Deliberate Practice in Emotion-Focused Therapy

A free training from Sentio University, co-authored by Rhonda N. Goldman and Alexandre Vaz.

Emotion-focused therapy is built around moves that are hard to teach from a manual. Tracking the difference between a primary and a secondary emotion in real time, spotting a marker for a chair work intervention, holding the empty chair when a client begins to grieve, delivering an empathic conjecture at the exact moment when affect is rising. Reading about these moves is one thing. Performing them under the rhythm of a live session is another. Deliberate practice closes that gap by isolating each move and rehearsing it under feedback until it becomes reliable. This webinar, led by senior EFT trainer Rhonda N. Goldman alongside series co-editor Alexandre Vaz, walks through the structured exercises that make these foundational moves trainable.

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What you will learn

The webinar demonstrates core EFT skills broken down into rehearsable units:

  • Tracking the client's primary versus secondary emotion in real time
  • Identifying the marker that signals a chair work intervention is appropriate
  • Conducting an empty-chair dialogue for unresolved feelings about another person
  • Conducting a two-chair dialogue for self-critical splits
  • Using empathic affirmation and empathic conjecture at high-affect moments

Watch the webinar

Deliberate Practice in Emotion-Focused Therapy, with Rhonda N. Goldman and Alexandre Vaz. Free to share.

This webinar accompanies the APA book Deliberate Practice in Emotion-Focused Therapy by Rhonda N. Goldman, Alexandre Vaz, and Tony Rousmaniere, part of The Essentials of Deliberate Practice series. The book contains the full set of exercises that the webinar above demonstrates. Buy on Amazon.

How to use this with peers or supervisors

The webinar is most useful when paired with structured practice afterward. We recommend a two-session model. In the first session, watch the recording with a peer or supervision group and pause at each demonstrated exercise to discuss how it would fit your current caseload. In the second session, run one of the exercises live. One person plays the therapist, one plays the client, and a third observes and offers structured feedback against a specific behavioral target, such as "identify a primary emotion within two minutes of a high-affect client statement" or "deliver one empathic conjecture during a chair-work transition." Five to ten minutes of focused rehearsal followed by feedback tends to produce more growth than longer unstructured roleplay. Licensed clinicians who want to take this further can join Sentio's ongoing deliberate practice consultation group, which meets regularly and is open to clinicians worldwide.

Going deeper: Deliberate Practice Supervision

The webinar above demonstrates what deliberate practice looks like inside emotion-focused therapy. Doing deliberate practice supervision well is a separate skill, and one that is hard to acquire from didactic content alone. The method has to be practiced under feedback, the same way the clinical skill itself does. A single weekend workshop tends not to give supervisors enough repetitions to develop the experiential muscle they need. Sentio runs an intensive year-long clinical supervisor training built around this principle. For the longer rationale for that format, see Why One Weekend Supervisor Trainings Fall Short.

About the authors

Rhonda N. Goldman, PhD is Professor of Clinical Psychology at The Chicago School and a central figure in the field of emotion-focused therapy. She has authored seven texts on EFT and is a founding board member of the International Society of Emotion-Focused Therapy. Dr. Goldman completed her PhD at York University in Toronto under Dr. Leslie Greenberg, the co-founder of EFT, and travels internationally to lead EFT trainings for clinicians.

Alexandre Vaz, PhD is the Chief Academic Officer of Sentio University and co-founder of the Deliberate Practice Institute. He is co-editor of The Essentials of Deliberate Practice book series (APA Books) and host of Psychotherapy Expert Talks.

Related Sentio resources

Frequently asked questions

What is deliberate practice in emotion-focused therapy? Deliberate practice in emotion-focused therapy is the structured rehearsal of specific, high-leverage EFT skills under feedback, rather than general experience-on-the-job. It isolates moves like tracking primary versus secondary emotion, identifying chair-work markers, or conducting an empty-chair dialogue, and rehearses them in short repetitive cycles until they become reliable in live sessions.

Who is this training for? The webinar and exercises are designed for licensed clinicians, postdocs, predoctoral interns, and advanced trainees in any program that uses emotion-focused therapy. Supervisors, training directors, and faculty who teach EFT will also find the framework directly applicable to their teaching.

Do I need to be EFT-certified to use these exercises? No. The exercises were designed to be useful at every stage of EFT training, from first exposure through certification and beyond. Therapists who are early in EFT learning will benefit from rehearsing the foundational moves, and experienced EFT clinicians can use the harder difficulty levels to keep their skills sharp.

Is the webinar really free? Yes. The full webinar is free to watch, free to share with peers and trainees, and free to use inside a supervision group. The companion book by Goldman, Vaz, and Rousmaniere is sold separately by APA Books and contains the complete set of exercises.

How is this different from a standard EFT training? A standard EFT training typically covers the theory of emotion, the markers, and the major chair-work interventions. Deliberate practice is a complement, not a replacement. It targets specific in-session skill bottlenecks with focused, behaviorally-defined rehearsal so that the markers and interventions you learned actually show up in your live work faster.