The Cycle of Excellence: Using Deliberate Practice to Improve Supervision and Training

by Tony Rousmaniere (Editor), Rodney K. Goodyear (Editor), Scott D. Miller (Editor)

How do the good become great? Practice! From musicians and executives to physicians and drivers, aspiring professionals rely on deliberate practice to attain expertise. Recently, researchers have explored how psychotherapists can use the same processes to enhance the effectiveness of psychotherapy supervision for career-long professional development. Based on this empirical research, this edited volume brings together leading supervisors and researchers to explore a model for supervision based on behavioral rehearsal with continuous corrective feedback. Demonstrating how this model complements and enhances a traditional, theory-based approach, the authors explore practical methods that readers can use to improve the effectiveness of their own psychotherapy training and supervision.

This book is the 2018 Winner of the American Psychological Association Supervision & Training Section's Outstanding Publication of the Year Award.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

Published June 9, 2017

Reviews

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a soon-to-be clinical social worker, determined to become an effective therapist, and I found this to be one of those rare holy cow books, a real game-changer. But more seasoned therapists would also do well to read this book. As the authors point out, the average therapist doesn't improve much after their first year or two of practice. The research shows that accumulating more experience doesn't make one a better therapist, nor does taking continuing education courses or receiving more supervision. The average therapist, in fact, will see a gradual deterioration in their effectiveness as their career progresses.

So what's the answer? The authors of this book look to the work on expertise conducted by Anders Ericsson and his colleagues, work popularized by Malcolm Gladwell. If you want to be an effective therapist, you need to be very intentional about your work, obtaining accurate baseline data, procuring continual feedback, and engaging in deliberate practice, which, as Ericsson found, is a specific type of practice, not just doing the same thing over and over again for 10,000 hours.

The Cycle of Excellence contains four editors, and 26 authors, and like many compilations, it contains some needless repetition. For instance, the second chapter pretty much restates, although with more detail, the main points of the introduction. But that's a very minor quibble for an extraordinarily important book, the lessons of which everyone in the mental health profession ought to heed. I cannot recommend this highly enough.