Deliberate Practice is Not Purposeful Practice

In 2007, Scott Miller, Mark Hubble and Barry Duncan wrote an article that turned my world upside down. 

It was published in my favourite magazine, Psychotherapy Networker, titled, ​Supershrinks: What’s the Secret to Their Success?​

I was already a huge fan of their work (see the link to the backstory in Further Readings below). 

I made contact with Scott. 

I couldn’t believe he replied my email. At that time, I wrote to many authors, and it was uncommon that anyone replied. 

He was in the US, and I was in Singapore and Australia, so most of our conversations were his early mornings/my late night discussions. 

The number of hours I’ve clocked on Skype with Scott would make my wife very upset. 

10. The Wisdom Pattern of Scott Miller

In this exclusive episode #10 on Frontiers Radio, we have a special guest, Dr. Scott Miller. We talked about several luminary figures who shaped and influenced his life, pivotal turning points, the writing process and his thoughts around the future of psychotherapy.

Three years later, in 2010, I was offered a chance to do my doctorate

So my wife and packed our bags and moved to Australia. It was nerving. We both left our full-time jobs and families, and settled for student allowances for the next three years. 

This cumulated to the publication of the first empirical study on deliberate practice in psychotherapy in 2014. 

You can read the study ​here​. 

If you want to dive into the weeds, you can read the full dissertation ​here​. To me, what we didn’t find is more interesting than what we found. 

Deliberate Practice Defined

Deliberate Practice is often confused with clinical practice and purposeful practice. 

Clinical practice is the output of you do. 

First, Clinical practice is not deliberate practice. Several studies show that clinical experience does not lead to improvement.[1] 

Second, purposeful practice is how we were taught in school.

In purposeful practice, we are often led by a teacher, guided by a pre-determined curriculum objective. To determine whether “learning” takes place, evaluative or performance tests are conducted. Finally, repetition is key, so “practice makes perfect.”

In purposeful practice, the learning process is top-down. 

Now let’s contrast this with deliberate practice.

In DP, you are often coached by someone who knows your work, so that individualised learning objectives is designed, coupled with learning feedback (not just performing feedback) to continuously calibrate the direction of your learning efforts. Finally, “practice does not make perfect.” Practice makes permanent. This is why it is not just mere repetition, but successive refinement.[2] 

In DP, the learning process if often bottom-up. 

The late K Anders Ericsson was the father of deliberate practice. Much was studied in the outcome of DP on performance. None was previously investigated in the field of psychotherapy. 

Here’s what Ericsson said, 

In other words, any DP efforts must help each learner improve at each of their own zone of proximal development (ZPD).[3] 

We must help each therapist move from their comfort zone and into their learning zone, while being mindful of not tipping them into their panic zone. 

To sum it up: 

1. Clinical practice is about performance (i.e., helping clients). 
2. Purposeful practice is about competence. 
3. Deliberate practice is about excellence. 

In the coming weeks, I will elaborate on ways you can engage in DP, figure out what to work on that can move the needle, address misconceptions as well as things to avoid. 

Further Readings

The Backstory

Find out more about the early seeds of DP in psychotherapy. (And my love of books).

Read article

What does Deliberate Practice Look Like?

Onstage, Backstage, and Offstage for Psychotherapists

Read article

Very Bad Therapy Podcast

Scott and I spoke with Ben and Carrie on their podcast about deliberate practice. 

Listen

Footnotes: 
[1] Chow, D. (2014). The study of supershrinks: Development and deliberate practices of highly effective psychotherapists.(PhD), Curtin University, Australia.Chow, D., Miller, S. D., Seidel, J. A., Kane, R. T., Thornton, J., & Andrews, W. P. (2015). The role of deliberate practice in the development of highly effective psychotherapists. Psychotherapy, 52(3), 337-345. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pst0000015 Germer, S., Weyrich, V., Bräscher, A.-K., Mütze, K., & Witthöft, M. (2022). Does practice really make perfect? A longitudinal analysis of the relationship between therapist experience and therapy outcome: A replication of Goldberg, Rousmaniere, et al. (2016). Journal of Counseling Psychology. ​https://doi.org/10.1037/cou0000608​ Goldberg, S. B., Rousmaniere, T., Miller, S. D., Whipple, J., Nielsen, S. L., Hoyt, W. T., & Wampold, B. E. (2016). Do psychotherapists improve with time and experience? A longitudinal analysis of outcomes in a clinical setting. J CounsPsychol, 63(1), 1-11. doi:10.1037/cou0000131 

[2] Chow, D. (2017a). The practice and the practical: Pushing your clinical performance to the next level. In D. S. Prescott, C. L. Maeschalck, & S. D. Miller (Eds.), Feedback-informed treatment in clinical practice: Reaching for excellence (pp.323–355). American Psychological Association. Miller, S. D., Chow, D., Wampold, B. E., Hubble, M. A., Del Re, A. C., Maeschalck, C., & Bargmann, S. (2018). To be or not to be (an expert)? Revisiting the role of deliberate practice in improving performance. High Ability Studies, 1–11. ​https://doi.org/10.1080/13598139.2018.1519410​ 

[3] Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes.Harvard University Press.