Member Article

How Deliberate Practice Shaped My Confidence as a Therapist

Mikaela Abundez Toledo, MA, Registered AMFT

I have spent a lot of my life learning through practice. Before I became a therapist, I was a volleyball player at CSU San Bernardino and was part of the 2019 NCAA Division II National Championship team for women’s volleyball. That experience shaped the way I think about growth. In athletics, improvement was never treated as something that happened just because we understood the game. We watched, repeated, adjusted, received feedback, and tried again.

Because of that background, the idea of deliberate practice stood out to me when I was looking for practicum sites in graduate school. I was drawn to the Sentio University MFT Program’s emphasis on building clinical skill through observation, feedback, and repetition. At the time, I did not have language for everything I was looking for, but I knew I wanted training that would help me do more than talk about therapy. I wanted to feel confident in my clinical skills when I was sitting across from clients, not just in my understanding of theory.

My training at Sentio Counseling Center helped me understand the difference between learning a concept and being able to use it in the room. In class, I could understand the importance of slowing down, tracking emotion, reflecting process, and staying connected to the client’s experience. But in actual sessions, those skills felt much more complex. A client might become guarded, overwhelmed, self-critical, or disconnected, and I would have to respond in real time.

That was where deliberate practice became meaningful for me. Because client sessions were recorded, I was able to review actual clinical moments with my supervisors instead of relying only on my memory of the session. We could pause the video, notice where I moved too quickly or missed an emotional cue, and identify one specific skill to practice. Instead of only asking, “What happened in the case?” I began learning to ask, “What was I doing in that moment, and what skill could I strengthen?” That small shift made the work feel less vague and less overwhelming. I could focus on one clinical move at a time: pausing before responding, reflecting emotion more simply, staying with a client’s experience longer, or noticing when my own anxiety made me want to move too quickly.

This process reminded me of volleyball, but it also challenged me in a different way. In sports, feedback can be direct and visible. You can see whether the ball went where you wanted it to go. Therapy is more relational and nuanced. Sometimes the most important learning happened in subtle moments: when I missed an emotional cue, asked a question too soon, or shifted into explanation instead of staying present. Deliberate practice gave me a way to slow those moments down and learn from them.

It also helped me become more compassionate toward myself as a developing clinician. Early in training, it is easy to interpret uncertainty as a sign that you are not good enough. Looking closely at my work helped me see uncertainty differently. The moments where I felt stuck were not proof that I could not do the work. They were invitations to practice a specific skill with more support and intention.

Over time, this helped me feel more confident. Not confident in the sense that I always knew exactly what to do, but confident that I had a process for continuing to grow. I began to trust that if something felt difficult in session, I could bring it into supervision, look at it honestly, practice a different response, and return to the work with more clarity. That kind of confidence felt grounded because it was built through repetition rather than performance.

I also appreciated that deliberate practice did not make therapy feel mechanical. At first, I wondered if practicing specific clinical responses would make the work feel less natural. My experience was the opposite. The more I practiced, the more present I felt. Skills that once took a lot of mental effort became more available, which allowed me to listen more closely and respond with more intention.

As I continue developing as a therapist, I find myself returning to this lesson often. Growth is not only about knowing more. It is also about being willing to look at what actually happens in the room, receive feedback, and practice the parts of the work that feel hardest. That willingness can be uncomfortable, but it can also be deeply reassuring.

I am still very much in the process of becoming the therapist I hope to be. What deliberate practice gave me was not a shortcut or a guarantee. It gave me a structure for growth. It helped me understand that confidence can be built slowly, through humility, feedback, and repetition. For me, that has been one of the most meaningful parts of my clinical training.

Mikaela Abundez Toledo, MA, is a Registered Associate Marriage and Family Therapist in California providing online therapy for adults navigating anxiety, perfectionism, and the intersection of sport and identity. She trained at Sentio Counseling Center at the Sentio MFT Program. Website: growwithmikaela.com