In the last blog I made the case that experience alone does not make you better — deliberate practice does.
That claim is not just a training slogan. It comes from one of the most replicated findings in the psychology of skill acquisition: across domains as varied as music, chess, and sport, the amount of time spent in focused, effortful, feedback-guided practice predicts performance far better than years of raw experience does (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993; Ericsson, 2008). A large-scale re-analysis of that original research has since narrowed the claim — deliberate practice explains a great deal of the difference between performers, though not literally all of it — but the core mechanism holds: practice that specifically targets a weak point, with feedback, outperforms practice that simply repeats what you already do well (Macnamara & Maitra, 2019). The same pattern is now showing up in psychotherapy training itself, where clinicians who complete structured, deliberate-practice programmes see measurable gains in skills like managing strong emotion and staying responsive under pressure — gains that ordinary supervised experience alone does not reliably produce (Rousmaniere, 2019; Sheen, Nurse, O'Shea, Ling, & Castle, 2024).
That idea landed with a lot of you who recognised it in other careers too, where experience is given more value than deliberate practice. But it left a reasonable question hanging in the air: if deliberate practice starts by isolating a specific weakness, how on earth do you decide which weakness?
This is where most good intentions die. Not because people are unwilling to practise, but because they aim at the wrong target — or at no clear target at all. So let's fix that. Let's find your edge.
The problem with practising what you're good at
There is a comfortable logic to working on your strengths. You get to be competent for an hour, which is pleasant, and you can tell yourself you have been developing your craft. The trouble is that the returns are almost nil.
Refining a skill you have already mastered moves you from excellent to very slightly more excellent, in a corner of your work that was never letting your clients down. Meanwhile the thing that is letting them down — the abreaction that makes your stomach drop, the intake that rambles, the deepening that goes vague under pressure — sits untouched, because touching it feels uncomfortable.
Comfort is the enemy of improvement. It explains why so many diligent practitioners plateau. They are practising. They are simply practising the wrong things, for the very human reason that the wrong things feel nicer. The practitioners who keep improving do the opposite. They hunt for the gap. They run toward the wince.
The golfer and the bunker
Picture two golfers with the same handicap, practising on the same afternoon.
The first hits a hundred drives. He loves his driver, the contact is sweet, and after an hour he feels like a golfer. He does not go near the bunker, because he is not good out of the bunker, and being not-good is unpleasant.
The second spends her hour in the sand. Over and over, from bad lies, mostly failing. It is ugly and frustrating, and she looks worse than him all afternoon.
Now put them both on the course. Sooner or later, both find the sand. This is not a hypothetical: research tracking aspiring elite adolescent golfers found that a deliberate practice intervention aimed squarely at their weakest, most failure-prone shot — putting from difficult lies — improved both performance and, just as importantly, the golfers' own practice habits afterwards, in a way that simply hitting more of their favourite shots never could (Hayman, 2013). One golfer had practised that exact moment two hundred times this month. The other had spent his practice avoiding it.
The shot that decides your round is rarely the one you enjoy practising. It is the same in the therapy room. You do not get to steer every session toward your best induction and away from the sudden flood of emotion, the sceptical analyst, the "I don't think anything happened." Those moments arrive whether you have prepared for them or not. The tennis professional from the last piece knew this — she spent most of her training dissecting her weakest shot with a coach, on purpose. Your edge is your bunker. It is the shot you have been avoiding, and finding it is the whole game.
What "your edge" actually means
Here is the part that trips people up. Your edge is not simply your worst skill. If it were, this would be easy. But that is not where improvement is fastest.
Definition
Your edge is the zone just beyond comfortable competence — the skills that work, but not reliably. You can already almost do them. On a good day they land; under pressure, with the wrong client, they wobble. That instability is not a reason to avoid them. It is the signal that you have found exactly the right place to practise.
Picture any skill sitting on a line. At one end are the things you cannot really do yet. In the middle are the things you can do sometimes, when conditions are kind. At the far end are the things you can do in your sleep. Deliberate practice does its best work in that middle band — where you fail often enough to learn, but not so often that you are simply lost. This is close in spirit to what developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky called the zone of proximal development: the space between what a learner can already do alone and what they cannot yet do at all, which is precisely where teaching and practice have the most leverage (Vygotsky, 1978). It also echoes what learning scientists call a "desirable difficulty" — a level of challenge that feels harder in the moment but produces more durable, flexible learning than easy, comfortable repetition ever does (Bjork & Bjork, 2011).
The key takeaway
Aim for the skill that is reliable enough to attempt and unreliable enough to matter. Too easy, and you are just enjoying yourself. Too hard, and you are not practising — you are drowning, and drowning teaches nothing but panic. The edge is narrower and more specific than most practitioners assume.
Below the edge, at the edge, beyond the edge
The right response to a weakness depends entirely on which of three zones it lives in.
