with DP in the case you can’t find a coach, because they are pretty damn rare at the moment and most of them are in the 4th dimension that we call Europe. So stay tuned, kids!

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