Show Notes

Welcome back to The Designer Practice Podcast, and I’m your host, Kayla Das.

Are you preparing for the National Clinical Mental Health Counseling examination otherwise known as the NCMHCE licensing exam? In today’s episode, Bisi Gbadamosi, Licensed Mental Health Counselor. We’ll discuss where to start studying first when preparing for the NCMHCE exam.

Hi Bisi, welcome to the show. I’m so glad to have you here today. Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Bisi, before we dive into today’s episode, please introduce yourself, where you’re from, and tell us a little bit about your own practice journey.

Absolutely. So I am from the state of Florida. I do have my own practice, which is called Mindful Blooms Counseling, but I also do some tutoring to help people prepare for this exam in a separate business that I have.

When I was taking the test, I was very overwhelmed by all the resources that were and were not available. So now I just try to create the things I wish I had when I was preparing for the exam.

That’s so amazing. I’ve talked to so many different therapists who’ve taken, many different types of exams in the past, and the number one thing that I always hear is that they feel overwhelmed when they first start thinking about preparing for the licensing exam. So what is the first step someone should take when beginning to study for the NCMHCE exam?

This one always scares people, but I will repeatedly tell someone to take a practice exam to just think of it as a baseline. Go ahead, do the full four hour exam and just see how it feels when you’re doing it.

We’re not aiming for a certain score. We’re really just looking to see, are you going too fast or too slow? Are you maybe skipping words and second guessing yourself? All of those things need to be found out as soon as possible so we can make adjustments for it. We don’t want the real test day to be the first time you sit all the way through this test.

Absolutely. I think that’s really great advice, and I’m speaking just from my own experiences. Those types of exams, whether it’s like the actual exam in the office, so sometimes you go to where you normally would take your exam and then you go there and take the practice or even if you take it at home or through a study guide, it can give you a really great idea of where you are currently.

And also what your strengths are and where you might need improvement and to focus your study on.

Exactly. I completely agree.

So for listeners who may not be aware of the exam structure, can you explain how the NCMHCE exam is formatted and how that affects studying for this particular exam?

Yeah, so this test actually just changed formats pretty recently. It was around 2022 when it made a complete overhaul. Now it is case studies, so you’ll have case studies with 11 different clients. You’ll get some demographics about them, some background information, and then you’ll get three sessions of reading with each of those clients.

You’ll get about three to five questions about each of those sessions and then you head right into another client. So it can be something like anxiety for one client and then you’re switching to a client in psychosis. Within a few questions it can throw people off a little bit, but others find that this new story-based format is actually really helpful for them.

When you say that it has a case study format, do they have like kind of actors pretending to be clients when you’re taking the exam?

So it’s us, the therapists, but they will have a client session actually where it’ll say the client comes to you and you at a community center. The client sits down, they tells you a little bit about their background. You start to ask about their symptoms, they’ll tell you some of what they’re going through, how they’ve been affected so far. A back and forth. It’s not always quote dialogue like a script, but it does have us pop in with some input to what the client is saying and then it will finish off. It’s not typically long. It’s anywhere between three to seven paragraphs of a session and then it puts us to the questions.

Oh, amazing. So why is it important to understand the clinical decision-making process instead of just memorizing facts when studying for this particular exam?

I will say that actually, where sometimes this case study format can get people in trouble because they start to respond the way they would with an actual human client that they have. But this test is very clinical. It’s varied by the book, and even for myself, sometimes I’ll look at the correct answer and go, I would never do that with a real client. And so for this, we really have to take ourselves out of it and almost go back to that student mindset who really wanted to do things the right way.

Even though in real life we know there’s not necessarily one right way, we do have to learn how to think differently and think the way that the exam is looking for. With this particular test.

Are you able to give any examples on what that might look like?

Yeah, so for example, the test is set up where we always start with the first session or the intake session, and I’ve noticed that for this test, the first four sessions, we really need to focus on rapport. We need to be careful not to get too direct with our interventions, so we might see something in the story where it would make sense for us to clinically do constructive confrontation and kind of call out something that just happened.

