The common factors hypothesis holds that therapy's effectiveness is not found in features of specific therapeutic methods, but rather that therapy is helpful due to the presence of three general features that all therapeutic modalities share: positive clinician traits, commitment to a common practice to achieve a common goal and effective communication. These features are also cited as crucial competencies of doctors in general. Yet despite the demonstrable importance of these 'soft skills', prominent clinical educators are calling for greater understanding and implementation of common factors education. In this paper, I seek to provide an account of what a 'common factor' or 'soft skill' is, and how to incorporate education of these 'common factors' into clinical education. To this end, I argue that common factors are best understood as philosophically informed reflective practice. Current medical accounts of therapy and the education of therapeutic practice lack this understanding, and as a result miss some key conceptual features that philosophically informed reflective practice could provide. I will also demonstrate how philosophically informed reflective practice can be suffused into familiar clinical pedagogical methods. In doing so, I will illustrate how clinical education can be reformed with philosophically informed reflective practice in mind.