How to Get Better as a Hypnotherapist: Why Deliberate Practice Beats Experience

Here is an uncomfortable question for anyone who has been practising hypnotherapy for a decade: are you actually better than you were five years ago, or just more comfortable? Most of us assume the two are the same thing. We assume that seeing clients, running sessions and clocking up the years is, in itself, how we improve. The research says otherwise. And once you understand why, you can do something about it.

This is a piece about how therapists genuinely get better, not through more hours in the chair but through a specific, well-evidenced kind of effort called deliberate practice. It is the difference that makes the difference.

The plateau nobody warns you about

In 2016, a team of researchers led by Simon Goldberg (with William Hoyt among the authors) published a study that quietly unsettled the profession. Titled Do psychotherapists improve with time and experience?, it followed 170 therapists treating 6,591 clients. The individual therapists' records spanned anywhere from under six months to nearly eighteen years, averaging under five years each. It is one of the largest and longest analyses of its kind.

The expectation was obvious. Surely, as the years accumulated, therapists would sharpen their skills and their clients would fare progressively better. What the data actually showed was the opposite. On average there was a small but statistically significant decline in client outcomes as therapists gained experience. Not a plateau, but a gentle slide backwards.

To be fair to the data, the picture was not uniformly bleak. The same study found that early client dropout actually decreased as therapists became more experienced, and that roughly 40% of the therapists did improve slightly over time. But the overall average trend was a decline, and that average is what should give us pause.

Read that again, because it matters. The very thing we are taught to trust, accumulated experience, was on average associated with slightly worse results over time, not better ones.

“Experience is not the same as expertise. You can repeat a year twenty times and call it twenty years of practice.”

This finding does not stand alone. Two years earlier, Terence Tracey and colleagues published a landmark review in American Psychologist asking whether expertise in psychotherapy even exists in the way we imagine. Their sobering conclusion was that the evidence for therapists improving with routine experience is thin, and the reason is structural: therapists rarely receive the accurate, timely, corrective feedback that any skill needs in order to grow. We remember our successes, quietly explain away our failures, and almost never find out what happened to the client who drifted away after session three.

There is a crucial sequel to that first Goldberg study, and it points straight at the solution. The same research team went on to examine an agency that had deliberately built routine outcome monitoring and deliberate practice into its culture (Goldberg, Babins-Wagner, Rousmaniere and colleagues, 2016). Tracking 153 therapists and 5,128 clients, they found that outcomes there genuinely did improve over time, at both the agency level and the level of the individual therapist. The difference was not more years in the chair. It was an environment engineered for feedback and structured practice. In other words, therapists can get better with experience, but only when that experience is paired with the right kind of deliberate work.

So if experience alone does not make us better, what does?

The tennis player who never improves

Picture two tennis players. The first is a keen club amateur. She plays two or three matches a week, has done for fifteen years, and she is good, comfortably better than a beginner. But here is the thing: she has played at almost exactly the same standard for a decade. Her serve has the same flaw it had in 2015. Under pressure she reaches for the same safe shots. She has found her level, and matches simply confirm it, week after week.

The second player is a professional. Crucially, the pro spends the majority of her time not playing matches at all. She is on the practice court dissecting the weak backhand, hitting the same cross-court shot four hundred times, reviewing footage, working with a coach who tells her uncomfortable truths. The matches are where she performs. The improvement happens in between.

This is the distinction that should keep every serious practitioner up at night. Seeing clients is playing matches. It is performance, not practice. It keeps you sharp at what you can already do, but left to itself it will not extend your range. The amateur logs the hours and stays where she is. The professional trains deliberately on the components of excellence, and pulls away.

Most hypnotherapists, if we are honest, practise like the amateur. We run sessions. We attend the occasional weekend workshop. We assume the rest takes care of itself. And then we wonder why year eight feels a lot like year three.

What deliberate practice actually is

The term comes from the psychologist Anders Ericsson, whose 1993 research first mapped how genuine experts, whether violinists, chess grandmasters or athletes, are made rather than born. Before we go further, it is worth defining it precisely, because the phrase is often used loosely to mean “trying hard.” It means something much more specific.

Deliberate practice is not simply “doing the thing a lot.” It is a specific and rather demanding activity with four defining features.

It is focused on a specific weakness, not a general workout. You are not “doing hypnosis”; you are isolating your inductions, or your handling of an abreaction, or the precision of your language when deepening.

It happens at the edge of your current ability, in the zone just beyond comfortable competence, where you fail often enough to learn.

It is driven by immediate, honest feedback, whether from a recording, a mentor or an outcome measure, so you can see the gap between what you intended and what you did.

