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

How to Use Client Preferences to Improve Therapy Outcome: Launch & Training - Mick Cooper, John Norcross and Team 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.