You Haven’t Taught Until They Have Learned
I love this phrase from the Hall of Fame basketball coach John Wooden. “You haven’t taught until they’ve learned.”[1] It’s tempting to focus on what we teach as clinical supervisors. Instead, we need to...
The Skills of a Supervisor Is Not the Same as a Therapist
One of the common assumptions we make is that the skills of a clinical supervisor is the same as the skill of a psychotherapist. Certainly there are its overlaps, but I would argue that...
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.
Measure Growth, Not Competence
The Reimagine Education in Psychotherapy (REP) Series, Part 3. I cannot fail. I failed way too many times in my primary, secondary, and even in tertiary education. It was challenging to not be succeeding...
Teach the 3 Types of Knowledge and Not Just 1
I propose that in order for us to reimagine education in psychotherapy (REP), these 3 types of knowledge—content, process, and conditional—can serve as a primary conceptual framework.
Competence in content knowledge can create a false confidence of ability. Meanwhile, analogous to a good music not necessarily needing music theory to make good music, it also begs the question if content knowledge needs to serve as a basis for process and conditional knowledge. Perhaps if schools treat these 3 domains ecologically, and not hierarchical; learners might experience the critical interplay early in their higher education.
Kindling the Flame
There are two different ways to think about how we educate psychotherapists. The first is a banking model. Traditionally, in a banking model, we teach the theory, research, fill it in the learner’s minds, attempting to download and fill the learner’s mind with knowledge, and about 4 years later, we then send them off for practicum and begin the real work.
The second way is a kindling model. In this approach, we flip the banking model on its head, and start with the action, igniting a deep interest while continuously fanning the flame, and then learn to synthesise, join the dots and form new conscious knowledge—after the fact.
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.
Explainoholic
Last week, I discussed why information does not typically lead to transformation. and how the over-emphasis on content knowledge. I alluded to our over-emphasis on content knowledge over relational knowledge. So why can’t we...
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]...
“Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?”
“First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.” ~ Nassim Taleb, Antifragile. I’m in the midst of writing up a long overdue research paper. As you...
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...
9 Distinctions of Burn Out
Despite our sophisticated understanding of various psychological mechanisms that lead to stress, anxiety, and depression in our clients, we have a tendency to conflate the signal for the fire. The alarm bells tell us that something’s burning. Unless it’s a false alarm, the sirens aren’t the problem.
The experience of burnout is symptomatic of a compounded problem. What we need to gain clarity of is what cumulated to the emotional exhaustion.
Think Like an Oak Tree
In an attempt to design safer and more resilient structures, architects and engineers are starting to think like a tree.[1] When hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, only 4 out of 700 trees...
Is Less Really More?
Turns out that in order to make better decisions, we need less information, rather than more. Director of the Harding Center of Risk Literacy at Max Planck Institute German psychologist Gerg Gigerenzer notes “Experts...
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...
Personal Learnings: Looking Back In Order To Move Forward (Part II of II)
“What is essential is invisible to the eye.” ~Fred Rogers In the last blog post, I wrote about the personal side of I’ve learned from the peaks and troughs of 2018. Today, I’d...
Private Thoughts: Looking Back In Order to Move Forward (Part I of II)
I haven’t been able to hit publish for the past several weeks. I feel crippled by some intense glass walls. These walls seem to have voices that utter, “It’s not good enough,” “That’s nothing...
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,...
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