Feedback from Heather

Over the years I have received LOTS of valuable feedback from people who attended one or more of my trainings.  

However, one of our star alums from last fall’s class sent me the most comprehensive, most detailed feedback I have ever received.

I am sharing this with you to offer you an idea of what you can expect during our time together!

From Heather Coburn:

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Hi Michele

Thank you again for this amazing training.

I have attached some of my thoughts about my experience.

with much respect and appreciation, Heather

Heather Coburn  PhD RSW RMFT

Things I appreciated about the training:

• Incredible value for the amount and quality of training. You covered the major issues in couples work and did so with depth. I liked the 9-4 day. Time to allow reflection and sometimes conversations about the lessons of the day, walking, and staying on top of my own work stuff. The materials were perfect!  Both regarding content, handouts, (the detailed outline allowed me to both listen and take notes as I followed along) and the thoughtful folder with pen, brochures, and paper was much appreciated. The materials package looked professional and invited me to think even more seriously about what we were talking about. And you were so generous with your book give aways! Thank you.
• I liked that the name tags did not have credentials.
• I loved the introduction you gave about how you came to this work and to hold these ideas and how this is a shift for you from your early training. Very normalizing and inviting and opens space for possibility for professional growth. I LOVE that you are MSW trained. So important for me as an MSW. I need SOWK mentors.
• You present in a conversational style that makes you easy to listen to and your pacing gives time to reflect and absorb all the rich things you say. You are friendly, funny, relational and a great storyteller. You got even more funny and playful as the training progressed. I liked this and it embodies your stance to bring ourselves to our work!
• Your homework task to us was again that parallel process of what we get to experience from a SF approach to better understand what our clients might experience. Enhances my learning.
• You were so energetic throughout the training and especially on Day 4.  WOW. Your energy and enthusiasm was contagious. The days flew by. You connected with all of us and remembered names… you are so hospitable.  What “Guru” invites participants to her home and spoils them…
• It was remarkable how you remembered participant comments and used them in subsequent discussions. This served to link content to practice and made the training feel like it had flow and ease. And you used comments to be funny and connect with us (i.e. with participant and how you liked his “softened start up” when he made a second comment). Your memory is enviable. You tracked every comment from us and reflected back almost word for word. You restated comments to make sure everyone heard and checked out if you heard correctly. This was helpful for making sure we heard and also for giving time to be ready for your answer.
• You encouraged questions by asking frequently what questions we had, you welcomed them, thanked us and thoughtfully responded to questions. So collaborative.
• You model the skills you are talking about such as validating, affirming and appreciating  (ie our discomfort and questions), you ask SFT oriented questions and you demonstrated “utilization”.  You make “use” of every comment or question.
• I appreciate how you stop the videos and say what you are thinking about and how that shapes what you say or do next. You seemed to move between inviting us into making comments that were more in line with “hypothesizing” (about clients) and asking us to construct SFT questions as we watched the clips. I thought this again was skillful in getting us to experience the difference in types of “lens” and questions and the impact of different questions in terms of what conversation is generated. You then asked us to assess how useful the outcomes were and always linked back to client stated specific goals.
• You do so much more than use SFT skills in the session and your masterful interviewing, facilitating, conceptual and perceptive skills are LAYERED and I’m sure each time I watched a clip I could notice something else. I know you have to focus only on a specific skill at any given time and I wish there were no time limits so you could linger on clips and talk about ALL that was going on.
• I appreciated the homework task of thinking about getting through a tough time and to notice how this might have made me a better therapist and I especially appreciated that you did not ask it as a go around the room exercise. I don’t know that I could think of something that I might want to say on the spot! I have enough trouble introducing myself!!!
• Your clinical and personal examples were explicit, interesting, and helped illuminate the concepts you were discussing. The story about your mother’s death and acceptance was so powerful. Hard for you to say… and so useful for us as everyone could relate which could help us relate/appreciate to the goal/work for the exclusive partner re infidelity and moving toward acceptance. Thank you for sharing such a personal story.
• You say “theory light” and I think it is the “right” amount of theory with emphasis on use of ideas in practice. I need a little theory. And I liked the stats you gave as this serves as context for me. You are very creative about the research you cite and the way you use it to illustrate your points ie bids between couple and the Tronick technique.
• The content/agenda builds beautifully. So easy to understand and follow. Must have taken lots of tweaking and organizing!
• I liked the repeat message of a SFT “mindset” “lens” and how this effects/shapes the conversation with the clients.
• When watching the clips you invited us to put ourselves into the therapy room and to imagine holding multiple and conflicting ideas and presuppositions and to think about what questions we would ask. Smart way of getting us to practice the skills!
• I loved the repeat messaging around DO vs understand/insight and on HOW to DO differently.
• When participants made comments that were different than how you think about things you appreciated the comments and validated them and then respectfully stated what you think. I particularly liked your phrases “what that gets me thinking about is…” and “one of the issues that this raises in me is…”  and “my thinking is…”  you send the message that these are ideas, notions, constructs, conversational resources and they are to be considered for utility rather than for agreement around which is “TRUE”. Then you were funny at times about “Michele truths”. This gave me confidence to (tentatively) hold some practice grounded “truths” about what is useful for couples as starting points. You were also clear that if what I try works, do more, but if this attempted solution does not work for this couple you are clear that it is my job to do something different and to keep tracking what is useful for a particular couple.
