If you didn’t catch my last post… which was yesterday, I’ve had a recent tectonic shift of a realisation – my three years of Deliberate Practice have boiled down to one thing… just listen better.
I kept cracking the atom of how I could become a more effective therapist. First getting feedback from clients, then managing my fight vs flight, then getting on the same page as clients/aligning with their wants, to then understanding client needs.
Each time I cracked through each layer – I was convinced I’d got to the bottom and couldn’t go any deeper. Each time I was wrong…
… Now I’m convinced that listening is the most vital foundational part of being effective in our work… here we go again.
More so I have built a lead major theory as to what is my biggest block to not becoming a better listener.
A fear of getting it wrong.
I’ve spent my whole career trying to avoid getting it wrong.
Getting it wrong is bad. Very bad. It’s a fear that preceded my training as a Psychologist. A fear I’ve had since I was a child.
That fear is deepened in our training too. I mean – do no harm. How scary is that? No one seeks to do harm in the work we do. So of course we try our best to get it right, but this prevents us from trying new things and going down the path less travelled, because when we try new things we suck at them at first and that feels wrong.
Disclaimer: I’m not advocating for no consequences, obviously certain things should be punished.
I think somewhere along the way I taught myself it was ok to get things wrong, as a way of preserving my own sanity and being more compassionate to myself.
As with most core fears, it carries incomplete logic, this idea that I should therefore always be right. But how is that possible? Unless I lived a life that’s a carbon copy of the person in front of me, there will be things about their experiences I don’t yet understand – that in trying to understand I will inevitably get things wrong.
As is always the case though, you can never fully remove yourself from those underlying fears. Every time I think I’m over the last hill, I peer over to see an endless stretch of desert in front of me. That might sound a bit hopeless, but deliberate practice has taught me that working on these things is a lifelong journey, one that you’ll never finish but that’s ok. There’s a freedom in realising that.
All I can do is try to keep trying, trust my own systems, my supports and loved ones.
Deliberate Practice has pulled me further and further out of that fear though – like nothing has before. With each passing month, another core belief strengthens, in order to grow and improve, I have to be willing to get it wrong. It has helped build my courage and confidence to turn towards my fear of being wrong to say “I know I can’t get rid of you, I will learn to live alongside you, because you do help me sometimes, but I will not be ruled by you”.
We’ve heard it all before – you only learn from your mistakes, but living it is very hard.
An example: Are we too scared of being surprised by our clients?
Through my Deliberate Practice Journey I have realised the process is not just about getting better at foundational therapy skills, it’s about working on what gets in the way of me engaging in those foundational skills.
I’ve learnt there’s an important part of my brain which is indeed very good at getting in the way – my fight vs flight response. It doesn’t mean to be annoying, but the automatic reactions that come with fight vs flight can make me a less effective therapist.
I don’t remember where I heard it or read it, but I have a clear memory of someone proposing that the main role of the fight vs flight system is to limit surprises. I didn’t think much of it at the time, unlike now. It makes sense, the stronger and more threatening the surprise, such as an aggressive dog appearing out of nowhere, the stronger the fight vs flight reaction is.
This theory has started swimming in my mind, as I try and make connections to how this idea may be impacting how I work.
I find myself acting in these automatic ways to limit surprises from my clients. I either cushion my words and questioning or I might seek to reassure them. I call these sugar-coating behaviours. Perhaps this is to limit the chance that I’m surprised by a clients unwanted reaction, such as a strong emotion.
Something I do that really sums it up for me though, is that I seem to have this go to phrase whenever clients are really hesitating to tell me something personal. As they engage in this mental tug-of-war on whether to tell me or not I say something like: “what ever you’re hesitating with you can tell me, you won’t be able to surprise me. I’ve heard it all”. Basically referring to how I’ve heard all sorts of out landish things from clients, there’s no subject too taboo.
On face my statement seems innocent enough and in many ways it is, but now I think it’s a prime example of how I seek to not be surprised by my clients. To my fight vs flight brain, surprise is bad, it means we’re not ready for an incoming threat. It’s that part of me that wants to look unphased, resilient and in control when faced with challenging experiences.
If I were to put my Deliberate Practice hat on, I’d say a more fitting response for the next time a client hesitates to tell me something, is to say: “You can tell me, it’s ok if you surprise me“.
Listening better means allowing myself to use my eyes and ears, allowing myself to be surprised, but also letting a client know when I’m stuck; such as when I’m confused. States of feeling that I would normally avoid sharing because they are wrong.
So today I will lean on a core principle – that it’s ok to be wrong.
On that I’m going to leave myself with that scene from the Movie Babe. To give myself permission to rest after such a big realisation following my post yesterday (I don’t need to exhaust myself), but also to sign off for the year. I just don’t think I’ll be able to do better than this post to end 2023 🙂 Happy holidays everyone and thank you for being with me on this journey.
Deliberate Practice Psych 