7 Powerful Therapy Exercises To Send To Your Clients

Therapy Exercises

If you’re a psychologist, counselor, or social worker, chances are you’ve got a library full of therapy exercises that you use with clients. But if you’re personalizing your exercises manually, you’ll know it can take a great deal of time and effort.

This guide will show you how to create stunning, effective digital versions of your favorite therapy tools, and share them with clients efficiently so that you can make a bigger impact.

Before you begin, we recommend you check out Quenza’s 1 month, $1 trial.

With professionally designed coaching and therapy exercises for you to customize and share, you’ll have everything you need to augment your specialist skills and deliver better health outcomes to your therapy clients.

3 Benefits of Using Exercises in Therapy

Therapy exercises are tools that serve more than one purpose, but essentially, they’re effective, practical strategies to help clients achieve certain therapeutic goals.

They cover a whole gambit of potential interventions, starting with assessments and exercises to surveys, worksheets, videos, and meditations.

While the fundamental goal of any therapy exercise is to help a client make positive progress, using the right activities in your treatments or programs can also offer a host of benefits.

While the fundamental goal of any therapy exercise is to help a client make positive progress, using the right activities in your treatments or programs can also offer a host of other important benefits.

Some of these include:

  1. Improved patient health engagement: Therapy exercises can be interactive, entertaining, stimulating, and informative all at once, increasing the likelihood that your patients will engage with them and progress toward their goals.
  2. Easier treatment planning: Because therapy exercises are goal-specific, they can be used to roadmap your therapy journeys. A common example is spreading assessments throughout a treatment plan to enable a different approach to therapy.
  3. Using evidence-based strategies: Most exercises stem from established frameworks; cognitive restructuring exercises, for example, are rooted in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. Evidence-based practice not only offers a safer patient experiences, but is also a reliable way to ensure less varied outcomes from treatment.[1]

How To Send Exercises To Clients The Easy Way

So using exercises can have significant advantages for you and your clients, but to apply them effectively, you’ll need to deliver your resources.

If you’re new to blended or remote care, sending virtual exercises and Activities is an efficient, secure, and engaging way to ensure your clients can interact with your materials.

With the right therapy software, you can send exercises by:

  • Digitalizing hard copies of existing exercises in your arsenal, or
  • Creating your own online therapy exercises from simple tools such as Quenza’s Activity Builder.

But first, what exercises should you be using?

4 Popular Therapy Exercises For Your Sessions

The most effective activity or intervention for any client will be determined by their therapy goals and where they are in their treatment, as well as their unique needs, capabilities, and preferences.

We’ll introduce you to some of Quenza’s most popular coaching and therapy exercises for couples, groups, and individuals, and show you how to personalize them for your programs.

2 Exercises For Improving Self-Esteem

Self-esteem exercises can help clients develop a more positive self-image and a stronger sense of self-worth, which act as considerable buffers against challenges to their wellbeing.

Whether you’re helping a patient identify their strengths or cultivate an optimistic outlook, these Activities from Quenza’s Expansion Library are easy to customize to different audiences.

Self-Compassion Box

Quenza Therapy Exercises for Self-Esteem Example
Quenza’s Self-Compassion Box Expansion takes a creative approach to helping clients cultivate more self-kindness.

Quenza’s Expansion Library gives you modifiable self-esteem exercises to help your clients practice more self-kindness and build their confidence. Quenza’s Self-Compassion Box exercise is ideal if you’re hoping to help others practice more self-love and kindness.

It takes the client through a psychoeducational introduction to self-compassion and its many benefits, before showing them how to remind themselves to show themselves forgiveness and understanding using cues.

To invite self-reflection on ‘uncompassionate’ behaviors, it asks questions such as: What kind of things do you typically criticize yourself for? and What sorts of unhelpful things do you tend to say to yourself/about yourself?

Developing Self-Appreciation

Developing Self-Appreciation is a Quenza exercise designed to aid clients in discovering the personal qualities they appreciate about themselves.

It combines self-reflection with savoring, narrative therapy, thoughts and feelings records, and useful questions to help them treat themselves with more kindness.

Example prompts include: The first thing I like and appreciate about myself is…, and Write who helped you develop the first positive quality you stated and extend some gratitude towards them. 