And it involves repetition with refinement: doing the thing again, adjusting, again, adjusting, until the new pattern becomes reliable.

Notice how little of ordinary professional life meets this bar. A full day of back-to-back clients is exhausting, but it is almost entirely performance. There is no isolation of a weakness, no feedback loop, no deliberate repetition of the hard part. You end the day tired but no better. That is not a failing of character; it is simply the difference between working and training.

Why 10,000 hours is a myth

You have almost certainly heard that it takes 10,000 hours to master anything. It is one of the stickiest ideas in popular psychology, and it is a misreading. The figure came from Malcolm Gladwell's popularisation of Ericsson's work, and Ericsson himself spent years pushing back against it. His research never claimed that quantity of practice was the key. It claimed the opposite: that the quality and structure of practice is what separates the expert from the perpetual amateur.

“Ten thousand hours does not make you a master. Ten thousand hours of deliberate practice might. The hours are the container, not the content.”

Our club tennis player has logged well over 10,000 hours on court. She is still a club player. The hours were real; they simply were not the right kind of hours. This is oddly liberating news for a working hypnotherapist. It means the path to genuine skill is not about grinding out ten thousand more sessions. It is about changing what you do with a comparatively small, ring-fenced slice of your time.

The study that proves it, in our own field

It is one thing to talk about violinists and tennis pros. Does any of this hold for therapists specifically? This is where the most important research for our profession comes in.

In 2015, Daryl Chow, Scott Miller and colleagues published The role of deliberate practice in the development of highly effective psychotherapists in the journal Psychotherapy. They studied a large cohort of therapists and their clients, and then looked closely at what distinguished the genuinely top-performing practitioners, those whose clients reliably did better, from everyone else.

The differences were not what most of us would guess. The best therapists were not set apart by their years of experience, their qualifications, their theoretical orientation, their gender, their confidence, or even their caseload. What predicted superior client outcomes was something far more humbling: the amount of time they spent, alone and outside of sessions, in deliberate practice aimed specifically at improving their skills.

The most effective therapists devoted roughly 2.8 times more time to solitary deliberate practice than their more average colleagues. They reviewed recordings of their own work. They studied cases that had gone wrong. They sought feedback that stung. They treated their craft the way the professional treats the practice court.

One honest caveat is worth naming here. These studies, Goldberg, Tracey and Chow alike, were conducted on psychotherapists broadly: counsellors, CBT practitioners and mixed-modality clinicians, rather than on hypnotherapists specifically. To date there is no equivalent deliberate-practice research carried out on hypnotherapy outcomes. Generalising from one to the other is reasonable, because the underlying mechanisms of feedback, isolating a skill and deliberate rehearsal are modality-agnostic, but it is more honest to flag the leap than to gloss over it.

How to build deliberate practice into a working practice

Theory is comfortable; change is not. Here is how to translate all of this into something you can start this week, without quitting your day job or adding twenty hours to your diary. The activities fall into two camps, what you do alone and what you do with peers, held together by the one ingredient neither can do without: feedback.

What you can do on your own

A surprising amount of deliberate practice is solitary. In the Chow study, it was precisely this solo work, done outside of sessions on your own time, that most clearly separated the best therapists from the rest. Here is what it looks like in practice.

Record and review your own sessions. With appropriate consent, record your work, then do the hard part and watch it back with a critical rather than a defensive eye. Watch with the sound off to study your presence and pacing; listen without the picture to hear your language patterns. You will catch verbal tics, missed cues, an induction that rambles, a moment where the client offered you a door and you walked straight past it. This single habit reintroduces the feedback loop that ordinary practice strips out.

Isolate one weakness at a time. Do not try to get better at “hypnotherapy”; that is too big to train. Pick one component: your handling of resistance, the precision of your deepening language, your first ninety seconds with a nervous client. Work on that, and only that, until it improves, then choose the next. Depth beats breadth.

Rehearse the hard parts cold. Athletes drill the awkward shot before they need it in a match. Practise an induction aloud, alone, until it is smooth. Rehearse, out loud, how you will respond to the client who says “I don't think I was actually hypnotised.” Mental rehearsal counts too: visualise the difficult moment and walk through your response before you ever meet it live. Repetition with small refinements, away from the pressure of a real client, is exactly what the science points to.

Study the work of practitioners better than you. Watch recordings and demonstrations of skilled hypnotherapists, but do it actively: pause, predict what they will do next, then compare. Passive watching is entertainment; prediction-and-comparison is practice.

What you can do with peers

Solo work has a ceiling: you cannot see your own blind spots. This is where peers and mentors become indispensable.

