How Guided CBT Practice Actually Works
Curious what you'll find inside CBT Pro On-Demand?
In this walkthrough, Dr. Maor Katz, Founder and CEO of Feeling Good Institute, demonstrates how therapists can build practical clinical skills through interactive role-plays, AI-powered feedback, and deliberate practice.
In this video, you'll see:
• How a CBT Pro On-Demand skill module is structured
• An example role-play using the "Changing the Focus" technique
• How therapists receive personalized feedback after each practice session
• How you can repeat scenarios and continue improving your therapeutic skills
CBT Pro On-Demand is designed to help therapists practice challenging clinical conversations in a supportive, self-paced environment, whether you're learning a new technique or refining existing skills.
Learn more about CBT Pro On-Demand: https://feelinggoodinstitute.com/for-clinicians/cbt-pro-on-demand
Key Steps Discussed in This Webinar:
1. Learn when to use the changing-the-focus technique.
2. Review when the skill should and should not be used.
3. Practice with realistic and challenging therapy scenarios.
4. Name the pattern and share your feelings respectfully.
5. Explain how discussing the pattern may help the patient.
6. Review the feedback and repeat the role-play if needed.
In This Video:
Maor Katz: Hey, I'm Dr. Maor Katz. I'm founder and CEO of Feeling Good Institute. Recently, I've been working a lot on creating a lot of skills that we're hoping therapists can just practice on their own or pair up and practice. We, at this point or at this date, have about 25 skills available, and we're adding more and more skills. I want to show you one of them. It's actually a more complex one. It's called changing the focus. The reason I chose this one is because I noticed that a lot of times in our consultation group, this is a skill that our therapists always-me included, by the way—always need to practice, or often need to practice, for the difficult situations that they encounter in the therapy room. Let me show you what a skill like that looks like for us to practice. I want to first and foremost also acknowledge that this is all based on the work of the wonderful Dr. David Burns, who came up with all these amazing skills and techniques to make therapy more effective. So, the skill is changing the focus. It's a skill that we use when you have a difficult situation in the room where there's maybe some uncomfortable feelings that you're having between you and your patient that it's a little tricky to bring up. You want to bring them up in a way that's helpful, but you're worried, of course, that it might be maybe hurtful or uncomfortable to do so. So, when you're seeing the app here, you can see what is for this particular skill of changing your focus. You can see that you can learn about the skill in it. Here, you can get some information about what changing the focus is, when to use it, when not to use it, etc. When you're feeling ready to practice, you can actually go ahead and start the role play and try to make it fairly similar, as much as we can, to a real environment of a therapy room. So, you can actually start the role play and listen to the scenario.
Patient Statement: So anyway, like I was saying, my week has been really, really hard. My boss said something to me on Monday that just completely ruined my whole week, and then my sister called—and you know how she is—and I just feel like nobody really gets what I'm going through. I mean, I try to explain it, but—oh, and I forgot to mention what happened with my neighbor.
Maor Katz: So you see that this is a scenario that is not uncommon, where we have a patient who really is doing their best, trying to share with us as much as they can, give us all the information, and has a lot going on. But also, it might kind of create a problem in moving therapy forward. So, how do you change the focus? Let me try and practice. The skill criteria is right in front of me, and I can see kind of what is needed in order to do well in the skill. It's divided into these five parts: we want to change the direction of the conversation, name the pattern, use "I feel" statements, and stroking, and then dangle the carrot that is going to explain why it is that we're even bringing this up in a hopeful way—how can it be helpful to the patient? And finally, pass the baton with an inquiry. So, what's neat about it is I can do all of this practice in my natural voice because I'm going to record the response, it's going to be transcribed, and we're going to give it to the app to analyze it. So here goes, let me try it with this patient: "Let me introject. Can I introject just real quick? I was noticing something that I think might be important. I noticed that there's a lot that you want to say, and everything that you say, I think, is important and meaningful. And also, I really do want to just be there for you and hear you out. And at the same time, I'm also noticing that a lot of time is spent with me hearing you, listening to you, and that makes me worried. Maybe you're not getting as much out of the session as you could otherwise. First, I thought, maybe I should just keep it to myself because maybe that's just what you're looking for. But then I thought, if I'm feeling this way in our sessions, maybe this is affecting other relationships in your life. And so, maybe we have this kind of special relationship, you and me, where we can talk about these things, and maybe it can kind of lead to breakthroughs, not only in our sessions but also in other relationships. What do you think?"
Maor Katz: So, I'm stopping the recording, and it's going to give me feedback, right? So here's the feedback. It's coming up in front of us here on the screen. Seems like I did well in some criteria, but didn't do so great in one criterion, and it's giving me some suggestions for improvement. Then I can decide: do I want to try again or do I want to go to the next scenario? So, I can click "try again" if I want to just try again, or I can go to the next scenario. So, this is the app. And again, this is one of very many skills that we created. There's a number of scenarios that I added here specifically for needing to change the focus, whether it's a lot of talking, or arriving late, or being kind of quiet or withdrawn, or blaming others, or maybe kind of doing something that I'm feeling kind of disgusted by or something like that uncomfortable. All of these are kind of tricky, of course, to bring up. If you have other scenarios that you think would be useful, please let me know. Thank you for listening.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What does “changing the focus” mean in therapy?
Changing the focus is a therapeutic communication skill used to respectfully address a pattern or uncomfortable interaction that may be preventing therapy from moving forward.
2. When should therapists use the changing-the-focus technique?
Therapists can use it when a patient’s communication or behavior creates a difficult moment that needs to be discussed carefully and constructively.
3. What are the five parts of changing the focus?
The five parts are changing the conversation’s direction, naming the pattern, using “I feel” statements and stroking, explaining the potential benefit, and passing the baton with an inquiry.
4. What scenarios can therapists practice in the application?
Therapists can practice scenarios involving excessive talking, arriving late, remaining quiet or withdrawn, blaming others, and other uncomfortable situations.
5. How does the application provide feedback on therapy skills?
The application transcribes and analyzes the therapist’s recorded response, shows which criteria were met, and suggests improvements before another attempt or scenario.