2 Best Exercises For Managing Anxiety

Here are two examples of a practical Pathway and Activity that you can use to help clients manage anxiety and cope better with stress.

Daily Exceptions Journal

This Daily Exceptions Activity is a great therapy exercise for anxiety in that it shifts a client’s focus away from negative stimuli toward the good things that happen each day.

They can tune into this video on a daily basis, which will help them reflect on important questions about their own capacities and abilities, and appreciate positive events.

Moving from Cognitive Fusion to Defusion

Moving from Cognitive Fusion to Defusion is an iCBT restructuring exercise that helps clients step back from anxious thoughts.

In this Activity, they’ll identify a self-critical thought, fuse with it, and learn how to label it as just that – a thought.

3 Couples and Group Exercises To Try

Here’s a small sample of Quenza therapy exercises for couples and groups that will keep them engaged while building skills for positive relationships and emotional intelligence.

Quenza Group Therapy Exercises
The Break-Up Plan, one of Quenza’s group therapy exercises, helps your clients understand friendships and why they end.
  • The Break-Up Plan: Ending Friendships That No Longer Work – This helps clients explore a friendship that is more negative than positive, and create a Break-Up Plan to end it.
  • Gratitude for Important People – This reflection invites clients to think about three people who have influenced them and their lives in positive and meaningful ways.
  • Gratitude in Romantic Relationships – If you work with clients who want to strengthen a marriage or relationship, this exercise aids them in nurturing fondness and admiration for one another through gratitude and appreciation.

Software For Practitioners: 8 Ways To Use Quenza in Therapy

Quenza’s tools and features are designed to make your life easier, by giving you more say over what your therapy exercises contain, how they look, and how you use them to help others.

It’s up to you how you use them!

A few example use cases include:

  1. Designing new Activities from blank templates
  2. Digitalizing paper-based therapy exercises that you’ve tried and love for years
  3. Modifying Expansions to integrate new solutions into your therapy
  4. Creating Pathways for classes, programs, or journaling exercises
  5. Staying on top of all your clients’ progress to refine their treatments
  6. Collecting feedback on your services to improve your practice
  7. Conducting group or couples therapy, or
  8. Providing touchpoints for your clients along the way.

With every element of your therapy programs in your control, you can make a bigger positive impact and help even more clients with your solutions.

Sending Journaling Exercises in Quenza

Mood tracking diaries, daily thought records, and other therapeutic journaling exercises are easy to send at regular intervals to clients with Quenza, improving the likelihood that they’ll engage with and benefit from them.

These are quite simply Pathways, with each daily or weekly Activity sent as a separate step, as pictured:

Quenza Therapy Exercises Journals
Journaling exercises like the Stress Diary Expansion (pictured) allow you to send daily or weekly Activities to clients automatically.

Like all Pathways you create with Quenza, you can set the intervals between each step to determine when your client will receive each journal exercise. You can even modify the Quenza Stress Diary Expansion to get a feel for how to create Pathways before designing your own!

Final Thoughts

Digital exercises give you a far, far more efficient way to personalize your therapy tools to clients’ unique needs, interests, and capabilities. And with the right online tools, like Quenza’s Activity and Pathway Builders, you’re free to fine-tune each psychology activity so they promote maximum engagement!

Use this resource as your guide when you’re designing therapy exercises for those you help, and take a look inside our Wellness Coaching Guide if you’re looking for complementary tools and resources.

We hope this article was helpful. Don’t forget to start your 1 month, 1 dollar trial of Quenza’s toolkit to customize dozens of science-based therapy exercises for your clients today.

Quenza’s digital toolkit for blended care will help you deliver effective, unique, and personalized solutions to improve your clients’ wellbeing, and contains all the features you need to run your online practice seamlessly.

References

  1. ^ Fineout-Overholt, E., Melnyk, B. M., & Schultz, A. (2005). Transforming health care from the inside out: advancing evidence-based practice in the 21st century. Journal of Professional Nursing, 21(6), 335-344.

About the author

Catherine specializes in Organizational and Positive Psychology, helping entrepreneurs, clinical psychologists and OD specialists grow their businesses by simplifying their digital journeys.

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