But for this test in the beginning, we’re really just focusing on validating and psychoeducation. We need to hold off until later to address that, unless it is about safety, because safety will always come first, like in real life. But if we’re noticing something’s not matching up, what the client said they’re doing and their goals really got a hard stop and wait till session five to start addressing those kinds of things.

I love that. That’s really helpful. What are some patterns you notice, among course takers who struggle to pass the NCMHCE exam?

One of the big things I would say is that sometimes the magnitude of the test can have people freeze a little bit and second guess themselves a lot. The amount of times I see people talk themselves out of the correct answer because they’re just not really sure if they’re on track, is discouraging at moments because that can make or break you passing this test.

And so even from the beginning, I tell people I would rather you have trusted yourself and maybe get a question wrong. Then for you to spend five minutes going back and forth and questioning your decision just to maybe get a point or two. And I say maybe because this test has over a hundred questions, but only 100 of them are actually scored, and you won’t be able to tell what’s scored and what’s not. And so I like to say trust yourself and keep going.

I love that. And that actually makes me think about when I was in university. I know that every time I had a multiple choice exam, it’s like I would look at the four options and then I’m like, okay, two of these could be right, but I don’t know which one. But like in my gut, I think it’s this one. And then I go ahead and choose the other one. And my gut was always would’ve been right, so I should have went with it. And it sounds like it’s the exact same thing.

Yeah, all the time. And this test has a lot of best and most questions. So the ones where it’s like both of these could technically help the client, but again, thinking the way the test wants it, you have to lean into the one that’s typically more clinical or fits the pattern of this exam.

Do you have any additional advice, insights, or tips for listeners preparing to take the NCMHCE exam?

I would say to talk to people/ the amount of times I’ve seen people who don’t tell anyone that they’re preparing for this exam because, maybe they’re scared that they’re not going to do well, or maybe they’ve taken it before and failed and don’t want people to ask them questions about it, but this test in a lot of our field in general is isolating too. So imagining the magnitude of a test like this and not talking to anybody about it can be really hard.

So I like to encourage people to maybe reach out to other therapists who’ve taken this newer version of the exam, or try to find people on Facebook or in other some groups and things and see if they can relate and at least have one or two people you trust who you can go to.

I love that. Bisi, you offer test planning resources. Can you tell us what they are and how they can help listeners?

So I’ve got a pretty good variety. I do offer one-to-one tutoring sessions with people who are really struggling with applying their knowledge that they’ve learned to the way that the exam is looking for.

I also have a blog. Facebook group and I have study guides for the theories specifically because the theories is one of the largest categories or domains on this exam, and it can be super overwhelming because a lot of times our theories class was in the first semester of grad school, and if you’ve been out of grad school for a while, that could feel super far away.

Or even if you take this right out of school, it might have been at least two years since you took that theories course. So that’s the big thing that I always harp on is know your theories really well for this test.

So to connect with Bisi for tutoring, head to bloomingwithbisi.com/ncmhce-tutoring

or to get her NCMHCE Theories Study Guide, check out bloomingwithbisi.com.ncmhce-theories-study-guides.

Or you can simply scroll down to the show notes and click on the links.

Bisi, you also mentioned that you have a free Facebook group specifically for counselors preparing for this exam. Could you share a little bit about what listeners can expect if they decide to join your group?

Yeah, absolutely. So during the typical work week, so Monday to Friday, I try to post practice questions specifically related to the theory study guide. They’re usually posted in the evening, and then I’ll post the answer the following day. I also will post midweek check-in posts just to see how people are doing, get some encouragement from others, and get some tips.

And then that’s also where, in addition to the newsletter, but it’s where I like to post any reminders. So I do a workshop twice a week. That reminder goes into the Facebook group a couple of times to be like, Hey, don’t forget to come join us if you’d like to. It just goes with what I mentioned previously about having other people who get this exam and gives people a sense of community and a place to ask any questions that they may have, because this test can be a lot.

And for any listener interested in joining Bisi’s Facebook group, head to the show notes. I have the link down below.

Bisi, Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today to discuss where to start studying first when preparing for the NCMHCE licensing exam.

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

And thank you everyone for tuning into today’s episode, and I hope you join me again soon on the Designer Practice Podcast.

Until next time, bye for now.

Credits & Disclaimers

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