Set up a peer-practice partnership. Find one or two serious colleagues and meet regularly to practise deliberately, not to swap war stories but to work. Take turns running techniques while the other observes against a specific checklist, then swap roles. Role-play the difficult intake, the resistant client, the abreaction. Practising on each other, where the stakes are low, lets you fail safely and often.

Find a coach or mentor who will tell you the truth. The professional has a coach for a reason. A mentor or supervisor who gives honest, specific, sometimes uncomfortable feedback is worth more than another certificate on the wall. Mutual admiration feels lovely and teaches nothing; seek out the person who raises the bar and is willing to tell you what is not working.

Review recordings together. Bring a recording of your own work to a trusted peer or supervision group and invite them to critique it against a shared standard. Others will spot patterns you have become blind to, and articulating why something did or did not work sharpens everyone in the room.

Why feedback is the linchpin

Every activity above, whether solo or shared, depends on one thing: honest, timely feedback. This is the ingredient Tracey and colleagues identified as the missing piece in most therapists' development. Without a feedback loop, repetition simply engraves your existing habits, flaws and all. With it, each repetition becomes a chance to close the gap between what you intended and what you actually did.

The most powerful and least-used source of feedback is your own client outcomes. We tend to grade ourselves on how a session felt, not on how the client actually fared, and feelings are a notoriously unreliable guide. Introducing simple, routine outcome measures, even a brief check-in scale at the start of each session, gives you the corrective signal that experience alone never provides. You cannot improve what you refuse to measure.

The choice in front of you

The evidence converges on a single, clarifying message. Time in the chair will keep you competent, comfortable and, quietly, stuck. Deliberate practice, meaning focused, effortful, feedback-rich work on your specific weaknesses, is what separates the practitioner who is genuinely excellent in year twenty from the one who has simply repeated year three, twenty times over.

The good news is that almost nobody does this. Which means the practitioner who takes deliberate practice seriously does not just improve; they pull away from the field, exactly as the professional pulls away from the talented amateur. The tennis is the same. The training is everything.

“You will not rise to the level of your experience. You will fall to the level of your practice. So make the practice deliberate.”

Frequently asked questions

Does experience make you a worse hypnotherapist?

Not exactly, but the largest longitudinal study to date (Goldberg, Hoyt and colleagues, 2016) found that, on average, therapists' client outcomes declined slightly with years of experience rather than improving. Around 40% of therapists did improve, and client dropout fell as experience grew, but the average trend was downward. The takeaway is not that experience harms you, but that experience alone is not enough to make you better. Deliberate practice is what drives genuine improvement.

What is deliberate practice for therapists?

Deliberate practice is focused, effortful work on a specific weakness in your skills, carried out at the edge of your ability, with honest and immediate feedback, and repeated until the skill improves. For a hypnotherapist that might mean reviewing recordings, drilling inductions, rehearsing difficult moments and measuring client outcomes, all done outside of live sessions.

Is the 10,000-hour rule true?

No. The 10,000-hour rule is a popularisation that misrepresents Anders Ericsson's research. Ericsson showed that it is the quality and structure of practice, deliberate practice, that builds expertise, not the raw number of hours. Ten thousand hours of unfocused repetition will not make you a master.

How much deliberate practice do I need to improve?

Research by Chow, Miller and colleagues (2015) found that the most effective therapists spent around 2.8 times more time on solitary deliberate practice than their peers. In practical terms, even a ring-fenced two hours a week, spent reviewing your work, drilling a weakness and seeking feedback, can meaningfully change your development.

Take your practice deliberately further

At Jacquin Hypnosis Academy, deliberate practice is not an afterthought; it is built into how we train. If you are ready to stop logging matches and start training like a professional, explore our courses and mentoring, and put the difference that makes the difference to work in your own practice.

References

Chow, D. L., Miller, S. D., Seidel, J. A., Kane, R. T., Thornton, J. A., & Andrews, W. P. (2015). The role of deliberate practice in the development of highly effective psychotherapists. Psychotherapy, 52(3), 337–345.

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.

Ericsson, K. A., & Pool, R. (2016). Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Goldberg, S. B., Babins-Wagner, R., Rousmaniere, T., Berzins, S., Hoyt, W. T., Whipple, J. L., Miller, S. D., & Wampold, B. E. (2016). Creating a climate for therapist improvement: A case study of an agency focused on outcomes and deliberate practice. Psychotherapy, 53(3), 367–375.

Goldberg, S. B., Rousmaniere, T., Miller, S. D., Whipple, J., Nielsen, S. L., Hoyt, W. T., & Wampold, B. E. (2016). Do psychotherapists improve with time and experience? A longitudinal analysis of outcomes in a clinical setting. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 63(1), 1–11.

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.