43: Ben Bernstein, PhD – Performance Psychologist & Coach Shares His Journey, Insight, and Career Advice to Psychology Graduate Students

Masters in Psychology Podcast

If you want to get to know Dr. Ben Bernstein, you need to look at his history growing up as a young child in New York City. Dr. Bernstein’s father was a very well-respected clinical psychologist and his mother directed plays for the Parent Teacher Association (PTA). At 9 years old, Dr. Bernstein was cast as a child psychologist in one of the original plays his mother directed. Dr. Bernstein was also a prodigious piano player. He loved music and immersed himself in Mozart, Beethoven, and Bartok yet when he performed in competitions and recitals, his hands and knees shook so playing the piano became a nightmare. During our discussion, Dr. Bernstein shares these and other experiences that led him to become a performance psychologist and earned him the title “Stress Doctor.” In this podcast, Dr. Ben Bernstein, known as “Dr. B,” shares his academic, professional, and personal journey in hopes that it helps anyone interested in the field of psychology. Dr. B attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, MA where he studied English literature and sociology and graduated with honors. He shares a story of how he got involved in new educational developments that were happening in England and how he was invited to teach and run a research project at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada where he received his MEd and PhD in Applied Psychology. An educator for the last 50 years, Dr. B has taught at every level of the educational system. Originally trained in London, in the progressive British infant schools, he received major grants from the American and Canadian governments for his work. Dr. B recognized early on that he was a “natural psychologist” in terms of listening, observing, and feeling compassion for people. He shares the events leading to opening his own private practice and eventually realized “I wasn’t suited really to sitting and listening to people all day” so he found a supervisor and mentor to help figure out why. He states, “I went to see her and in pretty short order, she said to me she said, ‘well, the reason you’re so unhappy is because you’re acting like you think a psychologist should act, and it’s not you.’” Dr. B shares that he is talkative and likes to be very engaged and interactive with his clients. He states, “And you know that style of therapy, although it has changed certainly over 40-45 years, was not really in vogue at the time.” This experience along with a few other significant experiences that Dr. B shares during our discussion eventually led him to discover that he loved performance coaching and why not combine it with his education and experience as a psychologist to become a performance psychologist. Before doing this, however, Dr. B realized that he wasn’t fulfilling something for himself and that was his engagement with music. Therefore, the year he and his wife, Suk Wah, got married, they moved back to California and he got into a graduate program in music composition at Mills College in Oakland, CA where he received his MA in Music Composition. Though he already had two licenses (one in Connecticut and the other in New York), in order to keep his psychology work going, he had to apply for licensure in California. He states, “California had its own particular requirement after EPPP, after your 3000 hours of postdoctoral experience, to have an oral exam. And so, I had to take the oral exam and I joined a study group where people practice giving answers. And I came to find out that the pass rate for first time takers of this oral exam, the penultimate requirement for licensure in California, the pass rate was 18%. So this was astounding to me because in that group, people were answering questions, very adept clinicians, very sensitive, very complete. So, what was happening that they would cross the threshold and they would fall apart?” He was able to coach all of the people in the study group and everyone passed so this became his whole niche,