TILT – Therapeutic Innovations in Light of Technology
Ne wInnovations
How To Start Using Apps in Therapy and Coaching Jay Ostrowski If you have a pulse and a cell phone, you may have noticed the tidal wave of Apps that have come on the market, and many onto your smartphone. Whether you are tech friendly or not, Apps are here to stay and weaving Apps into therapy and/ or coaching can help you be a more effective counselor/coach and create new opportunities to help your clients. Using Apps in therapy or coaching just might help your client make a breakthrough.
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How Can an App Be Useful in Therapy and Coaching? Have you ever had a client that could use a little more self-awareness? Ever wish you could collect more information to understand the extent of the client’s issue or help the client identify patterns? Does your client wonder if the medication is really making a difference? Of course, the answer is “Yes” to all of these. Collecting information is one of the most basic (and easy) uses for Apps. Asking your client to log the “moment,” or collect information at different prescribed intervals
could bring in valuable data into therapy and coaching. Imagine a client bringing in a completed chart of the targeted emotions or behaviors and corresponding notes for those times. Remember that worksheet you’ve photocopied until the letters have mostly blurred together? Well, there’s likely an App for that too. Apps can be used to gather information during or in between sessions. The checklist, journal, log, worksheet, or screening device can all be made (or have already been made) into an App. Since smartphones are carried everywhere, an