Make the First Sessions Count: Brief screening and high-impact protocols

Description

About this Workshop

Many clients arrive curious but unconvinced: a performer looking for an edge, or someone who has heard about neurofeedback and wants to see what it can do before committing. This workshop gives practitioners a structured way to meet them. A brief assessment screens for clinical flags that call for a full evaluation and a standard course of training. For everyone else, it leads to a short block of targeted, high-yield sessions designed to produce an early, tangible experience of self-regulation.

Brendan Parsons, Mitch Sadar and Angelica Sadar will each demonstrate their approach live: from the client’s goal to screening, interpretation, protocol choice and first sessions. They will then compare where their decisions converge and differ.

Participants will learn to recognise when a brief pathway is appropriate and when to refer to the full assessment route. They will choose protocols most likely to produce a noticeable early response, build transfer into daily life, and measure that response in a way that helps client and practitioner decide together on next steps: a longer training programme, a change of approach, or a full clinical assessment.

Brief theory segments will explain the decisions as they arise in practice. The emphasis is on selecting a useful starting point and evaluating response, with clear distinctions between an immediate state change, learning and sustained functional improvement. Participants will leave with a structured screening-to-intervention workflow, a set of starter protocols and a plan for reviewing response with the client.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

1. Formulate a focused assessment question from a client’s functional goal.

2. Recognise findings in a brief assessment that indicate the need for a full assessment and standard course of training.

3. Interpret EEG changes across rest, task and recovery conditions, separating meaningful patterns from artifact.

4. Select a starter protocol likely to produce a noticeable early response, and justify it from the client’s goal and findings.

5. Design a short, targeted training block specifying feedback, client strategy, progression and transfer task.

6. Evaluate early response using physiological and functional measures to guide a shared decision on next steps.

7. Compare two assessment-to-intervention approaches at the same decision points.

Instructors

Meet the Workshop Presenters

Brendan Parsons

Brendan Parsons has a doctorate in psychology – neuropsychology and cognitive science from the University of Montreal. Certified “BCN” since 2009, he has a decade and a half’s worth of experience in the fields of biofeedback and neurofeedback. Extremely lucky to have been a part of the BFE early in...

Angelika Sadar

Angelika Sadar, M.A., BCN, BCB-HRV is a licensed psychologist who has been in private practice in the greater Philadelphia area since 1985. Her work over the years has involved all age groups and clinical presentations. She is a treatment coordinator at Sadar Psychological and is a nationally recogn...

Mitchell Sadar

Mitchell Sadar, Ph.D., BCN, BCN-HRV is a licensed psychologist who was the director of a Pennsylvania Correctional Institution’s inpatient program for over 15 years. In 1999 he was trained in neurofeedback and tried to bring this modality to the correctional population, but his attempts were not acc...

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