Boy, has it been a big three years for me in this journey. At the beginning I was still only one year into being a registered Psychologist. I was still trying to find my identity beyond the CBT I was trained in. I was desperate to discover the kind of therapist I wanted to be. Did I want to be a EMDR therapist? A Schema therapist? ACT looked interesting too. At that time if you asked me what my biggest issues were, I didn’t know enough and what I did know was always needing to be simplified. I was not only so focused on how well I was doing psychoeducation, but always on making things simpler. Sure, I did my best to provide clients with skills and tools, but psychoeducation was always where I started. As an example, I often loved to teach clients about their fight vs flight brain on the white board for 45 minutes. I was so focused on knowing, the more I knew, the more my clients could understand themselves. Knowledge was key.

In early 2021, a tectonic shift happened. I didn’t discover Deliberate Practice, but it was the time that I finally started to understand it. Crucially it taught me that continuing to accumulate knowledge on therapies and therapy skills was not going to help me improve with clients.

Instead of my focus being outward on learning therapies, the spotlight started to turn inward to how I needed to change. I started by making a list of all the things I could improve as a therapist. I then promptly entered my panic station and my perfectionism impelled me to move as quickly as possible to eliminate my list.

At first there wasn’t much guidance, few people have been on this journey and far fewer have written about it. Luckily, reasonably early on I did find a coach to guide me. A key thing I learnt was that I couldn’t tackle everything about myself at once. So we started with how I gained feedback.

If my journey to improve was a blank wall, feedback was the first section of that wall to be painted. It was the first pillar of my Deliberate Practice. It involved putting my attention into surrounding tasks, such as debrief conversations and using feedback scales. As this layer of paint was the first to go onto the wall, it has had more time to dry. The most time to sink in. As a result, lets say this paint is now 90% dry on the wall.

Eventually as I became confident enough in eliciting feedback, I became ready for the second section of the wall to be painted – client alignment. This one started out as being aligned with a clients goals and later began to involve additional tasks, such as aligning with their needs. I’ve had at least of a couple of runs at this paint layer, but given that it was my second area of focus, lets say it’s 80% dry now.

Once I was ready, my attention then turned to a third section of the wall. At this point it becomes more complicated, because now I’m tackling more of my idiosyncratic roadblocks. It also involved many tasks; learning to manage my anxiety in sessions, asking more effective open-ended questions and creating more structure – to name a few. Some of these tasks are still very recent, so I’m going to say that this section of paint is 60% dry.

Fast forward a while and now we’re onto my most recent and current section of paint – deep listening. This section encompasses almost all of my current attention. The paint is still very fresh. The tasks here are where I’m most focused. Here I’m focused on the surrounding tasks, such as seeking clarification from clients and rolling with resistance. I’m still mixing this very closely with seeking and responding to feedback from a client.

The paint is still drying

I could have kept going in sharing my examples, as in reality there are eight pillars of my current Deliberate Practice ecosystem, so eight sections of the wall. It didn’t feel useful to continue writing about all eight here, hopefully you get the idea though. If you want to see all eight pillars, you can see my previous blog post on them.

A quick side note, how I have presented these pillars is a bit over-simplified. Realistically the process of developing them has been far less linear. I have bounced around the pillars, going back and forth between them. Each pillar has at least another eight surrounding tasks and many of those have smaller tasks within them. In essence, it’s been a huge amount of work, that hasn’t always been efficient – with many mistakes and dead ends along the way.

As a result of that never ending search I was always changing my processes. My attempts at trial and error were frequent and often large. I was never in one place for long. An unintended consequence of that is that it’s made it harder to understand which of my changes have actually been beneficial to my outcomes.

Something has changed though

Throughout the whole time, in gradually painting this wall, it never felt complete. It always felt like I was missing something big, I could always see where there was no paint yet. It felt like there was always another section needed to better connect with my clients and understand what they needed. I felt like just how I started, I didn’t have enough.

Then one day that changed.

That was the day I realised that all I really need to do was improve how I listen. Once that struck me towards the end of last year I became settled. It feels like my wall is now complete – there’s no missing paint.

In essence, I now feel l have all the pieces to the kind of therapist I want to be – my foundations are set.

That if I never added anymore, I would be ok. I’m now doing enough.

I’m not saying the journey is over, far from it, but I’m no longer rushing to add a missing foundation of paint. I’m hopeful from here that I’ll just be tweaking my foundations, not adding new ones. I’ve decided that as a result – this year I will slow down. I don’t plan on making any changes to my processes – I want to let the paint in front me of dry. If anything I will strengthen what I already have, with smaller tweaks. My hope is that this will not only help me look after myself, but it will also allow me to see what’s helping.

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