In both of my previous posts (TEAM CBT and Yan Shou Gong), I’ve mentioned “testing”.

Testing is also an extremely important discipline in software engineering. When making changes to software, we want to know, as quickly as possible, whether our change has had the desired effect. Software engineers put a lot of effort into minimising the amount of time before they receive meaningful feedback. We can call this shortening the feedback loop.

In areas of personal and human development, this becomes significantly more murky. It can be extremely hard, if not impossible, to attribute a change to a specific action or behaviour. Sometimes it seems obvious, but when we repeat the behaviour, it doesn’t have the same effect the second time.

What links TEAM CBT and Yan Shou Gong is their interest in testing.

In TEAM CBT, a client will fill out a short survey before and after every therapy session. Before they will complete a mood survey, and after they will complete a mood survey and an empathy survey. These give the client a simple way to evaluate the degree of change from a particular session, and in sessions over time. The empathy survey gives the practitioner a way to evaluate whether the client experiences empathy. Dr Burns says that, in evaluations of this approach, practitioners expected their own evaluations of their empathy to match their clients approximately 60% of the time. But in reality they matched just 10%. So this can be powerful feedback for the practitioner to help them know how their work is being received. Dr Burns suggests that, whilst we might think people could easily lie on these surveys, experience suggests that they don’t - that they often say things in them that contradict how a practitioner might have evaluated the session, which is again very useful feedback.

In Yan Shou Gong, pretty much every posture in the forms are testable. That is, another person can push the practitioner, in a particular way. If the practitioner has aligned their body correctly, they won’t be able to be pushed over. More than that, if they relax in the right way, they will be able to move the tester despite their attempts otherwise. Thus, it is immediately obvious, in a single session, whether someone has understood the practice being shared.

Every practice should aim for this testability, yet very few do. How can a client or practitioner know if a particular exercise has worked as expected? How can it be evaluated? How can someone know if they have learned to use the system as intended?