Deliberate Practice Psych

Making Deliberate Practice easier.

DP TIP #5: Address your most impactful automatic behaviour

  1. Get Feedback From Your Clients
  2. Tailor your goal-setting approach to suit each individual client
  3. Use Routine Outcome Measurement
  4. Identify your automatic behaviours

Now we’re onto the next phase of addressing automatic behaviours. In this entry, I’ll present you with some ideas on what to do if you have your list of automatic behaviours as a therapist, but feel stuck on where to go next.

The next step is fairly simple, once we have a list of automatic behaviours, we then have to narrow down which one to focus on.

I very firmly recommend that you only focus on one automatic behaviour to begin with. First, because it’s best to keep your deliberate practice system as simple as possible, especially while you’re still getting used to it. Second, it’s surprisingly easy to become overwhelmed when trying to address, monitor and reflect on your progress with more than one automatic behaviour at a time. Trust me – I say these things from experience and learnt the hard way.

In the words of the great Ron Swanson of Parks and Recreation: “Never half-ass two things, whole ass one thing”.

There’s a couple of directions you can choose between going down, in identifying an automatic behaviour to start on.

On one hand, you can assess your automatic behaviours based on their perceived impact on the therapy process. I’m a huge fan of a 0-10 scale to help me analyse, in this case 0 would be no impact on therapy process at all and 10 would be something like guaranteed drop out if the behaviour occurs.

If you’re not sure about what might be most impactful. It can be helpful to reflect on how you engage in the what impacts therapy outcomes most – the common factors of therapy and fundamentals of what we do. These include creating a therapeutic relationship with your client, working on what the client is motivated to work on (goal alignment), agreement with the client on the means to working on their goals (process alignment), creating hope for the client that they can improve and showing empathy, to name a few.

On the other hand, you can assess based on the accessibility level of addressing the automatic behaviour, where 0 is I could tackle that automatic behaviour in my sleep and 10 is even if I was Batman I still couldn’t address the behaviour.

I would suggest aiming to address the most impactful automatic behaviour first, but if that feels too challenging or scary, then there’s no shame in starting with one that is really accessible. Aiming for accessibility first can be great at providing a sense of achievement and momentum in getting easy runs on the bored.

In fact that’s exactly how I started. If we again look at my original list of automatic behaviours from May 2021, as below, I can demonstrate how my process played out. My desire to strengthen goal consensus with clients I definitely saw as the most impactful in helping my therapy outcomes. I did attempt to address it first, but in the end I didn’t quite have the success I hoped for. So after that I decided to instead tackle a behaviour that was less impactful, but much easier and accessible to tackle. That brought me to the automatic behaviour of prematurely suggesting session topics to clients. When I successfully addressed this it then gave me a morale boost to try something a little harder and in the mean-time I was gradually collecting ideas on to help strengthen my goal consensus with clients.

  • More consistent and stronger consensus with clients.
  • Setting client expectations with higher clarity. (most impactful to address)
  • Sometimes being overly passive in response to a client.
  • A tendency to avoid a client’s challenging emotions.
  • An over-reliance on providing psychoeducation and ‘techniques’.
  • Avoiding asking for feedback, even when administering the Session Rating Scale.
  • Not outlining the intended ‘end-goal’ with a client.
  • Suggesting session topics to clients before asking them what they wanted to address. (most accessible to address)

If after attempting the ideas presented here, you feel overwhelmingly uncertain about which automatic behaviour to start on, then I suggest to speak with a mentor, supervisor or peer to unpack your hesitation. It’s ok to lean on your support system when your stuck, I have leaned on mine many, many times through this process.

It’s in these early phases of building your deliberate practice system that it’s really easy to get hooked in by the urge to tackle as much as you can in one go – to try and sprint to the finish line. Remember that when it comes to deliberate practice, it doesn’t matter if you try and move fast or slow, your progress will be slow either way. Deliberate practice is like attempting to untangle a clump of 15 phone charging cables that have become a ball. However, your progress will be far more consistent and less stressful if you keep things simple and choose to move slowly in untangling the ball. Chip away at it and you will get there eventually – patience and persistence is key.

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