Currently in discussion at HypnoAsia . . .

Actually, you have given me a very interesting idea. In the medical field, they typically work in teams for many operations.

Yes, but for most consulting work it is done one-on-one. In cases where a patient is seen by more than one physician, the junior doctors always defer to the senior.

This way, not only the young doctors learn from their more experienced colleagues, but also the senior doctors can keep an eye on their mistakes and make amends.

In most cases like this, the senior doctor does the consulting while the junior doctors are observing (typically interns). If a senior doctor asks a junior for his opinion, then the patient will wait to hear whether he is right or not from the senior (testing, not practicing). In most of these circumstances, the junior doctors are not seen as “real” doctors by the patients but as students learning their trade.

If the team is comprised of non-learning doctors then they almost always defer to one another’s opinion in their specialty area (the team is made up of specialists who work together). In any case, there would be no correcting in front of a patient.

I wonder if it is a viable solution to the practicing scenario in our therapy practices. Would you care to share your view on this?

Personally, I believe that internships are a good idea . . . but not in the team consultation model. If a senior hypnotist meets with a client with juniors, the juniors would not be able to assert themselves in their own right but would be looking over their shoulders too much. Also, they would not be able to establish real hypnotic rappor with the client who would be wondering if they knew everything they need to know if a supervisor was present.

A better model is to have a team but to not have them present during sessions or meetings with clients. So, to the public, eash hypnotists working at the clinic is fully trained and competent . . . which is a good model anyway . . . have sessions videotaped and then later, the team can randomly pick videos for one another and go over them with the other members of the team. Peer mentoring but not monitoring.

If one wants less experienced folks to learn from those who have more experience then they can watch videos of the more experienced person, workshop with that hypnotist, and perhaps directly observe sessions with explicit explanations to the client that the observer is an intern and will keep his mouth shut and that all things in the therapy room are still covered by confidentiality.

However, some folks are just super uncomfortable with more than one person in the room when undergoing therapy. I would strongly suggest minimizing the stressors on the client as much as possible. Clients don’t want to be educational gunea pigs, they want to get in, get the best therapy they can, and get out free, clear, and better for it.

A number of clinics that have more than one hypnotist do use a peer-mentoring system of viewing videos of sessions and giving ongoing feedback. Others in some communities will establish a mentoring relationship with their teacher or an older more-experienced hypnotist in their area and meet for coffee or the like twice a month or more or less and just go over questions and get advice. Still others, who are either uncomfortable with this sort of face-to-face relationship use email lists like this one (HypnoAsia) or my Hypnosis Technique Exchange or the Hypnosis-Hypnotherapy and Mindlist lists as a means to get feedback and ideas without a feeling of personal risk. Some teachers have their own lists where their students mentor with them or where they are the center of the list and others turn to them for advice or information while ostensibly open but still very much personality-centric which can make them problematic personality-cults for marketing purposes only when they go awry or they can be very very valuable and rich resources when done very well such as the Omnigrads and Marknosis lists. Regardless, some degree of mentoring is very very valuable and the idea that even folks who have been in the business for awhile can always learn new tricks and all of us, experienced or new to the whole shebang, could use someone to talk to and ask advice of at some point. It really depends upon how formalized you want the relationship to become.

When looking to the idea of interning or practical experience gathering before someone goes out into the world and meets with real live clients to do changework beyond the simple induction and suggestion, then supervised hours are a worthy goal. This will also depend upon what level of training a person has. Some training programs require a large degree of actual practice before certifying a person while others are quick courses about the subject with no real hands-on experience prior to certification. If a training program has a competence exam as a prerequisite to certification, then graduates of the program are likely to have better skills at the get-go than those that do not have written, oral, AND demonstrational exams as part of the certification process. Folks who come through programs without the benefit of all three testing strategies really need mentoring as they begin to practice (even those who do, could use it and support groups are very valuable – any organization worth its salt should have community building processes to engender mentoring or peer-mentoring of some sort). Folks who are aggresively self-taught may or may not have initial skill levels to get them started (some have more self-awareness of a need to learn than those who come from non-testing certification programs as some folks who go through those programs actually believe they know what they’re doing when their programs are rather lacking).

Of course, I’m babbling anyway.

All the best,
Brian