We have been blessed to work with many very, very intelligent people over the years. It always stimulates us to have smart people ask challenging questions about the work that we do.One of the common complaints of smart people in therapy is: my therapist isn’t telling me anything I don’t already know.
We used to try to point out the ways in which the therapist was sharing at least somewhat new information. However, several years ago, we realized that the core issue is that therapy is about learning a behavior or skill rather than what we’ll call “book learning.”
Book or academic learning is about acquiring knowledge about how something works. Learning the aerodynamic issues involved in a dive would be book learning. Process or behavior learning is the about practicing skills so that they become automatic, fluid, and repeatable. It is about the years of work that go into mastering a back two and a half somersault with two and a half twists. 
Psychoanalysts long ago realized that the notion of a “curative insight” was seriously flawed. In my work I have seen only a handful of times in working with many hundreds of people that an “aha” moment leads to a dramatic and sustained change.
Much more often, the work of therapy is involves practicing different behaviors and correcting mistakes made, over and over again.
As with learning a sport, you hold in your mind certain thoughts or ideas about how to do something and then you practice them over and over again, discovering problems and correcting them, and occasionally getting someone outside to take a look at what you’re doing, a coach or expert. Since you can’t see everything that you are doing while you are doing it.
From this perspective, therapy needs to focus on skills and behaviors that are important in life (like having high quality intimate relationships), but it is the ability to observe and correct issues and to encourage practice that is more important than the brilliance of the formulation.