Deliberate Practice in Interpersonal Psychotherapy

A free training from Sentio University, co-authored by Olga Belik, Tony Rousmaniere, and Alexandre Vaz.

Interpersonal psychotherapy is built around a small, learnable set of moves: charting the patient's significant relationships, naming the central interpersonal problem area, parsing communication that went wrong, linking mood to events in the patient's social world. The moves are well defined, but performing them under the rhythm of a live session is another matter. Knowing the structure of an interpersonal inventory and conducting one with a real patient are different skills. Deliberate practice closes that gap by isolating each move and rehearsing it under feedback until it becomes reliable. This webinar, led by senior IPT trainer Olga Belik alongside series co-editors Tony Rousmaniere and Alexandre Vaz, walks through the structured exercises that make these foundational moves trainable.

Join the email list for free training tools

What you will learn

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

  • Conducting an interpersonal inventory and identifying the central problem area
  • Linking the patient's mood to specific interpersonal events in session
  • Using communication analysis to slow down and examine difficult relationship moments
  • Choosing between the four IPT problem areas: grief, role disputes, role transitions, and interpersonal deficits
  • Using in-session role-play to rehearse new interpersonal moves with the patient

Watch the webinar

Deliberate Practice in Interpersonal Psychotherapy, with Olga Belik, Tony Rousmaniere, and Alexandre Vaz. Free to share.

This webinar accompanies the APA book Deliberate Practice in Interpersonal Psychotherapy by Olga Belik, Jessica M. Schultz, Scott Fairhurst, Scott Stuart, 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 "complete an interpersonal inventory and name the primary problem area in under ten minutes" or "deliver one communication analysis question after the patient describes a difficult interaction." 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 interpersonal psychotherapy. 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

Olga Belik, PhD is a national trainer and supervisor with the Interpersonal Psychotherapy Institute and Chief Psychologist and Director of Training at the Child and Family Development Center, Providence Saint John's Health Center. She holds a faculty affiliation with UCLA and has been recognized by the American Psychological Association's Board of Educational Affairs for her contributions to the education and training of child and adolescent mental health psychologists.

Tony Rousmaniere, PsyD is the President of Sentio University and Executive Director of the Sentio Counseling Center. He is past-president of the psychotherapy division of the American Psychological Association and the author of over 20 books on deliberate practice and psychotherapy training, including The Essentials of Deliberate Practice book series (APA Books).

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 interpersonal psychotherapy? Deliberate practice in interpersonal psychotherapy is the structured rehearsal of specific, high-leverage IPT skills under feedback, rather than general experience-on-the-job. It isolates moves like completing an interpersonal inventory, linking mood to interpersonal events, or running a communication analysis, 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 IPT clinicians, postdocs, predoctoral interns, and advanced trainees in any program that uses interpersonal psychotherapy. Supervisors, training directors, and faculty who teach IPT will also find the framework directly applicable to their teaching.

Do I need to be certified in IPT to use these exercises? No. The exercises were designed to be useful at every stage of IPT training, from first exposure through certification and beyond. Therapists who are early in IPT learning will benefit from rehearsing the foundational moves, and experienced IPT 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 Belik, Schultz, Fairhurst, Stuart, Vaz, and Rousmaniere is sold separately by APA Books and contains the complete set of exercises.

How is this different from a standard IPT training? A standard IPT training typically covers the structure of the model, the four problem areas, and the protocol. Deliberate practice is a complement, not a replacement. It targets specific skill bottlenecks with focused, behaviorally-defined rehearsal so that the protocol you learned actually shows up in your live work faster.