Main description:

Deliberate practice is a systematic approach for improving psychotherapy outcomes one clinician at a time. This step-by-step guide to deliberate practice demonstrates how to collect and use client outcome data to create an individualized professional development plan to improve the quality of your service.

Your goal is to help more of your psychotherapy clients get better. For those who do realize gains, your goal is to help them experience a greater degree of improvement as a result of working with you. In this book you will learn how to conduct routine outcome measurements to gather data from your own practice. Detailed instructions and examples walk you through the process of determining your baseline performance, identifying and addressing your strengths and deficits as a practitioner, and assessing your progress.

Richly-drawn case studies and stories from the business world and popular culture illustrate how research from the field of expert performance offers a different paradigm for professional development that departs from the field's traditional emphasis on learning therapy models and techniques.

Contents:

Dedication
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. The State of our Art
Chapter 1: What Therapists Will Say, Can't Say, and Won't Say
Chapter 2: What Do We Really Know About Psychotherapy, After All?
Part II. Expertise and Expert Performance: The Evidence Base
Chapter 3: Learning from the Experts on Expertise
Chapter 4: What is (and is not) Deliberate Practice?
Part III. Getting Started: What To Do First to Achieve Better Results
Chapter 5: Your Baseline Matters
Chapter 6: How to Find Your Baseline
Chapter 7: Making Sense of Your Baseline
Part IV. Moving Forward: Identifying What to Deliberately Practice
Chapter 8: Mining Your Data for Better Results
Chapter 9: Why Average Isn't All That Bad
Chapter 10: How Being Bad Can Make You Better
Chapter 11: What Matters Most for Better Results
Chapter 12: A Study in Deliberate Practice
Part V. How to Deliberately Practice
Chapter 13: The Process of Deliberate Practice
Chapter 14: Designing a System of Deliberate Practice
Chapter 15: Still Feel Self-Doubt? You're Probably on the Right Track
Appendix A. Reliable and Clinically Significant Change Chart
Appendix B. Calculating a Standard Deviation
Appendix C. Taxonomy of Deliberate Practice (TDPA)
Appendix D. Troubleshooting Tips
References
Index
About the Authors