A couple months ago I decided to clear up why I see deliberate practice as being so important in helping us improve as therapists. The main reason is because deliberate practice addresses cognitive biases in ways a that other forms of development do not.

There are two forms of cognitive bias that can have a major impact on how we work as therapists. Firstly, the urge to avoid simplicity, commonly out of fear that simplicity is inadequate in addressing what are very complex psychological challenges that client’s can face. I wrote about my observations and views on that topic in a recent blog post.

Here I will write about the second kind of bias that occurs for all humans – mental automation. Mental automation is our ability to do something without thinking or conscious effort. People will often refer to it as being on autopilot. Automatic thinking saves time, energy and tends to be incredibly fast. Used in the right context, it can make life easier and reduce stress.

I think back to when I was a teenager and I was learning to drive a car. When I started it was a nightmare – there was so much to hold in my mind at once: check my rear view mirror, side mirrors, seat position, steering wheel position, hand position, keeping my foot on the break so the car didn’t roll… the list felt like it went on and on. I never thought I’d get the hang of it…

I bet you know already how this story ends? Chances are that the automatic thinking of your own brain has figured out that over time I got better at driving and now I don’t even have to think about it when I drive.

How I drive a car is now so automated, that on my way to work, over 40 minutes, I can day-dream the whole time and get to my destination without a problem. This is another benefit of automatic thinking, it frees up mental resources so I can think about other things, almost like multi-tasking.

These examples demonstrate that it’s not just cognitions that become automated, our behaviours can also become automated as a result.

Life would be incredibly annoying and impossible without such an ability, there’s no way I would be driving now if it still felt like it did when I first started.

The ability to automate can be very useful when desired. It tends to work best when the steps to a process are largely the same and the ‘ingredients’ involved remain largely unchanged over time.

There is a flip side though, not all automatic thoughts and behaviours are desired. Ask any client feeling negatively impacted by a schema, who can’t help assuming the worst when faced with new challenge.

I would argue that it’s not just clients who can be impacted by undesired or unhelpful automatic reactions, we as therapists can be just as prone. I’ve been writing about mine for some time, which I often generalise as trying too hard to be helpful. For the sake of this piece I will refer to such reactions as automatic behaviours.

Automatic behaviour’s are very common in the work we do and may include the following, they often include a level of assumption. The following is just some random examples of what could be an almost endless list:

• Assuming we understand a client or their challenges.
• Avoiding certain topics with a client because it would not be helpful.
• Assuming a client’s diagnosis based on body language.
• Giving a similar treatment plan, to clients of similar presenting challenges.
• Assuming we know what, a client will respond well to.
• Trying to intuit a client’s therapy preferences.
• Always giving homework at the end of a session.
• Starting a session with small talk.

I find they occur more easily because the therapist is scared that they will look incompetent in the eyes of the client if they were to ask the client’s opinion or preference.

We are trained to know our stuff. I think a therapist’s greatest fear is to come across to a client, like they don’t know what they are talking about or what they are doing – to look lost in the face of someone paying for their help. Fear that if other therapists saw us look uncertain, they would think we have no place in this profession.I believe that such a desire to appear knowledgeable, confident, and competent then bleeds through into an assumption that we know our clients too, or at least we should know our clients. A massive problem can become apparent, a crack in the earths crust beneath our feet, because while our studies taught us lots about psychological theories and models. Those studies can’t teach us about the individual that sits across from us – only the individual can do that.

My ultimate goal is to learn to not only assume that I know nothing about a client that comes to see me, but to also believe it. I want to learn about my client and how I can help them, solely from them and their love ones, not from a text book.

When it comes to these automatic assumptions and behaviours, at best they will have no negative impact on the therapy process or on you personally, at worst they could result in drop out. This is because while they may work for some clients, they may not work for others.

I believe a good first step is learning to be observant of your automatic behaviours, not all of them, of course. Just ones you think could be preventing you from being more effective, like my trying too hard reactions.

My next Deliberate Practice tip number four will focus on how to become aware of and turn towards your automatic behaviours. Which is obviously a crucial first step to tackling them.

I must warn you that tackling one’s automatic behaviours will require a very large well of determination. You will need a very compelling reason to stay down the path. I know that if my own reason weren’t so compelling, I would have stopped all this some time ago.   The sustained effort it takes to keep addressing an automatic undesired behaviour can be immense. Just because you find the behaviour undesirable doesn’t mean that your brain will agree. As a result, change will be very slow going – a war of attrition. Tackling my trying too hard behaviours has felt like one of the most sustained challenges I have faced in my life, because while I have faced many challenges from the world around me- there’s nothing quite like the challenge of facing yourself. Despite the challenge, I promise that this journey is worth it. Not necessarily because you will conquer your brain. I’ve been on this path of tackling my own automatic behaviour’s for at least a year now and while I have made considerable ground, they are still with me. On face this can be frustrating, but at the end of the day the gains I have experienced from this journey are worth every bit of effort. I have learnt to better focus on what matters most in therapy, that I can be more determined and disciplined than I ever thought possible and I have come to accept my brain more than I have before. But more than anything else I have learnt to be proud of myself, it’s amazing to see how stubbornly clever I can be.

As always, I write these pieces to keep myself going, but I also write them to compel you to travel down your own version of the same path – to face what you are scared to face. I selfishly want you to experience the same growth I have, because when we learn to face what we felt we never could, the reward is priceless – the courage to live alongside fear.

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