Deliberate Practice in Multicultural Therapy

A free training from Sentio University, co-authored by Jordan Harris and Tony Rousmaniere.

Multicultural therapy asks the clinician to do things that are difficult to teach from a textbook. Noticing a cultural rupture as it happens, choosing whether to name it or hold it, repairing after a misattunement around race, gender, sexuality, faith, or disability, and tracking your own reactions as data rather than acting them out. Reading about cultural humility is one thing. Performing it under the pressure of a live session, when something has already gone sideways, is another. Deliberate practice closes that gap by isolating each move and rehearsing it under feedback. This webinar, led by Jordan Harris, lead author of Deliberate Practice in Multicultural Therapy, alongside Sentio President Tony Rousmaniere, walks through the structured exercises that make these foundational moves trainable.

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What you will learn

The webinar demonstrates core multicultural therapy skills broken down into rehearsable units:

  • Naming a cultural rupture or microaggression in session without becoming defensive
  • Using cultural humility language to invite the client to teach you about their experience
  • Adapting interventions to client identities without imposing your own assumptions
  • Repairing after a misattunement around race, gender, sexuality, faith, or disability
  • Tracking your own reactions and using them as data rather than acting them out

Watch the webinar

Deliberate Practice in Multicultural Therapy, with Jordan Harris and Tony Rousmaniere. Free to share.

This webinar accompanies the APA book Deliberate Practice in Multicultural Therapy by Jordan Harris, Joel Jin, Sophia Hoffman, Selina Phan, Tracy A. Prout, Tony Rousmaniere, and Alexandre Vaz, 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. 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 multicultural 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

Jordan Harris, PhD is a licensed marriage and family therapist and the lead author of Deliberate Practice in Multicultural Therapy (APA Books). He directs Sentio's Deliberate Practice Coaching program and runs a couples-focused private practice in Northwest Arkansas. Dr. Harris received his PhD in Marriage and Family Therapy from the University of Louisiana Monroe and is a former American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy Minority Fellow.

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).

Related Sentio resources

Frequently asked questions

What is deliberate practice in multicultural therapy? Deliberate practice in multicultural therapy is the structured rehearsal of specific, high-leverage clinical skills under feedback, rather than general experience-on-the-job or didactic content alone. It isolates moves like naming a cultural rupture, repairing after a misattunement, or adapting an intervention to a client's identity, 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 who work with culturally diverse caseloads, which in practice means almost everyone. Supervisors, training directors, and committees that oversee clinical training will also find the framework directly applicable to their work.

Do I need a specific multicultural training background to use these exercises? No. The exercises were designed to be useful across the full range of clinician experience with multicultural work. Therapists who are new to formal multicultural training will benefit from rehearsing the foundational moves, and experienced 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 Harris, Jin, Hoffman, Phan, Prout, Rousmaniere, and Vaz is sold separately by APA Books and contains the complete set of exercises.

How is this different from a standard multicultural training? A standard multicultural training typically focuses on awareness, knowledge, and frameworks. Deliberate practice is a complement, not a replacement. It targets specific in-session skill bottlenecks with focused, behaviorally-defined rehearsal so that the awareness and frameworks you already have actually show up in your live work faster.