How to Use Client Preferences to Improve Therapy Outcome: Launch & Training

Clients come to therapy with clear and often unspoken preferences about how they want to work. When these preferences are recognised and actively integrated, therapy is more collaborative, more responsive, and more effective.

This one-off workshop marks the launch of a new international website designed to support preference-informed therapy. The site enables clients to identify and communicate how they would like therapy to be conducted, offering practitioners practical tools to strengthen alignment, engagement, and outcomes from the very start of the work.

After several years of development, Mick Cooper, John Norcross, and an international team of colleagues have released an updated version of the Cooper-Norcross Inventory of Preferences (C-NIP-2). This revised measure enables adult clients to express preferences across seven clinically relevant dimensions, including therapist directiveness, emotional intensity, focus on past or present experience, and the balance between awareness and action.

Alongside this, and developed with support from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, a new preference measure for young people has been introduced. The Understanding Preferences in Counselling (U-PIC) offers a developmentally sensitive way for young clients to communicate preferences around emotional focus, creativity, therapist leadership, and the balance between challenge and acceptance.

During the workshop, participants will be introduced to the clinical and research foundations of working with client preferences, and shown in detail how these tools can be used in everyday practice. You will see how the forms can be completed online or used in hard copy within sessions, how preference information is fed back to clients, and how this data can inform therapeutic decision-making without constraining clinical judgement.

Participants will have the opportunity to try the measures for themselves, explore real-world clinical examples, and ask practical questions about integrating preference-informed approaches into their own work.

This session will be of particular value to practitioners who want to work more collaboratively, personalise their therapeutic approach, and enhance outcomes by listening more closely to how clients want therapy to feel and function.

Who is this workshop for?

This workshop is suitable for counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists, and other helping professionals working with adults or young people across a range of therapeutic modalities.

It will be particularly relevant for practitioners who want to:

• Work more collaboratively and responsively with clients
• Integrate client preferences into assessment and early sessions
• Personalise their therapeutic approach without losing theoretical integrity
• Strengthen engagement and outcomes through shared decision-making
• Use evidence-informed tools that are practical and ethically grounded

The session will be accessible to practitioners at different stages of experience, including trainees, qualified clinicians, supervisors, and those with an interest in integrative, pluralistic, or client-centred practices.

All the profit from the workshop will go to maintaining and developing a freely-available site to help clients identify and articulate preferences they may have for therapy.

RECORDING 

This event will be recorded and you can use the ticket function to pre-purchase the recording before the event. This will be useful for colleagues who are not able to attend the event live and also for those who attend the event live and want to watch it again.

ZOOM 

This event will be hosted on the Zoom meeting platform where we will use our cameras and microphones to interact with each other as a group.

SELF-SELECT FEE

The self-select fee is a radical inclusion policy to open learning for all colleagues. The guide price for this event is £20.00, however, we appreciate that income varies greatly in different locations and circumstances. Please contribute what you can to help us maintain inclusive professional training.

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At Onlinevents, we and the presenters we collaborate with are committed to working in a way that aligns with the ethical codes and frameworks of our respective professional organisations. We expect all colleagues attending our events to uphold the ethical principles of their professional membership.

If you are not a member of a professional organisation, we ask that you participate in a way that is both authentic and respectful, fostering a space of mutual learning and professional engagement.

By registering for this event, you agree to be present and interact in a manner that reflects these principles.

Mick Cooper

Mick Cooper is an internationally recognised author, trainer, and consultant in the field of humanistic, existential, and pluralistic therapies. Mick is a chartered psychologist and Professor of Counselling Psychology at the University of Roehampton. Mick's books include Existential Therapies (2nd ed., Sage, 2017), Working at Relational Depth in Counselling and Psychotherapy (2nd ed., Sage, 2018), and Integrating Counselling and Psychotherapy: Directionality, Synergy, and Social Change (Sage, 2019).

Mick’s principal areas of research have been in shared decision-making/personalising therapy and counselling for young people in schools. In 2014, Mick received the Carmi Harari Mid-Career Award from Division 32 of the American Psychological Association. He is a Fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and the Academy of Social Sciences. In recent work, Mick has been exploring the contribution that counselling theory and practice can make to wider social change and justice: Psychology at the Heart of Social Change: Towards a Progressive Vision for Society (Bristol University, 2023).

John Norcross

An internationally recognized expert on behavior change and psychotherapy, John C. Norcross, Ph.D., ABPP, is Distinguished Professor of Psychology & Chair at the University of Scranton, Professor of Psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University, and a board-certified clinical psychologist.

Author of more than 400 scholarly publications, Dr. Norcross has co-written or edited 22 books, most of them in multiple editions. These include the 5-volume APA Handbook of Clinical Psychology, Psychotherapy Relationships that Work, Handbook of Psychotherapy Integration, Clinician’s Guide to Evidence-Based Practice in Behavioral Health, Self-Help that Works, Leaving It at the Office: Psychotherapist Self-Care, the Insider’s Guide to Graduate Programs in Clinical & Counseling Psychology, and Systems of Psychotherapy: A Transtheoretical Analysis, now in its 9th edition. He also published the acclaimed self-help books, Changeology and Changing for Good (with Prochaska & DiClemente).

Dr. Norcross has been elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA) Division of Clinical Psychology, the APA Division of Psychotherapy, the International Society of Clinical Psychology, and the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration. He Norcross edited the Journal of Clinical Psychology: In Session for a decade and has been on the editorial boards of a dozen journals.

Dr. Norcross has also served as a clinical and research consultant to a number of organizations, including the National Institutes of Health and pharmaceutical companies. A Fellow of 10 professional associations, he has been honored with APA’s Distinguished Career Contributions to Education & Training Award, the Pennsylvania Professor of the Year from the Carnegie Foundation, the Rosalee Weiss Award from the American Psychological Foundation, and election to the National Academies of Practice.