So what is the first step to improving your performance?  Simply put, knowing your baseline.  Whatever the endeavor, you have to keep score.  All great performers do.  As a result, the performance in most fields has been improving steadily over the last 100 years.

Consider, for instance, the Olympics. Over the last century, the best performance for every event has improved–in some cases by 50%!  The Gold Medal winning time for the marathon in the 1896 Olympics was just one minute faster than the entry time currently required just to participate in the Chicago and Boston marathons.

By contrast, the effectiveness of psychological therapies has not improved a single percentage point over the last 30 years.  How, you may wonder, could that be?  During the same time period: (1) more than 10,000 how-to books on psychotherapy have been published; (2) the number of treatment approaches has mushroomed from 60 to 400; and (3) there are presently 145 officially approved, evidenced-based, manualized treatments for 51 of the 397 possible DSM IV diagnostic groups.  Certainly, given such “growth,” we therapists must be more effective with more people than ever before.  Unfortunately, however, instead of advancing, we’ve stagnated, mistaking our feverish peddling for real progress in the Tour de Therapy.

Truth is, no one has been keeping score, least of all we individual practitioners. True, volumes of research now prove beyond any doubt that psychotherapy works.  Relying on such evidence to substantiate the effectiveness of one’s own work, however, is a bit like Tiger Woods telling you the par for a particular hole rather than how many strokes it took him to sink the ball.  The result on outcome, research indicates, is that effectiveness rates plateau very early in most therapists careers while confidence level continue to grow.

In one study, for example, when clinicians were asked to rate their job performance from A+ to F, fully two-thirds considered themselves A or better. No one, not a single person in the lot, rated him or herself as below average. As researchers Sapyta, Riemer, and Bickman (2005) conclude, “most clinicians believe that they produce patient outcomes that are well above average” (p. 146). In another study, Deirdre Hiatt and George Hargrave used peer and provider ratings, as well as a standardized outcome measure, to assess the success rates of therapists in a sample of mental health professionals. As one would expect, providers were found to vary significantly in their effectiveness. What was disturbing is that the least effective therapists in the sample rated themselves on par with the most effective!

The reason for stagnant success rates in psychotherapy should be clear to all: why try to improve when you already think your the best or, barring that, at least above average?

Here again, expanding our search for excellence beyond the narrow field of psychotherapy to the subject of expertise and expert performance in general can provide some helpful insights. In virtually every profession, from carpentry to policework, medicine to mathematics, average performers overestimate their abilities, confidently assigning themselves to the top tier. Therapists are simply doing what everyone else does. Alas, they are average among the average.

Our own work and research proves that clinicians can break away from the crowd of average achievers by using a couple of simple, valid, and reliable tools for assessing outcome. As hard as it may be to believe, the empirical evidence indicates that performance increases between 65-300% (click here to read the studies). Next time, I’ll review these simple tools as well as a few basic methods for determining exactly how effective you are. Subscribe now so you’ll be the first to know.

One more note, after posting last time, I heard from several readers who had difficulty subscribing. After doing some research, we learned that you must use IE 7 or Firefox 3.0.7 or later for the subscribe function to work properly.  Look forward to hearing from you!

In the meantime, the transcript below is of a recent interview I did for Shrinkrap radio.  It’s focused on our current work: