The Focusing Training Program with Healing Professionals Track
Learn an experiential, body-oriented process of self-awareness and emotional healing that immediately benefits your work with clients.
Focusing has been linked in over 50 research studies with positive outcomes in therapy including greater emotional regulation, more satisfying relationships, and increased self acceptance.
“For over 30 years I’ve been searching for effective ways to help myself and others maximize their unique potential and alleviate the distinctive suffering that manifests from living with a tricky and highly complex human mind and nervous system or more simply stated, from being human. Inner Relationship Focusing is THE most powerful, effective, and elegant human technology for individual and community well-being I’ve ever encountered. In the relatively short period of time I’ve been engaged in Focusing, both personally and in my work with clients, the shifts and openings that have occurred are astounding. My life is opening up, the well-being of my clients is expanding, and all in the context of a global pandemic. Amazing!”
~ Cathryn Campbell
Does This Sound Like You?
You want more ways to be helpful to clients who:
- don’t know what they feel or feel “nothing”
- struggle with self-criticism and confusion
- feel stuck in their lives
- talk about feelings rather than having them
- get overwhelmed by intense emotion
- struggle with depression, addictions, and other effects of trauma
Focusing can help…
Focusing is a process of bringing compassionate, curious attention to embodied feelings in the present moment. As research shows, that kind of attention is the doorway to real and lasting change.
What You’ll Receive with The Focusing Training Program with Healing Professionals Track:
- The ability to bring a Focusing presence to your work with clients — a strong, steady center that helps you stay present no matter what they bring into sessions.
- Facilitative language you can incorporate into sessions, like the phrase, “Something in you…” and an understanding of why that’s so powerful.
- The ability to tune in to your clients’ “experiential track” — that level of meaning and discovery that is below the words.
How it Works
Register for our online Focusing Training Program (also called Your Path to Lasting Change). You ‘ll be learning Focusing for yourself — and that alone can bring benefits to your work with clients.
When you register, you add the Healing Professionals Track, which provides additional content to support you in bringing a Focusing perspective to your clients.
Benefits of Working from a Focusing-Oriented Perspective:
You have a positive, holistic view of your clients’ symptoms and difficulties
Your clients feel more empowered and better able to give themselves support between sessions
You can spot the small steps of change that add up over time to real life progress
Benefits for the Practitioner:
You feel more comfortable and confident during client’s sessions
You show up in sessions as yourself, genuine and real
You have a way to process your own feelings and reactions that come up in your work with clients
For an article about Inner Relationship Focusing by Carol Nickerson that includes a story about how she used IR Focusing to process feelings about a client, click here.
“Before Focusing Training, I didn’t have a way to teach my coaching clients how to move through uncomfortable emotions and that left me feeling impotent, pushy, and unprepared. Now, I have a method to show my clients the power of going inward in a safe, gentle way. We often think that change has to be difficult or challenging, but Focusing has taught me it can be gentle and beautiful. The secret of Focusing is realizing you don’t have to change anything–you can just be with your emotions as they are.”
~ Natalie Bryant
“Ann Weiser Cornell approaches Focusing with both moment-by-moment sensitivity and years of depth. This is one of the most profound therapeutic techniques of which I am aware, and may even be said to be the basis of all good therapy.”
~ Jeffrey Mishlove, author of The Roots of Consciousness and host of TV and radio show Thinking Allowed
Hi, I’m Ann Weiser Cornell, and I’ve been teaching and developing Inner Relationship Focusing training programs since 1985.
I created these programs because I saw people struggling with procrastination and action blocks, sinking under low self-esteem and severe inner criticism, having a hard time feeling grounded and making confident decisions, and most of all longing to live the fulfilling lives they knew they could live but never quite getting there.
At first my programs were designed for individuals themselves but more and more psychotherapists kept asking me how to bring this work into therapy. So I developed the Healng Professionals Track as a supplement to my Focusing Training Program. Healing professionals who want to use this work with clients have to learn it for themselves. How can we take other people to a place we don’t know how to go ourselves? Plus, your ability to be in a Focusing kind of contact with yourself is contagious – your very presence, even without words, becomes a healing containing space for your clients.
The Program
Our Online Program: Your Path to Lasting Change + The Healing Professionals Track
In the Focusing Training Program, a blended course with both Healing Professionals (HPs) and non-HPs, you’ll learn the Focusing process for yourself, including partnership exchange. You’ll build skills in accompanying a Focusing process, from the art of reflecting to the facilitative language of skilled guiding.
The Healing Professionals Track provides additional content specifically tailored for HPs who want to bring Focusing into their work with clients.
You’ll learn how to seamlessly bring a Focusing presence into your client sessions as a way of being. Your clients may never even hear the word Focusing in their work with you.
Wondering if you fit the Healing Professional description?
From our perspective, Healing Professionals include: psychotherapists, coaches, bodyworkers, spiritual directors, physicians, healers, nurses and anyone who meets with clients for the purpose of healing and growth.
In the Healing Professionals Track you’ll also receive:
- Special Audio & Video Content to help you bring Focusing into your client sessions, provided via a private web platform.
- Live Q&A Calls to answer your questions about bringing the course material into client sessions. These live, interactive Q&A calls with the course instructors occur three times a year, so you’ll have support both during and after the program. You can keep on joining the calls as long as you like… a remarkable resource! Plus, recordings of past calls are all available.
- Email Support in addressing the special issues of healing professionals throughout the program.
More about the Q&A Calls Courses meet the qualifications for continuing education credit for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences. Focusing Resources, CAMFT Approved CE Provider #62524 Focusing Resources is approved by the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists to sponsor continuing education for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs. Focusing Resources maintains responsibility for this course and its content. CEUs
What's Included
For every week of the Path to Lasting Change course, you get a resource related to that week.
The Focusing Training Program is led by
Ann Weiser Cornell
Lucinda Hayden
Carol Nickerson
“This has really changed the way I do therapy. I have a totally different reaction when a client hits something difficult. Now I say, ‘Oh, riches!'”
– Sue Roberts
How to Register
To enroll, visit the webpage for our online Focusing Training Program Your Path to Lasting Change and choose the option with the Healing Professionals Track.
Screenshot:
Words from more Healing Professionals…
- Kim Phillips, Marriage & Family Therapist
"Your Path to Lasting Change created a shift in my goals as a therapist. The surprise was, this course also created a shift within me. I found an awareness of my Self-in-Presence and learned to say 'hello' to the ever-changing aspects of myself that I experience as my emotional life. From the viewpoint of a therapist, before the course, I felt I had to be responsible for 'fixing' others. Now, being present within, I'm more often able to help others do the same -- to connect to their own emotional wisdom which allows them a lifetime of self-compassion and greater calm. Personally, Focusing gives me a feeling of being more alive, like the lights of awareness, acceptance, and peace have been switched on inside -- so critical during this time of social upheaval, COVID19, and general life unrest. I can't say enough about the course, because it's difficult to find the exact words to describe the experience of Focusing. Sometimes we just need to listen to something inside telling us to get off the fence and experience it for ourselves." - -Roy Gould, psychotherapist and life coach, New Brunswick, Canada
"I have been working as a coach and therapist since 1988. From the very first week in Focusing Level One I took what I was learning in to my client sessions, with amazing results. I deal a lot with anxiety issues… and after 30 minutes of Focusing my clients were saying, ‘Wow, what’s that?’ Focusing has helped with my own anxiety issues too. I have to say that the decision to take this course ranks up there with the best decisions in my life.” - Carol Ivan, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist, Brookfield, IL
"I'm so glad to have discovered this work. Over the years I've been dissatisfied with how I'm doing therapy with my clients. I've gone out and learned various therapeutic techniques and approaches and found that they're good in certain ways, but something was still missing for me. So I just kept looking for something more effective. Inner Relationship Focusing just clicks with me; it allows me to focus with the client on whatever is most present for them, and at the same time teach them a way of being with their inner experiences that will help them be emotionally and psychologically wiser and more astute. And learning this approach from Ann was wonderful; she is a great teacher, and I think her attention to facilitative language is invaluable."
Recommended Resources for Therapists
Focusing in Clinical Practice: The Essence of Change
Books & ManualsAnn Weiser Cornell, who has been teaching Focusing to clinicians for over 30 years, shows step by step how to bring Focusing into any kind of clinical practice. Designed to be immediately useful to working clinicians, this book shows how to help clients get felt senses and nurture them when they appear, how to work with clients who have difficulty feeling in the body, how to support clients who experience dysregulating emotional states, and more. Plentiful examples and vignettes show specifically how the process works at the moment-by-moment level.$32.00
Visit our friends at GoodTherapy.org, a leading online therapist directory and mental health resource dedicated to supporting and advocating for ethical therapy practices. Join GoodTherapy.org to grow your practice, access online continuing education, and support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.
Focusing Resources is approved by the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists to sponsor continuing education for LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, and/or LEPs. Focusing Resources maintains responsibility for this course and its content.
