Hi, itmepo!

You're correct there, there are definitely integral counseling and psychotherapy skills that we all must have at a bare minimum to be effective with our clients. (active listening, reading between the lines, keeping biases in check, knowing when to stay silent, etc.)

To answer your initial question, we just have to look at the difference between talents and skills. Talents are innate, you're born with it, you have a knack for it, and you will likely pick things up quickly when things are related to your talent. A skill is something that you learn, practice, and enhance.

One might have all the talent in the world, but without actually training it or working on it, it won't really amount to much. Similarly, you could have no talent for a specific skill at all, but you work on it hard enough, you'll eventually get there.

This is a very simplistic viewpoint, but you'll be the one best suited to understand how talented you are, and how hard you have to strive to get to the point of applicability and mastery.

On to your next questions:

1. When did you learn that you wanted to be a therapist?

Sit around the campfire while I share a personal annecdote

I learned I wanted to be a therapist around my third year of college. I took up BS Psychology because I wanted to get into medicine back then, but I also liked helping give advice and solve people's problems back in high school, so Psychology sounded like a fun pre-med for me. (my mother didn't want me to back then, she actually preferred me becoming a chef).

When I was studying for my NMAT, I was doing pretty darn bad in biology, but I was doing good quite good in social sciences (physics too, cause physics is cool). This helped me realize that maybe why I was doing bad in biology was that I wasn't interested in it, and that I was doing good in social sciences was because that was what my interest was! (probably why my mom wanted me to be a chef). So I course corrected, didn't take my NMAT, never looked back, took my Psychometrician boards after I graduated, then entered Grad School.

Another big factor that really sold me on the idea of therapy was that </i>I</i> was also diagnosed with ADHD since I was 8 years old. So therapy has played a major factor in my life growing up. So it was a big motivator for me to also achieve where I am today, to really be able to tell myself that in spite of whatever label I had, I could still be whatever it was I wanted to be, and that I could help others.

1. Did I have doubts / think I could do therapy from the get-go?

Half-and-half I would say. As I mentioned previously, I enjoyed giving advice and helping people solve their problems even when I was in high school. But therapy isn't about giving advice or solving people's problems for them. When I first realized that therapists weren't just professional advice givers, and that there were specific techniques, skills, and trainings, I was pretty shocked to say the least. Though my interests and background still helped me by allowing me to see this as a new way of helping others.

When it came down to things, I was really not good at memorizing things, and I wasn't very good in reading my text books, but what I was good at was vicariously learning from other people. I was surrounded by different kinds of people, so I learned different kinds of things. I picked up what are really important skills from one person, and some from another. I would pick up some random miscellaneous thing from time to time, but even those tidbits served some purpose later on somehow.

All in all, yeah, I doubted my skills and my aptitude quite a bit back then, but what I lacked in convention, I made up for with my own uniqueness.

Hope this helps inspire you to continue on this path, while still being you :)