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...
Tagged: clinical practice
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,...
A System of Practice
Join our in-depth, cutting-edge learning platform, Reigniting Clinical Supervision (RCS). Registration closes this Friday, 3rd of May 2019. We begin on Monday, 6th of May 2019. If you are a subscriber to Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development,...
What Therapy Is (Or Isn’t).
The psychodynamic camp says, “Your past is the problem.” The third wave mindfulness therapist says “Mindlessness is the problem.” The emotion-focused therapist says, “Your unresolved feelings are the problem.” The pioneering team at Mental...
Understanding vs. Remembering: Why It’s Important to Track (and Revisit) What You’ve Learned
We tend to place a premium on understanding and underrate the importance of remembering. We assume that once we comprehend something, we would be able to recall the content. In actual fact, what happens...
The Work Before the Work
How do you prepare yourself to enter into the space of therapy? How do you make room not just for your client, but for you, to facilitate the entrance of emotional safety, the safety...
Blackbox Thinking For Psychotherapists (Part II of II)
“My characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain...
Blackbox Thinking For Psychotherapists (Part I of II)
With each plane crash, future flights become safer. With each therapy failure, we feel less safe with ourselves. We are cast into a sea of self-doubt. Our confidences plummet; our competence is called into...
Stay Invested In…
When in therapy, stay invested in, 1. Defining and Redefining a problem; 2. Coming to a consensus of what is the problem; 3. Resolving the problem.
Vanity Metrics: Do We Value What We Measure, or Measure What We Value?
Those of you who work in agencies and large organisations know this. You are asked to keep score on stuff that doesn’t matter to you or your clients. We call this KPIs (key performance...
What Does Deliberate Practice Look Like? Onstage, Backstage, and Offstage.
“What does deliberate practice look like?” Thanks to Ivan for a great question! “Lots of people want to be the noun,” says artist and writer, Austin Kleon, “without doing the verb.” First, I want...
What is the Outcome to Focus on When Someone is Dying?
What is the outcome you will focus on when someone is dying? One of the most striking experiences I had was watching my grand auntie spent her last days in palliative care. She was...
The Future of Our Work Isn’t Robots. It’s Caring Humans.
The future of our work as a caring profession isn’t going to be subjugated or outsourced to artificial intelligence or driverless cars. Instead, our work is going to matter even more in the future...
The Paradox of Focusing on the Therapist
Empathy has a hard time seeing a bigger picture. That is why fundraisers for charities do better when they tell a compelling story of an individual child with no access to clean water, rather...
Repairable Models: It’s Time We Fix This
Try opening up your latest iPhone or Samsung mobile device. It’s near impossible. That’s because tech giants are making phones harder to repair. Apple insists that their iPhones are so complicated that third-party repairers...
First Principles: The 5-Step Process for Deep and Accelerated Learning in Therapy
In a previous post, I’ve talked about the importance of Developing First Principles Before Methods. I’ve also talked about the ways you can develop first principles from challenging situations, therapeutic mistakes, and guidance from...
Three Ways to Develop First Principles in Your Clinical Practice
Try this little thought experiment: Take a piece of paper, and in the next 2-3mins, in no more than 2-3 paragraphs, write down your philosophy of what guides you in therapy. Most of us...
Develop Your Own Wealth of Learnings
In a previous post, I talked about the iterative cycle that we can take in our professional development (click HERE to revisit it, and download the free infographic). Here’s something that I’ve recently revisited that struck...
Terrible Gifts in Therapy
This is not some Catholic self-flagellating, guilt inducing exercise. Rather, if we see with fresh eyes, every moment of difficulty that we face in a session with you client, presents a gift to you. These...
What are the Perennial Pillars for Psychotherapists?
For songwriters, the perennial pillar is song craft. It is not technical mastery. A songwriter knows that technical agility at an instrument is not going help him create a better song. It’s easier to...
Our Real Work
What is our real work? It’s easy to think that the role of a psychotherapist is to treat a person or help our clients change. Indeed, that may be the outcome we hope for....
Stop Talking, and Start Performing.
What if one of the ways of transforming our practice in psychotherapy is to stop calling it talk therapy, but to see it as a performance ritual? What if we stop talking, and start...
Signs That Therapists are Barking Up the Wrong Tree in Our Professional Development
I’m going to re-look at some deeply held truths we were taught to believe about professional development in the field of psychotherapy. Actually, if these truths are closely examined, they are perpetuated lies.
How Do You Get Better At Eliciting Feedback?
In the previous post, we addressed the issue of how to receive feedback. In this post, we take a step back and address how we can elicit feedback.
How Do You Get Better at Receiving Feedback?
“How was your meal sir?” “Fine, thanks.” I lied. Five minutes into the meal, the waitress comes back to me. She’s wondering why I haven’t touched my pasta one bit since she last enquired.
Scenius vs. Genius
Not only does his brilliance shine in his collaborations, he’s also good at coming up with words. Heard of the term “ambient music“? He came up with it. Heard of the word “Scenius”? Probably not....
Why We Need This One Person For Us To Get Better
When this guy was in the room, I played better. We first met Randolf Arriola when I was about 17 years old. My bandmates and I saved up enough money to go into a...
The Tension of Opposites: Clinical Intuition vs. Clinical Data (Part 2 of 2, The Rate & Predict Exercise)
In the previous post, I advocated the marriage of our clinical intuition and the use of outcome informed data. Do not let me convince you. Let your experience convince. Put it to the test....
The Tension of Opposites: Clinical Intuition vs. Clinical Data (part 1 of 2)
There are those who embrace routine outcome monitoring (ROM), and those who shy away from it like the plague. On one side of the fence, skeptical practitioners point their crucifix against the use of...
The Pursuit of Excellence is Not the Pursuit of Perfection
The pursuit of getting better at our craft in therapy requires us to make fine distinctions. One of them is to make the distinction between the pursuit of excellence vs. the pursuit of perfection.
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