Deliberate Practice with Helping Skills

Deliberate practice exercises help psychotherapists develop competence in core helping skills that are applicable to any therapeutic approach.

These exercises present role-playing scenarios in which two trainees act as a client and a therapist, switching back and forth under the guidance of a supervisor. The therapist improvises appropriate and authentic responses to client statements organized into three difficulty levels--beginner, intermediate, and advanced.

The first 10 exercises review foundational skills to facilitate exploration, insight, and behavioral change, such as offering empathic reflections and conjectures, asking open-ended questions, validating clients' experiences, deepening their emotional experiencing, identifying maladaptive patterns, exploring potential avenues for change, seeking feedback about therapy, and identifying ruptures and repairs to the therapeutic alliance. Two comprehensive exercises follow in which trainees integrate these skills into a transcribed session and mock therapy sessions.

Step-by-step instructions guide participants through the exercises, identify criteria for mastering the skills, and explain how to monitor and adjust difficulty. Guidelines to help trainers and trainees get the most out of training are also provided.

To demonstrate how deliberate practice can be fully integrated into a professional curriculum, this series features exercises developed and refined within the clinical training curriculum at the Sentio online/hybrid marriage and family therapy (MFT) therapist training program in California, which is where we started developing this series. These exercises, which have been tested at clinical training sites around the world, are used to enhance clinical outcomes within the first hybrid MFT program approved by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences to fully integrate deliberate practice into its entire curriculum. By integrating these models into its hybrid MFT program in California, Sentio University demonstrates that therapist training graduate programs can use deliberate practice to bridge the gap between theory and clinical mastery through repetitive, feedback-informed practice to support the development of modern, outcome-focused clinicians.