Homeschooling?
A Smorgasbord of Tips to Keep Your Kids Engaged, Learning and Connected During Home Isolation. Note: This article is cross-posted on two of my blog sites, Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development and Full Circles. While FPD aims...
Personal Learnings: Looking Back at 2019 in Order to Move Forward (Part II of II)
(Update 20 March 2020: Like other countries, Australia has now instituted a travel ban. COVID-19 has impacted so many families directly and indirectly. My thoughts and prayers go out to you). In the previous...
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...
The Language of Inner Life
“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” ~ Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The language that we need to learn and to know, not so much as to explain things (see this...
Myths About Myth
A myth is the image we have of the world and our relationship with it, and the story we tell ourselves. A myth is not the opposite of fact. All of us carry myths—implicit...
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.
Explainaholic
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...
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