Beyond your edge are the skills you have genuinely mastered. They feel wonderful to practise, which is exactly why they are a trap. This is not development; it is a victory lap.
At your edge are the skills that work but not reliably. This is the sweet spot, where nearly all your practice time should go. You know roughly what good looks like and can produce it sometimes — you just cannot yet produce it on demand. Drilling these, with honest feedback, is what turns "sometimes" into "always." Feedback is doing real work here, not just encouragement: a landmark review of the education literature found that feedback which tells you specifically where you stand relative to a goal, and what to do next, produces far larger gains than generic praise or vague encouragement (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). This is exactly why structured deliberate-practice programmes for therapists build in repeated cycles of attempt-then-feedback around one narrow skill, rather than open-ended rehearsal (Carlsson et al., 2024; Rosén, 2025).
Below your edge are the skills you cannot really perform yet, where you do not know what good even looks like. And here is the counter-intuitive bit: do not drill these on your own. Repetition only refines a pattern you already have the shape of. With no reliable model, solo repetition just grooves in your guesses. What you need first is teaching — a mentor, a course, a demonstration to give you the pattern before you rehearse it.
This saves you from two classic errors: drilling a skill you have already mastered and calling it practice, and drilling a skill you have not yet learned and wondering why solo repetition is not helping. Both feel like effort. Neither produces improvement. Practise at the edge. Get taught below it. Leave what lies beyond it alone.
Why we avoid the very thing that would help
If the edge is so obviously where the value is, why is it so hard to go there? Three reasons, worth naming, because naming them is half the battle.
The first is that it simply feels bad. Working at your edge means being not-very-good on purpose, when you could be spending that time being good. Every instinct pulls you back toward competence.
The second is ego, and it is quieter and more dangerous. The longer you have practised, the more your identity is bound up in being skilled, so admitting a shaky area can feel like admitting you are not as good as your years suggest. Experience is not the same as expertise. A widely discussed review of the psychotherapy research literature made exactly this point: therapists' outcomes generally do not improve with years in practice once they pass their early training, and clinicians are notoriously poor judges of their own skill level — which means the confidence that comes with experience is not a reliable guide to where your actual weaknesses lie (Tracey, Wampold, Lichtenberg, & Goodyear, 2014). Experience masquerades as expertise, in part, by teaching us to explain away our weakest moments.
The third is that the weakness is often invisible. Much of a hypnotherapist's real skill is undramatic: the precision of a phrase, the length of a silence, the exact moment you chose to lead rather than pace. These are hard to see in yourself in the moment, so your weakest skills hide in plain sight for years. You cannot fix what you have never actually looked at.
How to find your edge: an honest audit
You do it the way the professional does — you stop performing for an hour and look at your own game with a critical rather than a defensive eye. Here is how to do that systematically.
Map the whole craft — therapist first, hypnotherapist second
Start wider than you think you should. It is tempting to audit only the hypnosis, but you are a therapist first and a hypnotherapist second, and most of what determines whether a client gets better happens around the trance, not inside it. Map both: rapport, the first ninety seconds, history-taking, formulation, contracting, clean questioning, handling resistance, sitting with emotion, endings — and then inductions, deepening, suggestion, convincers, abreaction, emergence. You cannot improve a craft you have never laid out in full.
Score yourself honestly
Go through the map and ask two questions of each skill, not one. First: how reliably do I do this well? Not on my best day — reliably. Second: how much does this actually matter in my real caseload? The magic is in the combination. Your best targets are not your weakest skills; they are the ones that score in the middle for reliability and high for how much they matter. A skill you are shaky at but never use can wait. A skill you have mastered can wait too. The one that is unreliable and important is calling your name.
Triangulate with the questions that don't lie
Scores can flatter, so test them. Which two recent sessions do you keep replaying — and what specific moment do you return to? Which part of a session do you quietly hope the client won't need today? Where do you rely on a single go-to because you never built an alternative? These questions bypass the ego, because they ask about felt experience rather than self-assessment. The moment you keep replaying is your edge announcing itself.
Name it with precision
This is the step almost everyone skips, and the one that turns an insight into a trainable target. "Get better at inductions" is not a target; it is a wish — too big to practise, too vague to measure. Sharpen it until it is almost uncomfortably specific. Not "get better at inductions" but "deliver a rapid induction smoothly with a sceptical, analytical client, without rushing my pacing." Not "handle emotion better" but "stay regulated in the first thirty seconds of an unexpected abreaction, instead of rushing to fix it." A weakness you can name precisely is a weakness you can practise — and it is also a weakness you can get useful feedback on, since specific, goal-referenced feedback is what makes the practice pay off (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). A vague one just makes you feel bad.
