Problem Solvers and Problem Finders
“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” ~ Pablo Picasso Some of the best clinical supervisors I know are not just good problem solvers, but they are highly perceptive problem finders. Why...
Category: Deliberate Practice
To Understand? Easy. To Help Someone Feel Understood? Difficult.
Recently, someone said something to me that cast doubt on my ability as a therapist. This person said, “It’s not that hard to help someone feel understood. With good eye contact, attentive listening sprinkled...
The Holy Grail of Learning
In more ways than one, therapists are bridge makers. Except that one of the greatest challenges is the process of bridging what we’ve learned into fruitfulness for our clients. Demis Hassabis, founder of the...
Extend Your Mind Using Knowledge Centralisation
After figuring a way to create space and protect deep learning, one of the biggest barriers in the deep learning process is that most of the knowledge acquired over time are not accessible in ...
A Deep Learner Needs a Möbius Strip
When I first heard about a “möbius strip” from writer Parker Palmer, I thought it was a name for a German freeway or something. The Smithsonian magazine explains that “a Möbius strip can be...
#7. A Tribute to K. Anders Ericsson
[iframe style=”border:none” src=”//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/14947670/height/100/width//thumbnail/yes/render-playlist/no/theme/custom/tdest_id/1733435/custom-color/fd0e35″ height=”100″ width=”100%” scrolling=”no” allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen] We pay tribute to K. Anders Ericsson in today’s episode. He is known by many to be “the expert on expertise.” His work,...
10 Frontiers Problems to Solve
Date: 23rd June 2020. I started writing the first draft of this list of problems to solve in April 2019. There were like 15-17 problems at first… and that was more than a year...
Focus on What’s Not Going to Change
Here is Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, on the importance of what’s not going to change: I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is...
Protect Deep Learning
Participants from all over the globe have just completed the first two stages of the inaugural batch of the Deep Learner web-based workshop. Instead of just a bunch of pre-recorded lectures, Deep Learner is...
Personal Mistakes: Looking Back at 2019 in Order to Move Forward (Part I of II)
Two years ago, I started a project of capturing highlights on a weekly basis, previously called “A Year in Weeks”. I shared my private reflections and my personal learnings from looking back at 2018. ...
No More American Idol
American Idol and the likes of other singing contests have created a false impression that what it takes to be a musical star is to sing really well. The aim of reality television singing...
Circle of Development
Note: The original version of this article first appeared in Psychotherapy.net, June 2019. Today we are going to use the concept of Circle of Development (COD) to elaborate on how clinical supervisors can help...
The Way We learn
In today’s post, I take a moment away from the Reimagining Education in Psychotherapy (REP) series. Given that most therapists I meet are hungry for professional development, I would like to address the topic...
The Clock of Learning Across Disciplines (CLAD)
The Reimagining Education in Psychotherapy (REP) Series, Part 5. In the previous article (REP part 4), I made the case to be playful and tolerance for mediocrity as part of the learning journey. To...
Lego for Psychotherapists
Turns out that there there is a key difference between teaching kids how to play with legos, versus telling them what to build.
4 Lessons from 20 Weeks of Very Bad Therapy
Ben and Carrie got me on their show for one of their episodes. (Listen to Episode 11, regarding the problem with an intake model. More about this in the book, The First Kiss). What they are doing is so underrated. I asked them in passing, “Wouldn’t it be super interesting to hear what you both learned after doing the first 20 episodes, so that we can learn too?”
I was surprised that they took up the invitation.
This is a guest post by Ben Fineman and Caroline Wiita.
“It’s All About the Process…”
We need to trust the process of therapy, but without clarity on the effect of therapy, you are likely to get lost in the weeds—lost in our theoretical explanations and pet solutions—especially when the client isn’t experiencing any real gain.
Information is Not Transformation
“If information is all we need, everyone would have become billionaires, with perfect 6-pack abs,” says writer and entrepreneur Derek Sivers. Information ≠ transformation. We spend a lot of our time consuming information, in hopes...
The Music of Psychotherapy: Learning in a Wicked Environment
I often get a bewildered look when I tell people that the first place I visited in US was Kansas City. It was also the first time I met K. Anders Ericsson. In 2010,...
6 Visuals About Our Progress
In this short post, I’ve pulled together six simple visuals that speaks to the evolution of our field in psychotherapy. Are You Experienced? Clinical experience matters in our common parlance. We say things like,...
How Do You Go Faster on a Bicycle?
Pedal harder. Build you leg muscles and increase your stamina. Wrong. Watch cyclist Michael Guerra tap into the principles of aerodynamics in catching up on the race.
Feathers and Wings, and How We Fly
Developing better psychotherapy methods and techniques to increase impact, is akin to building better wings and more feathers to fly. We have made an attribution error. Recall the history of mankind’s attempts to fly.[1]...
To Specialise or Not to Specialise?
A therapist I was coaching asked me an excellent question. “Should I develop myself to become a specialist in a certain area, with a certain type of diagnostic category and/or population, or should I...
The Domino Effect
A domino can knock over another domino about 1.5x larger than itself. A regular domino fall is a linear progression, whereas in a geometric profession, as described by physicist Lorne Whitehead “a very small...
Here’s the Payoff
It all begins with an investment of faith. Organisations, supervisees, and practitioners whom I consult with know that, for the most part, they wouldn’t see immediate results. It’s a calculated gamble. I recently began...
What It Means to Be At The Frontier
When you are at the frontier, you feel alive. Being at the frontier, you experience an interplay between being awakened and a sense of surrender.
What Does General Athleticism Got to Do With Psychotherapeutic Skills?
In our careers as psychotherapists, there seems to be a particular trajectory that we strive to achieve. That is, to become specialised in a particular model of therapy. I mean, who’s to blame anyway?...
Instead of The “10,000” Hour Rule, Why Not The “60” Hour Rule?
By now, many of you would have heard about the 10,000-hour rule, made popular by Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Outlier. This was largely based on K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues seminal work in 1993,...
How Do You Grow as a Clinical Supervisor?
[note: if you are reading this from your inbox, please view in your browser in order to watch the video below] We sometimes over-extrapolate the idea of “parallel process.”[1] Maybe we think that therapists often...
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