Develop Good Taste

Before you can develop good abilities, you’ve got to develop good taste.

If you want to develop as a musician, you’d want to develop an ear for music. You would then need to expose yourself to a wide array of different genres and different takes on different genres by different artists, as much as possible.

Unfortunately, many therapists don’t get the chance to view other therapists in a action –less than their figures can count. If you were a musician, your ears wouldn’t be seasoned enough to develop good taste if you only heard 10, 20, or even 30 artists.

Listen To The Work of People You Admire

First, listen/watch as widely as possible. Dont’ just listen to master therapists talk about their theories. Watch them in session.

(Note: I tend to note recommend watching re-enactments, as the aim of those are to get across a theoretical idea or approach instead of showing how messy things can get.)

Here’s some resources of where to find therapy videos:

1. Psychotherapy.net

• There is now a membership platform. Try it and see if this whets your appetite and to develop good tastebuds.

2. Erickson Foundation

• A ton of videos as the archive is deep and wide
• I’ve bought a few of the past Evolution of Psychotherapy conference videos. The clinical demonstrations are particularly useful.

3. Alexander Street Press

• I no longer have access to this, but this is where I watched several videos, including stuff from APA and Brief Therapy.
• If you have access to a University Library, make sure you check if your library has access to Alexander Street Press. It’s a treasure trove.

For starters, here’s three that I would recommend:

1. APA The Next Generation

• In the spirit of the original Glory tapes with Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis and Fritz Perls (turns out that was rigged). So interesting to watch Judith Beck (daughter of the late Aaron Beck), Les Greenberg (Emotion-Focused Therapy) and Nancy McWilliams (Psychotherapydynamic) work with a male and a female client.
• In this two part series, what was striking was even though they were operating from different metaphorical landscapes, how much similarities there was with Greenberg’s work and McWilliams.

2. Carl Rogers

• you owe it to yourself to watch a handful of Carl Rogers at work.
• Most don’t realise that Rogers was one of the fist to pioneer recording of sessions and scientifically examining the therapy process and outcome.
• Here’s a full-length session-in fact, it’s two sessions– of Rogers at work. Carl Rogers Counsels An Individual On Anger (See below for a method I propose on how to watch that promotes the spirit of deliberate practice)

3. Salvador Minuchin

• I recommend reading Sal Minuchin and colleagues book, The Craft of Family Therapy.
• Even though this is transcript-based, I think it’s important for therapist to know how to work with more than one other person in the room. Plus, Minuchin offers ways of thinking and relating that offers a sense of individuality to exist.

Listen in a Particular Way That Cultivates Deep Learning

Warning: When you are exposed to lots of ways of “being and doing” therapy, there is a risk of unconscious mimicry of your favorite therapists, or worse, a feeling of overwhelm. I would add that you might also conflat a therapist way of working as their model of therapy. What I mean is that you want to be watching how an individual conducts a session, and not just want theoretical orientation they come from. One CBT practitioner can be doing CBT very differently from another practitioner. That is why evidence has shown that the differences were found to be “between therapist” (i.e., 5-9%) vs between modalities (i.e., 0-1%).

Instead of just passively consuming therapy recordings, one way to cultivate deep learning as you expose yourself to an array of different recordings is to do the following sequence:

1. PLAY –> 2. PAUSE –> 3. ACT

1. PLAY

• Play the recording.
• Your focus is not just what the therapist is saying, but the impact it has on the client and how the responses.
• Once you’ve gotten brief background of the client, take a moment to fully embody your client. That is, imagine you are Daniel Day Lewis and you are about to become this client.
• The intent of this embodied cognition is so that we stay focus on the effects of the client and not get lost on the “master” therapist at work.

1. PAUSE

• At every 5 to 10 min mark, pause the recording.
• You can also choose to pause at significant moments.
• Here, the intent is to slow down time so as to promote learning.

1. ACT

• Imagine that you are Carl Rogers, or whoever you are watching, and respond in your own way as a therapist to the client.
• Write down what you’ve said.
• And then list down 2 other things: Principles and Intent: a. What were the guiding principles that led you to say what you said, and b. your intentation for saying what you said.

Now that you’ve gone through the first three steps, let’s move on to the second part of this exercise.

4. PLAY–> 5. REFLECT –> 6. SYNTHESISE

4. PLAY

• This is where it gets interesting. Unpause the recording and play on.
• Listen carefully not just to what the therapist said but also who the client responded.
• The key here is not to mimic what the virtual therapist in the recording is saying, and neither is it to “get it right”. In fact, the key here is to create a moment of alertness to your own thinking and when possible, to gain some counter-factuals. When we are disconfirmed by how we are thinking and better still, when we are surprised by the effects of what the therapist actually followed through in the dialogue, we have a great opportunity for deep learning.

5. REFLECT

• Now that you imagined yourself in the therapist’s seat, and you’ve heard what the therapist actually did, take a moment to check in with yourself.
• “How do I feel about what what just transpired?”
• “If I was the client, how would I been feeling right now?”
• Does what the therapist said and what I said help to deepen the process, promote a therapeutic exchange, or was it just a gap-filler?”

6. SYNTHESIS

• As you would be doing the first 5 sequence of 1. Play–> 2. Pause–> 3. Act–> 4. Play–> 5. Reflect several times for a session recording, you’d want to “pull it all together” and synthesis your learnings
• As I talked about this in the Deep Learner course, you want to not just collect the dots but “connect the dots” of all of your learnings. In short, make sure you have a way to note down your learnings in a centralised system (i.e., use one primary software application or a type of analog notebook to store all of your learnings).
• Note: You need not complete a recording in one sitting. An hour’s worth of recording might take you twice the amount of time to complete in this fashion.
• As you repeat this process with other recordings, take a moment to also connect with your prior learnings from the other recordings you’ve watched, or other even other readings you’ve come across (I use Obsidian as my note-taking space. It allows me to create not just a one-way linking of notes, but a bi-directional linking of multiple notes. More on this in the future.)
• Synthesising with your prior learnings is highly valuable. As educational psychologist David Ausubel said, ‘If I had to reduce all of educational psychology to just one principle, I would say this “ The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly.”’

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If you were a musician, it wouldn’t cut it to simply just talk about music. You need to hear lots of it.

My hopes for you is not only to develop good taste, but in the process of doing so, you get to develop your own voice.

Good taste is an incredibly valuable skill, and you can acquire it with practice.

Seth Godin

In the next blog, we dive into an example of how we can apply these 6 steps using a real clinical recording of a session.