• Observing how you are with us reminds me of how I need to be with clients (curious, respectful, affirming, inviting us to stretch and be different and to connect to our goals)
• Appreciating how specific and focused you are around answering our questions and offering up specific clinical ideas has inspired me to be more focused and answer more questions directly from my clients! I love that you answer our questions with the actual words you would use (“this is what I would say and do, then you do it). I appreciated how you demonstrated how you would interrupt fighting in session and when one partner is making abusive comments to the other. LOVED how you framed it. Wish I could think like this… I also appreciated that by the last day, you invited us to think about what we think you would answer to our questions. This helped extend our learning and stretch us conceptually.
• You brought in interesting resources such as the Wendy Plump article and the letters and emails from clients. So effective. This brings the clients voice in the room in a creative way.
• You repeatedly invited us to think about and decide for ourselves what we are comfortable doing in the session and invited us to remember that we bring ourselves into the therapy room. The conversation you had around holding the secret of an affair while working with a couple was particularly useful to me. It invited me to think about what I believe and how this will shape what I do with the clients.
• Your facilitating and teaching skills are OUTSTANDING. You constantly oriented us to what we were talking about (i.e. dos and don’ts) and forecasted content coming next. This made the material flow and helped me not interrupt with questions when I knew the content would be covered later/soon. You also kept my interest by saying things like “here is another interesting situation”. These types of comments help me sustain my concentration! Which is important to me as I don’t want to miss anything!
• It was very powerful for me when you showed the clip of the couple dealing with the affairs. You showed the clip and asked for impressions and highlighted the range of different stories and reminded us that these are the “lens” we are wearing and that they will shape what we do and say next. It was so compelling when you continued the clip and then asked “any different thoughts about him now?” Such a perfect vignette to show the concept of “lens” and to remind/invite a SFT outlook.  And facilitated in such a respectful way.
• I appreciated how you talked about shifts in your thinking i.e. holding secrets and now spending more time on exploring reasons for the affair, if this is useful for the exclusive partner, which does not seem SFT congruent on first glance. Good to know that our thinking is always evolving! Though I sometimes wish I could know enough even for a little while!
• When we watched the video clips, I liked when you cued us into what we would see and this helped me be successful in understanding the concept being discussed rather than telling us after the clip and perhaps I would have missed seeing what you wanted us to see. I appreciated how you showed clips when there were times you reflected what was said and times you reflected client meaning or changed client words to words that were more in line with SFT and client stated goals. I noticed that your reflective listening was more than just restating and validating, and you seemed to honor pain/emotional experience without restating client complaints. I need to change my practice around that. I wondered if you were paying attention to what the client’s need or preference was imbedded in the complaint rather than the problem content discussed overtly in the complaint. Wished I would have thought to ask you that at the time.
• The clip about identifying triggers and developing an action plan was useful both to see what this might look like and also for me to hear you talk about where the clients were in their healing and the take away for me was to “not judge” based on such little info.
• You gave a balance of micro skill development and creating a therapy map and I appreciated the distinction between therapy and marriage education. And how you honored value of both. Your ability to take interactions and distill them into chunks that we can “look at” and assess and respond to for what might be useful to clients is AMAZING and concretizes our learning. You show the mechanisms of change and teach how we might create the context in which they happen. Your ability for specificity is truly remarkable. One thing I will take away for sure is to increase my clarifying and specifying goals and to be even more behaviourally descriptive.
• You were so gracious with your time at breaks. Your stamina is remarkable. And you are so humble.
• I appreciated how you situated your work as biased…all our work is biased and it reminded me to remember that and to check myself…
• You inspired me to be a bit more intentional about reflecting on my practice about what is going well, and what needs to be different. This is good clinical practice and I think I might find a way to incorporate this into clinical conversations with colleagues.

Things that perhaps could be considered to make the training even more impressive (really scraping the barrel here)

• Shorter breaks! I wanted as much time with you as possible. Charge a bit more and possibly have lunch catered to decrease the time it takes for lunch.
• A little more space between tables (I know this is a small thing…)
• Consider a day 5. Could be optional. Might involve case consult, coaching us on skills, looking at your work with live couple or tapes of longer sessions. I would love to sit in on sessions with you.

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From Michele,

Thank you so much Heather!  I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate this.  Hope to see you again - soon.

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To my "Behind Closed Doors 2020" attendees: I've included this letter because I want you to know how much I appreciate feedback about my work.  I hope that you will take the time to let me know your thoughts about the program. Ongoing feedback has always motivated me to "do more of what works and less of what doesn't."

For example, thanks to Heather's feedback about wanting more space between tables, we plan on spreading out a bit more. And about a 5th day... I'm flattered that she wants more!

I can't wait to meet you. This is going to be fun!

Michele