The choice in front of you
Every practitioner faces the same quiet fork whenever they sit down to improve. One path is to practise what you are already good at, feel competent for an hour, and change almost nothing. The other is to go looking for the thing you have been avoiding, sit in the discomfort of being not-yet-good, and actually move.
The first is pleasant and leads nowhere. The second is uncomfortable and is the only one that works, and it is now the model underpinning modern deliberate-practice training for therapists, from manualised peer-feedback courses (Andersson, Lagerberg, Boswell, Constantino, & Carlbring, 2024) to supervision built around a single named target (Rosén, 2025). You will fall to the level of your practice — not the level of your good days or your favourite technique, but the level of what you have genuinely, deliberately trained. Finding your edge is simply deciding to train the thing that matters rather than the thing that flatters. That is the difference that makes the difference.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know what to work on as a hypnotherapist?
Map your whole craft — therapeutic skills as well as hypnosis-specific ones — then score each skill twice: how reliably you do it well, and how much it matters in your real caseload. Your best target is the skill that is unreliable and important. Confirm it by noticing which moments you replay after sessions and which parts you quietly hope won't come up.
What does "working at the edge of your ability" mean?
It means practising in the narrow band just beyond comfortable competence — the skills that work sometimes but not reliably. Too easy and you are not improving; too hard and you are overwhelmed rather than learning. This "productive struggle" is well documented in the learning sciences as a desirable difficulty (Bjork & Bjork, 2011) and maps closely onto Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) — the edge is the productive middle, where you fail often enough to learn but not so often that you are lost.
Should I practise my weakest skill?
Not necessarily, and not always alone. If a skill is genuinely below your edge — you cannot yet perform it and do not know what good looks like — solo repetition just grooves in your mistakes. There you need teaching first. Save deliberate solo practice for skills at your edge, where you already have a rough model to refine and where feedback-guided repetition has the strongest evidence behind it (Ericsson et al., 1993; Sheen et al., 2024).
How often should I reassess my weaknesses?
Treat it as a recurring habit. A thorough audit two to four times a year works well, with a lighter check whenever you finish a focused block of practice. As one weakness becomes reliable, the edge moves and a new target appears. Finding your edge is not a single decision; it is a standing part of practising deliberately.
Find your edge
At Jacquin Hypnosis Academy, we no longer treat "getting better" as something that just happens with time. We treat it as a discipline — one that starts by looking honestly at your own craft and choosing the one thing that will move you most. That is what the Academy is built around: not more information, but deliberate practice, honest feedback and a community that helps you keep finding your edge.
If you are ready to stop practising what flatters you and start practising what matters, this is the place to do it. Find your edge, and put the difference that makes the difference to work in your own practice.
References
Andersson, G., Lagerberg, H., Boswell, J. F., Constantino, M. J., & Carlbring, P. (2024). Does practice make perfect? The effects of an eight-week manualized deliberate practice course with peer feedback on patient-rated working alliance in adults: A pilot randomized controlled trial. Clinical Psychology in Europe, 6(3). https://doi.org/10.32872/cpe.12353
Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In Psychology and the real world (pp. 56–64). Worth Publishers. https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2016/04/EBjork_RBjork_2011.pdf
Carlsson, J., Norberg, J., Gustafsson, M., Olsson, M., Bergbom, S., & Rousmaniere, T. (2024). A pilot study of a deliberate practice intervention for therapist trainees. Nordic Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/19012276.2024.2313532
Ericsson, K. A. (2008). Deliberate practice and acquisition of expert performance: A general overview. Academic Emergency Medicine, 15(11), 988–994. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1553-2712.2008.00227.x
Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363
Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81–112. https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487
Hayman, R. (2013). The role of deliberate practice in developing adolescent golfing excellence [Doctoral thesis, University of Central Lancashire]. https://knowledge.lancashire.ac.uk/id/eprint/6652/1/Hayman%20Rick%20Final%20e-Thesis%20(Master%20Copy).pdf
Macnamara, B. N., & Maitra, M. (2019). The role of deliberate practice in expert performance: Revisiting Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (1993). Royal Society Open Science, 6(8), 190327. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.190327
Rosén, E. (2025). Integrating deliberate practice into group supervision: A case illustration. Journal of Clinical Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.23780
Rousmaniere, T. (2019). Deliberate practice for psychotherapists: A guide to improving clinical effectiveness. Routledge.
Sheen, J., Nurse, K., O'Shea, M., Ling, M., & Castle, N. (2024). The influence of deliberate practice on skill performance in therapeutic practice: A systematic review of early studies. Psychotherapy Research. https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2024.2308159
Tracey, T. J. G., Wampold, B. E., Lichtenberg, J. W., & Goodyear, R. K. (2014). Expertise in psychotherapy: An elusive goal? American Psychologist, 69(3), 218–229. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035099
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press. https://home.fau.edu/musgrove/web/vygotsky1978.pdf